Project Diary: to safety

I don't seem to have created a lot of images that say "safety," but I thought this one kind-of reflected the way Tasia and Marilyn strove to create a pathway to stability for people whose lives were in a period of great upheaval.

I wish you could see the way Marilyn’s face lights up when she talks about Tasia Wiggins. Similarly, when Tasia talks about Miss Marilyn her steady voice moves to a subtly higher register, becomes infused with new energy. Sometimes she sighs. One a representative of the government, the other a representative of the community, over many years working together in Oakland they formed a unique and intimate bond in service to victims of violence.

Most Californians are unaware that there is financial compensation available for victims of violent crime. It comes from a State fund administered through counties, usually out of the District Attorney's office. The money in the fund comes from criminal fines, fees and penalties.

Most families of homicide victims are struggling financially; many will have no insurance. Then, very suddenly, they find themselves confronted not only with the trauma of a violent loss, but expenses, big ones, for funerals, for burials, for lost wages.

Tasia was with the Alameda District Attorney’s Victim-Witness Assistance Division for 28 years. She began as a victim advocate, informing and accompanying victims and survivors in their journey through the often-complex justice process. Eventually, she became supervisor of advocates and, finally Director, for ten years. As an advocate and even as Director, Tasia was especially attentive to families of homicide victims and her openness is remembered with gratitude and fondness by Marilyn and other crisis responders in the Khadafy Washington Project.

“All victims are important,” she told me in a wide-ranging interview last week, “but there was a way that when there was a homicide everything stopped, that was all that mattered. What I had in front of me was a mother, was a sister, was a brother was a father, whoever, a child, that whoever they lost was somebody very important.”

Marilyn has spent 25 years accompanying families of homicide victims through the application process. Tasia can remember weeks, even days in Oakland, when she and Marilyn would meet together with upwards of five grieving families seeking support.

Tasia left the Alameda program three years ago to run a similar program in Santa Clara County but, even as Santa Clara is perhaps a more peaceful place, she said she misses Alameda, she misses Marilyn.

“I miss,” she said, “knowing that when I hear about a homicide, I could text her and say ‘can you take care of them?’”

In a lifetime of serving victims, first victims of domestic violence in Arizona, then, later, victims of violence in Oakland and Alameda County -- now in Santa Clara County -- Tasia says the reward for the difficult job of witnessing human pain and anger and loss on a daily basis has been the bond she forms with those seeking help, to be part of a “glimmer of light” that might help them begin their long healing process.

But it was the bond she formed with Marilyn in service to victims that was the focus of our talk. In our interview, she kept coming back to the sense of safety Marilyn created, for people who felt unsafe in the world and unsafe in the justice system. Because, Tasia told me, violence impacts people’s ability to process information, to express whatever is going on within them. It is a frightening time when it can be difficult to be yourself, to even know what you are thinking or feeling.

“And that’s what someone like Marilyn can do,” said Tasia. “She can walk into a room, Marilyn knows where she’s at, and she can watch people in a room, and she’ll understand, ‘all right, there’s somebody who’s really angry or somebody really crying or somebody who’s not saying anything and they’ve got a really dazed sort of look’ -- and you can have any of those reactions in a room -- and Marilyn brings a level of, I’m going to call it safety. They can be whoever they are, they can feel however they are, and she’s just gonna be with them. Nonjudgmental. She’ll find that way to say that something that they need to hear. Or they can be angry, she’s not going to get upset with them for being angry. She’s like, ‘okay, all right, I get that.’ And she’ll say something and she’ll be a way with them, a way that what I’m gonna call it is safe, safe for them to feel exactly the way they need to be in that moment.”