Eulogy for a Coworker

Nobody knows when his hour will come:
As fish are caught in a cruel net,
Or birds are taken in a snare,
So people are caught by evil times
That fall unexpectedly upon them.

– Ecclesiastes 9:12

On February 27, 1998, Jolene Schott found murdered in her Waikiki apartment, the apparent victim of domestic violence.

Police discovered the body in the woman’s fifth floor Park Plaza studio on Friday at around 9 a.m. She had been dead for several days. The woman’s employer, Red Lobster in Waikiki, had reported her hissing on Monday.

On March 2, 1998, police arrested a 43-year-old man in connection with the slaying of the 35-year-old woman. Accompanied by an attorney, Steven Villa walked into police headquarters at 9:30 p.m., and was booked for second-degree murder. According to the arrest reports, the man lived in unit 44, directly beneath the apartment of the victim. Police had reason to believe Villa had been the victim’s boyfriend.

Autopsy reports revealed that Schott dies of “suffocation and strangulation.” Police said there were injuries to the body and head, as well. According to neighbors, Schott had been planning to move back to Pennsylvania, where the rest of her family lived, although they said she had been living in Hawaii for a while.

*

The managers at Red Lobster were concerned when Jolene hadn’t come to work in over a week. She hadn’t requested vacation time or called off because she was sick, and just not showing up for work was unlike her. Thomas, the general manager, decided to file a missing person’s report with the police. Something was wrong.

Now they knew why.

The news hit some of the servers particularly hard. Yavonne, being about the same age as Jolene, was like a sister. Her husband, a Hawaiian seaman by trade, spent much of his time aboard ship, leaving her to pass her time with friends from work. She had been in abusive relationships twice before, but had had the courage to walk away from the false sense of security. Yavonne had urged Jolene to do the same, but Jolene hadn’t been willing to listen.

For Leilani, a blond-haired local girl of Italian descent, it was like living a bad dream all over again – she had lost a sister to domestic violence a few eyars prior, only to have the killer released because of insufficient evidence. A short, single woman nearing middle age, she vowed she’d kill Steven herself if the justice system didn’t take care of him.

Perry, a Louisiana expatriate whose habit of being disgustingly crass often offended his fellow workers, had been the first to find out. He lived in the apartment building opposite Park Plaza, and had a friend on the same floor who could look directly across and see Jolene’s apartment. After hearing about Jolene’s absence from work, he decided to check on her himself. Nothing could have prepared him for what he saw.

As Perry turned the corner and came up to her front door, he saw that the police had already broken it down. When he looked inside, he saw Jolene lying on her side near the far corner of the apartment, surrounded by police officers. Although they had her driver’s license, they asked Perry to confirm her identity. As he walked toward the body, he saw that rigor mortis had set in, having fixed her arms in an outstretched position toward her long-gone attacker. A belt was strapped around her neck, and blood had settled in her vacant eyes, turning her irises from a pale field of blue to pure crimson. Her clothes had been ripped in places, and her face was covered with bruises and cuts. Blood had been splattered on the two walls behind her. The police said it looked like her killer had tied the belt around her neck to suffocate her, then used it to slam her back and forth against the walls. Perry said in a subdued manner that she must have put up a heck of a fight.

Thomas scheduled a store-wide meeting a week later to discuss what had happened and to decide what (and how) the restaurant should do for a memorial service. Since the funeral was being handled by her family on the Mainland, the managers suggested renting a boat on which to hold a wake, and idea readily accepted by the staff. Brenda, the assistant manager, volunteered to make the necessary preparations, and collected five dollars from the forty other servers to rent a boat.

Two weeks later, aboard a catamaran off the shore of Waikiki, the employees of Red Lobster #672 said their good-byes to Jolene Schott.

*

I had walked into work for my lunch shift at 11:3 on Saturday the 28th only to find a bunch of gloomy faces. Leilani was in tears in the “Mint” section. Even Brenda, the most consistently cheerful manager, seemed down. It was Yavonne, the 40-something hapa waitress, who broke the news to me as we were standing next to the dessert microwave. “Jolene was found murdered in her home yesterday,” she said quietly, looking down.

It didn’t sink in at first. Jolene? Murdered? I couldn’t believe it. Who could have killed Jolene?

She went on. “Police think it was her boyfriend. It wasn’t the first time he’d hit her.”

“My God….” was all I could manage. I had never known that about her, but then again, I didn’t see her frequently enough to notice any bruises around her eyes. Yavonne, on the other hand, had seen her on almost a daily basis. She had warned Jolene that she needed to end the relationship – that he wasn’t worth it – but Jolene either didn’t care or was too afraid to change her situation.

Jolene had worked weekdays more than anything – the only times I’d seen her were on Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day, when everyone had to work, or in passing between shifts. Conversations with her were minimal – nothing more than a “Hi, how are you?” followed quickly by a brief, “Fine, and you?”

On one occasion, however, I had made some time to talk to her about how Red Lobster’s 401k program works. She’d wanted some advice on what sort of investment she could get. We talked for a while – actually I talked for a while – but I did learn she didn’t plan on staying much longer in Hawaii. She hadn’t decided if she wanted to move off to North Carolina or back home with her family, but she knew she couldn’t stay here. I didn’t ask why. I suggested she wait until she got back to the Mainland before she opened up a retirement account.

It surprised me to learn she was only 35. She could have passed for a grandmother if she wanted to; her face showed more years of worry and concern than my mother is nearing fifty. I guess those three and a half decades had all been hard, not just the past few years.

*

Jolene made me think of my mother. She too could have turned out that way, had things been different for her. Divorced at 24 – the same age I am now – my mother faced an uncertain future. With no degree, little work experience, and two children under three years-old to care for, she could easily have given up and settled for the first man to come along who was able and willing to pay the bills. Fortunately for me, she didn’t.

During the day, her parents took care of the children while she worked at the Millville Motor Inn, a small-town truck stop diner in New Jersey where coffee decanters could be seen in every corner and the smell of eggs and bacon permeated the air.

Waitresses there were divided into two groups, based on the number of hours they worked. The full-timers were usually older women providing a second income for their families. They were tightly knit, the result of their many years working together. Their lives were characterized by a five-day work-week of split lunch and dinner shifts (separated by two-hour lunch breaks) and two random days off. Some of them supported their husbands while they looked for work, while others had found no husbands after searching for twenty years. They were counting on their tips to fund them into retirement, and their greatest fear was incapacitation due to a muscle or spinal ailment.

By comparison, the part-timers were typically young women, sometimes still in high school, who were there just to make ends meet until something better came along. With brighter futures, they came to work seeming more cheerful than their more senior counterparts, but they also had a higher turnover. Some had boyfriends, one or two had children, but for the most part they were all just kids, looking forward to a life beyond the boundaries of the New Jersey state line. For them, the repetitive life of a diner waitress was strictly temporary.

My mother didn’t fit easily into either category. Like the older group, she’d had the marriage and the kids. Like the younger group, though, she hoped life still had something more in store for her. Nevertheless, the burden she felt from her responsibilities was evident. At times, she would have what she called, “coffee nightmares”” stress -induced dreams brought on by keeping an entire restaurant of coffee drinkers from ever seeing the bottom of their cup. The incessant movement of waitressing even caused her to sleepwalk.

One day, one of the full-timers introduced my mother to an assistant manager in the Unimin sand mining company – one of those customers who never left a tip if he saw the bottom of his cup. His business frequently brought him up from Virginia, and in time he began to take a serious interest in the young waitress with the two affectionate children. For him, things became serious when her young son reached up and held his hand as they walked across a Pizza Hut parking lot.

In 1982, the waitress quit her job at the Motor Inn and remarried that assistant manager.

*

I arrived at the catamaran landing outside Waikiki’s Sheraton Moana Surfrider early that Saturday morning, and watched my coworkers trickle in one by one. With about fifty people on board, we sailed out to sea for twenty minutes, before stopping for a moment of silence.

If I had one regret, it would be that I didn’t know Jolene better. Sure, there was a generation gap, scheduling difference, and other situations that kept her and me from being close, but I still felt like I could have done more. Jolene, to me, was more than just a woman that I’d worked with. She was – in a strange and imperfect way – a doppelganger of my mother. Were it not for the twist of fate that brought my step-father to New Jersey on business, my mother could easily have ended up in the same trap as Jolene.

When my mother comes in from Chicago for graduation next week, when I see the way the years have worn my mother’s face, I will think of Jolene. At 47, my mother is only now coming close to resembling her, though she would be almost 15 years older.

*

Stephen Villa is currently being held without bond in connection with the murder of Jolene Schott. Although his family has asked for him to be released into their custody, Villa is deemed to be too great a threat to be let free. His attorney is trying to portray Jolene as the one who was out of control, much to the anger of those who knew her. His second-degree murder case is still pending. [May 1999]

*

Back on the catamaran, we cast our leis out onto the water and listened to the waves lap against the hull. Minutes go by, and my thoughts wander again. Bad things happen to good people – that’s true – but that can be said of anyone caught off-guard by chance. “She died before her time,” someone says. Perhaps we all do.

http://archives.starbulletin.com/98/03/03/news/briefs.html
http://archives.starbulletin.com/2000/09/18/news/story5.html