When I was deciding whether to attend the trial for the man who raped and murdered my cousin Sabina, I felt like I should be there so that the jury could see us—her family—and understand that she was more than just a crime statistic. I didn’t want her to become a mere abstraction to them: a case file, the victim, the deceased. To us—to me, my aunt, my mom, and the rest of our family and friends—Sabina was still a real person, a vibrant young woman whose absence was a gaping void. I hoped that if we sat behind the prosecutor, the jury would realize the depth of our loss, that they would see her humanity, and that they would want to punish the man who took her from us.
Another reason I felt I should go to the trial was that I might want to write about it someday. I had already discovered by age 23 that writing was the safest way for me to process things that felt incomprehensible. Telling myself that I’d write about Sabina’s murder someday meant I didn’t have to confront the full horror just yet. I could keep it tucked away until I was ready to transform it into something that might make sense. And I figured that when that day came, the trial would be a crucial part of the story I’d tell.
But despite these two compelling reasons to go, my body resisted. Two years after her murder, I still felt a visceral rejection of the whole ordeal. The idea of sitting through the graphic details of her final moments—seeing photos of her body, hearing detectives describe the brutality inflicted on her—was too overwhelming. I couldn’t even bring myself to look at the mug shot of her killer or read any news articles about what he’d done, let alone be in the same room with him, hearing his voice while she was gone forever. So I didn’t go. If I was going to write about Sabina’s murder, it would have to be without firsthand courtroom accounts.
Instead, I continued working on the book I’d started the year before Sabina was killed, a book about my father. Writing about my father, who died when I was 12, helped me maintain some distance from the painful memories. I approached his story like a journalist, interviewing people who knew him, piecing together a narrative that felt capital-T True. This approach served as a buffer, letting me explore my father’s heroin addiction and his complex relationship with my mom without collapsing under the weight of grief. I imagined that when I was ready to write about Sabina, I might use the same method: relying on trial transcripts, interviewing people who knew her, recreating her last moments. Someday, I thought, I’d finally face the reality of her murder and, in doing so, find a way to grieve.
When David Kushner’s memoir *Alligator Candy* came out in 2016, six years after Sabina’s murder, it seemed like the kind of story I might write. In it, Kushner revisits the disappearance and murder of his brother in 1970s Florida, using his reporting skills to explore the tragedy. I hoped it would guide me in thinking about how to approach Sabina’s story, but I could barely make it through 94 pages before I felt sick. The scene where Kushner reads news reports about his brother’s death hit too close to home, and I had to close the book. I realized I wasn’t ready to even read about other people’s tragedies, let alone write about my own.
Despite this, I started collecting “murder memoirs”—Carolyn Murnick’s *The Hot One*, Sarah Perry’s *After the Eclipse*, Rose Andersen’s *The Heart and Other Monsters*, Natasha Trethewey’s *Memorial Drive*. I even bought older titles like Maggie Nelson’s *The Red Parts*, Melanie Thernstrom’s *The Dead Girl*, Justin St. Germain’s *Son of a Gun*. But I couldn’t read them; they gathered dust on my shelf. I knew I needed to understand how other writers tackled personal trauma in the context of true crime, but the thought of confronting the brutality was too much. It seemed like writing about murder inherently reduced a person to a single, horrific event, overshadowing all else.
I kept asking myself: Could I write about Sabina without reducing her to just another victim in a story about male violence? Could I draw people’s attention away from the brutal details and focus on the girl who loved singing and dancing down the street, who had a smile that lit up a room? Could I show readers the scoliosis that gave her a cocky hip tilt, the way she always seemed on the verge of saying something sassy, and usually did? Writing about murder meant confronting violence and cruelty, but I wanted to make sure that if I ever told Sabina’s story, it would honor the person she was, not just the tragic way she died.
