Britt

-- By TashaStatzGeary - 11 Mar 2022

Cut Short

In August of 2018, I was preparing to move back to Massachusetts for my last year of college. I had spent the summer interning in New York. It was a profoundly lonely summer, the kind of loneliness that a 21-year-old woman can both romanticize and languish in. I somehow had the awareness that I was growing precisely because I was making mistakes, that I was lucky to be robbed in Bushwick and to learn from it. The hardships of my days were the building blocks of the stronger, future me.

On a painfully hot and humid day, I was wandering around Greenwich Village, trying to pass time and get out of my cramped apartment. Extremely hot and bright days in the city always make me anxious: everything seems louder and smellier. The skyscrapers feel extra claustrophobic. I was feeling homesick, aimless and sweaty. I sat to scroll on Facebook when I saw the post. A childhood friend had been murdered by her boyfriend. She had been robbed of the chance to grow from the difficulties of her youth.

Brittany was a few years older than me. Her parents were both addicted to drugs when she was born, so her grandmother stepped in to raise her. To escape the excruciating heat of Orlando in the summer, her grandmother would always send her to Brittany’s older cousin in Massachusetts for the summer. This cousin, Tricia, was my nanny, since both my parents worked full-time. Britt and I thus ended up as playmates every summer. She would tell me about Florida and her grandmother, and I, being two years younger, would mostly just listen. As we got older, she would tell me about training bras and boys. I had three older brothers, so Britt was a much needed comrade. I still have disposable pictures of us in Tricia’s backyard, posing with peace signs.

Once I was old enough to no longer need a babysitter, I stopped seeing Britt. By this age we had Facebook, so I would find out that she had her son at age 19. I would also see on Facebook, around the beginning of 2018, that she had a new boyfriend. And this boyfriend, in August of that same year, would brutally beat Britt to death while they visited his family in Detroit.

On the Amtrak train home, I made plans to get dinner with Tricia. She had acted as a second mother to me growing up, so we have stayed close. Our dinner was, of course, solemn. Tricia kept saying this happened because Britt was so desperate to feel loved and had such a scant idea of what that looked like. While this is undoubtedly true, I did not believe Britt’s upbringing caused her death. She was murdered because her boyfriend was raised to undervalue female life. He caused her death, not her.

No One Would Tell

I, admittedly, was uninformed about domestic violence before Britt’s murder. In health class in high school, our teacher played us a cheesy movie called No One Would Tell. Candace Cameron and Fred Savage star as the lead couple. The synopsis reads: “A teenager thinks all her dreams have come true when the school hunk begins dating her, but it's not long before the darker side of his personality rears its ugly head.” Justified or not, absolutely no one took this movie seriously. To be fair, it is objectively terrible, full of extremely cringe worthy dialogue from 1996 that is completely unrelatable for teenagers in 2014. I will admit that I partook in all the jokes about this movie. If anything, our health teacher trivialized intimate partner abuse by having this movie be his sole lesson plan.

The giggles from hormonal high schoolers are more forgivable than what happened in a Columbia Law School torts class a few weeks ago. When discussing a case involving an abusive ex-boyfriend who stalked his ex-girlfriend incessantly and ultimately hired someone to throw acid on her face, our professor went out of his way to include additional facts not in the casebook and to present them as if they were part of a sitcom. Each sentence was given its own slide for dramatic effect. “After being released from the hospital, Riss goes on a double date with Burton Pugach.” The room giggles. After a few more insulting slides, the professor reaches the punchline: “Riss and Pugach get married.” The room exploded into laughter. Once the crowd dies down, the professor notes a movie was made about this exact case and recommends watching it. A male student offers his review: “One of the most entertaining movies I’ve watched.”

Cultural Competency

After this class, I thought of Britt. I thought of people laughing at her for staying with her abuser, bemused that her abuser had psychologically manipulated her into believing he was her only option, the only person who could ever love her. I thought of Linda Riss, long deceased, being laughed at by a professor and classroom of people who could never understand what she experienced and why she may have married Pugach. I thought of how the most traumatic event of her life was distilled into a court opinion and used as a vehicle for us to learn common law. We used her pain to learn and then discarded her humanity with our laughter. I googled Britt’s name. The first result is the appeals court’s decision in the case against her abuser. I read the opinion, recognizing the classically cited criminal law cases, tracking the logic of why the appeals court reversed and remanded, finding sufficient evidence of proximate cause to establish a second-degree murder conviction. It’s not hard to imagine a law school class using this case to learn about second-degree murder. It goes without saying that every victim is more than what a court’s opinion and a casebook author gives them. I wish law school would teach all of its students this truth before releasing them into the world with a license to represent the Britts of the world.