One day last June, Detra W. walked into a 15th District police station looking for an officer she knew as Spider. Among drug dealers on the west side, Spider was feared and hated–he had a reputation for going to great lengths to make arrests, even crawling out from under cars and bushes. Spider had busted Detra back in the summer of 1999 for selling cocaine, and now she wanted to thank him. She says he laughed but didn’t remember her.
The case is significant for reasons that go beyond the architecture of two families. Detra’s supporters worry that if the court rules against her–a woman who’s thoroughly reformed her life–then no parent who’s been repeatedly incarcerated will be able to regain custody of a child who’s in foster care.
Her parents did the best they could, Detra says. “There were just too many of us.” She felt rejected when siblings got things she didn’t and grew up assuming she wasn’t one of her mother’s favorites. Only recently did she realize that her mother–who’d worked hard sorting mail for the post office, as an orderly at a mental institution, as a cook for a catering company–didn’t have enough money to buy all the children what they needed when they needed it. Detra says her father was “a sweet man” but he never earned much because he drank and couldn’t read. He stacked bricks at demolition sites.
He called her Fats, a nickname her father had given her. Her nickname for him was Mr. Rogers, because she thought he was neighborly. “We could be going up the street–it would take him forever ’cause he see a lady coming with her bags, he gotta help her, and he gotta talk to everybody,” she says. “I be like, ‘You can’t help everybody. You not going to be able to help everyone.’” She teased him about being so friendly, but she also admired him for it.
Every now and then he’d trick her into going to a Narcotics Anonymous meeting, where he’d introduce her by saying, “This is my wife, Fats. She an addict.” She would roll her eyes and walk out. You can’t quit unless you’re ready, she says, and sometimes even then you can’t quit.
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Two months later Detra learned she was going to have to submit to a drug test and broke off her electronic ankle bracelet. She moved down the block but says, “I didn’t hide. I just stood out there and worked packs.”
In June 1999, Detra says, Spider appeared out of nowhere and arrested her for possession of heroin and cocaine and for delivering cocaine. Because she was visibly pregnant–she was in her last trimester–she was sent to West Suburban Hospital rather than jail. Doctors told her that without an emergency cesarean the baby wouldn’t survive. Before being prepped for the operation, she says, she slipped into the bathroom and pulled her cocaine supply out of her vagina. She was clutching the bag as she drifted off under the anesthesia. When she came to, her first thought was not for her baby but for the missing bag of cocaine. “I was screaming, ‘Who stole my stuff?’”
