Shanina
Camden, N.J. One year ago, 14-year-old Shanina Gilmore walked out the flimsy front door of her drafty, rundown rowhouse, strolled down the sidewalk toward high school, and never came back.
As the days and weeks passed with no sign of Shanina, her mother, Charlotte Gilmore, learned something about her troubled daughter. She learned that Shanina, who liked to be called Nina, had rarely attended school since classes opened Sept. 7, 2001. She learned that most days, Shanina had taken the lunch money her mother had given her, stuffed the bills into the pockets of her size 5 hip-huggers, walked in the direction of Camden High School, and then changed course once she was out of her mother's sight. She learned that when Shanina came home at 3:15 each afternoon, she was not coming from classes but from a day of hanging out with friends.
By the time she disappeared that Oct. 15, Shanina had racked up more than 20 absences. Yet,
Gilmore says, the school never notified her, despite school board bylaws mandating that parents be alerted by phone after three unexcused absences and by a hand-delivered note after 10 absences. Gilmore says the school never contacted her about Shanina's excessive truancy until it sent a letter to her dated Nov. 2 - coincidentally, the same day a girl's warped remains, the remnants of duct tape still wrapped around the hands, rolled with the waves onto the cold Jersey shore.
More than three months later, they were identified as Shanina's."What was the school doing?" says Gilmore, a high-school dropout who was so determined to keep her daughter in school that she had taken her to Camden County Superior Court's family division earlier in the year, after she caught Shanina cutting class.
Under a Family-in-Crisis contract signed Sept. 26, 2001, by Shanina, her mother and a court officer, the court could have put the girl in a facility for troubled teens if she kept skipping school.
"If they [the school] had notified me that my daughter didn't show up, if they'd have come here and notified me, I'd have called the police. My daughter would have been saved," says Gilmore, who learned of the continued class-cutting when she visited Camden High School Oct. 16, the day after Shanina failed to come home.
The school produced attendance records showing Shanina had not been in class since Oct. 1.In August, Gilmore announced plans to sue the Camden School Board and the state's Department of Youth and Family Services for the wrongful death of her daughter. Under New Jersey law, the state has six months to reply by offering a settlement, something Gilmore's attorney, John Klamo, says is unlikely. Hence, he says, the lawsuit will be formally filed in February, and will accuse the school board and the social services agency of not monitoring Shanina and not warning Gilmore of her daughter's behavior.
The school board would not comment on the case, and police have yet to file charges in Shanina's death. Gilmore says her goal is not to assign blame for Shanina's death but to force schools to pay more attention to truant kids. Ultimately, she wants a national law requiring schools to notify parents of truant pupils in person, and to do a better job of maintaining records to ensure they can reach parents. She would call it the "Nina Notification Law."
"Why not? They have the Amber Alert and Megan's Law," she says, crouching close to the tiny space heater that provides the only warmth in the home she now shares with Shanina's black and white cat, Two-Tone, and her dog, Minnie.
Gilmore is the first to admit that Shanina's problems began here, in the same abusive, poverty-wracked household where she grew up. Gilmore's own mother had her first baby at 13 and left school shortly afterward when her mother abandoned her and the infant. Gilmore's older sister had two babies by 16. Gilmore was pregnant with Shanina at 13, gave birth at 14 and left school in the 11th grade.
Shanina's father, also a teenager, never helped out.So troubled was the family that in 1989, Philadelphia Magazine profiled them in a nine-page article on the perils of teenage motherhood. Gilmore, pictured holding baby Shanina, vowed then to improve things for herself and her daughter. "I wanna graduate from high school, maybe go to college," she told the magazine. "I want to succeed. Maybe I can't change my life a lot, but I can change it some. And I will."
Now 30, Gilmore is still trying to change, and she has come a long way. In recent years, she has kicked a crack habit, held regular jobs and begun night classes in hopes of passing her GED exams.
All were part of an attempt to provide a better home for Shanina. She also divorced Shanina's stepfather, Henry Christopher Stubbs III, and reported him to police in 1999 after Shanina said he had molested her. Stubbs, who pleaded guilty to child endangerment, is in prison awaiting trial for the December murder of a girlfriend and her 6-year-old daughter in Wilkes-Barre, Pa. He also has been questioned in Shanina's death, but has not been identified as a suspect.
"I always had good intentions, but something always sideswiped me," Gilmore says, casting frequent worried glances through the glass pane on her front door. The sagging house is in one of the poorest neighborhoods in New Jersey's poorest city. It's not unusual for drug dealers or thugs to come bursting through doorways as they try to evade police patrols, Gilmore says warily as a police cruiser idled across the street.
She's hoping to sell the house and would be happy to get $9,000 for it. Even at that price, she isn't optimistic. "Nobody wants to buy a dump," she says.
Piled in a corner of the living room are stuffed animals, dolls and cards. Most were brought by friends and neighbors after Shanina was confirmed dead, and they form a makeshift shrine to the teenager, whose last class photo adorns a heart-shaped plaque hanging above the sofa.
It shows a softly smiling girl with dark, wide-set eyes and neatly combed black hair curling around her chin.According to Gilmore, Shanina's problems were rooted in a lack of self-esteem, in a belief that she wasn't pretty enough or well-dressed enough to compete with her classmates. It was, Gilmore says, a result of her inability to buy her daughter the stylish clothes, jewelry, gadgets and other trappings so crucial to adolescent life.
Gilmore says she knew the feeling and was determined to give Shanina more than she ever had, even though it meant turning tricks as a teenager to earn extra money for baby toys, clothes and plastic sandals picked up at local dime stores.It wasn't nearly enough, though, and by the eighth grade, Gilmore says, Shanina was hinting at wanting to drop out of school. That's when the truancy began.
Test scores from her final year in middle school showed her in the lowest category - partially proficient - in all subjects. Nevertheless, she was passed on to ninth grade and entered Camden High School when she was 14.The school is one of the state's most troubled. Last year, it had a 36 percent dropout rate - the second-worst in New Jersey - compared to a state average of 3 percent for ninth- through 12th-graders.
That statistic prompted the school board to announce new anti-truancy measures earlier this year, and school board spokesman Bart Leff says they had brought sharp declines in dropout rates. The measures include regular sweeps by school officials of city streets during school hours, and the threat of court action against parents whose children are caught cutting school too many times. He reiterated school board policy of notifying parents after just three unexcused absences and said it is almost always done in person, not over the phone.
Gilmore, however, says school officials didn't visit her until Dec. 13, when someone brought a letter warning that Shanina had 23 unexcused absences. A final letter, dated Jan. 2 and signed by Camden High's vice principal and principal, announced that Shanina had been dropped from school for poor attendance. It listed the days she had supposedly attended class and included Nov. 20 and Dec. 12 - long after her death.
To Gilmore, that's evidence the school had no idea what Shanina was up to, despite the board's own guidelines on attendance and despite the Family-in-Crisis contract, which her lawyer says had been sent to the school board and should have provided a warning about Shanina.
Legal experts say the lawsuit would be the first of its kind. Other wrongful death suits against schools have involved students killed in violent incidents or accidents while on school property or on field trips.
While she waits for the state's six-month response period to expire, Gilmore goes to work, attends night school and supplements her income by selling castoffs she collects on trash nights from the surrounding middle- class suburbs. She has stacks of TVs, VCRs, toys, an old poster from the movie "Casablanca," even a wedding dress and veil.
In addition to saving for a better place to live and for college, Gilmore says she wants to buy a fancy urn to replace the brass one currently holding Shanina's ashes.
Despite their sometimes volatile relationship, Gilmore says she and Shanina were close, and she fondly describes the last day she saw her, when she handed her lunch money, gave her a hug and sent her off to school.
"I don't only miss my daughter, I yearn for my daughter," she says, puffing on a cigarette and staring toward the space heater. "I just want to see her, to smell her one more time. I just want to smell her one more time."
