On July 19th, 2009, Jennifer Hopper and Teresa Butz were asleep in bed, in their South Park, Seattle home, when a man with a knife climbed through their bedroom window.

“He slashed my throat four times,” says Jennifer Hopper, who, at the time, was two months away from her commitment ceremony with her fiance, Teresa. “And at one point in time I decided to just pretend I was dead or dying, thinking maybe, just maybe, he’ll stop cutting me. It was actually at that moment that Teresa started fighting for her life. She managed to kick him off the bed but he was able to stab her in the heart. However! With a stab wound she found a way to bash through a window and get halfway across the street and that’s what got him to run, and me able to get out the front door.”

Teresa died in the street that night.

This horrific crime rocked the community, and despite the intense heat of that summer, windows were locked tight around the city. Shortly after, Isaiah Kalebu was caught and is currently serving life in prison without parole.

But who is Kalebu and what inspired him to rape and attempt to kill two women he’d never seen before? That side of the story is explored in the new book, “While the City Slept,” by Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the story for The Stranger.

“So this book looks at three paths that collided on the night of the crime that’s at the center of the book,” sanders says. “The two women and their inspiring, and also normal, journeys toward finding love. Isaiah Kalebu, a man whose path reveals, very starkly, very sharp failings in our criminal justice and mental health systems. Failings that I think are shown in stark relief in this book and that should teach us to invest more in these systems to protect communities.”

Sanders tells each person’s life story, starting from birth, and Kalebu’s story reflects how cracked and corroded our mental health and criminal justice systems are. When Kalebu started to exhibit signs of mental illness and violence, his family desperately tried to get him help.

“After he was taken, for example, to Harborview for an emergency psychiatric evaluation by his mother, who prevailed on police not to arrest him while he was engaging in some really alarming behaviors, but said he needs psychiatric intervention. He was taken to Harborview, he was released without being deemed any sort of threat. He was released without any follow-up prescription, according to his lawyers later. The day after, he threatened his mother, he made her fearful for her safety. The day after that, smashed the windows of her van with a rock, hit her with the metal end of a dog chain and ultimately was arrested for that.”

A judge ordered Kalebu to spend time in Western State Hospital, a psychiatric facility, and when he was released, untreated besides the medication he took while here, he was supposed to continue getting treatment and taking medication. But he never did and no one ever checked up on him.

“In Washington state, the state that birthed Microsoft, the computer systems used by judges in Pierce County District Court and King County Superior Court, where Isaiah Kalebu had been before, don’t communicate well enough for the second judge to know very clearly what the first judge had ordered. Which was that Isaiah should be in treatment, so Isaiah was released. Not long after that he scared his aunt so bad that she filed for a restraining order against him. Again, no major intervention conducted. The day after that, her house burned down in an arson and she was killed, along with a man who was living with her, former quarterback for the New York Jets, JJ Jones. Isaiah remains a suspect in that case, although he’s never been tried. Again, this is the state that birthed Microsoft and has given Microsoft millions, if not billions, in tax breaks over the years. But it has chosen not to fund its criminal justice system.”

Sanders says funding those systems would save taxpayers money in the long run.

“We are going to spend more than three million dollars to keep Isaiah Kalebu in prison for life in Washington State. It would not have cost three million dollars to have intervened, in a better way, earlier in his life.”

Amazingly, Jennifer Hopper has forgiven Kalebu.

“You know, honestly, I wasn’t quite sure about the world I lived in after all this happened,” she says. “I feel really hopeful about this world. That we can be extraordinary if we choose to.”

Eli Sanders and Jennifer Hopper will be speaking at Seattle’s Town Hall Wednesday night, February 4th at 7:30pm, click here for tickets.

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