For about four hours, the kid held his ground. You have to give him that.
“Don’t you say she’s deceased,” the then-15-year-old boy shouted over and over at the two detectives from a corner of the tiny interrogation room. “Nobody’s dead!”
In the end, I suppose it was inevitable the boy would cave in and confess he never met Aarone Thompson, and that his sister, Shelley Lowe, and the little girl’s father had coached him in the lies he was telling.
Aaron Thompson, on trial in Arapahoe County District Court in connection with the death of Aarone, barely glanced at the two large television screens set up in the courtroom that showed the Nov. 17, 2005, questioning of Rajon Russell, now 19. Rajon had come from Detroit to live with Thompson and Lowe, now deceased, in their Aurora home about two years earlier.
“She’s not dead!” he moaned over and over.
It was the most fascinating, frustrating and, ultimately, tragic scene I’ve witnessed in a while.
Rajon, though he did not know it that evening, is a victim of his sister and her live-in boyfriend — just as Aarone was. The only difference is, he is not dead.
The videotaped questioning occurred three days after Thompson and Lowe called police to report Aarone was missing.
Detectives were not buying the couple’s story. You can tell they care about the boy, that they feel his sorrow that he and his six young nieces and nephews are destined for foster care.
They go hard and soft on the boy. Over the hours, he goes from playful to outright wailing, pounding his fists on the table and walls, crawling at one point into the narrowest crack in the far corner of the room.
“Shelley had nothing to do with anything!” he shouts as the detectives close in. “That girl, the one who is missing, she didn’t die. Quit saying that!”
It unravels from there.
By hour four, I am both pulling for and screaming inside at the boy to just tell the cops the truth. The skinny little kid in the white polo shirt you just know wants to break. No, he shakes his head, he cannot be a snitch.
“She’s not dead, she’s not dead. Stop saying that!” he shouts when a detective asks why he didn’t bother to look for her three nights earlier, why Thompson, Lowe and the entire family simply went to bed that night when scores of officers and volunteers were scouring the streets for the little girl.
“You know why,” the detective says. Rajon, as he has the entire tape, rubs at the pants fabric on his thighs, only this time with a fury.
The detective shoves the only picture that exists of Aarone in front of him. He refuses to look, working his pants madly.
“Once you tell us,” the detective tells him, “you’ll feel like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders.”
Rajon wants to talk to his nieces and nephews. He suddenly hears one of the children through the wall. He begins pounding on the drywall, shouting their names.
“Rajon,” the detective says softly, “now is the time. We need to know.” The boy is bent over in his chair, his head in his hands. “Have you ever seen her?”
“I’ve never seen her,” he finally says. “The first time I ever saw that picture was this week.”
Who was telling you what to tell us?
“You guys got it right on the dot a long time ago,” Rajon says, weeping.
“Shelley.”
Tragic.
Bill Johnson writes Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Reach him at 303-954-2763 or wjohnson@denverpost.com.
