Loved ones recall an artistic, fiery, bright young girl
STACEY MULICK; The News Tribune
Published: May 21st, 2006 01:00 AM
Adre’anna Jackson was a fixture at the Tillicum library, and often bragged she was its best patron.
She knew her wrenches and pliers, and could anticipate which tool David Anderson, a pastor at her church, needed when she helped him work on cars at Harry Todd Park.
She was a budding gardener and helped her mom plant summer-blooming bulbs in the raised dirt bed outside their Tillicum apartment.
She was a striking 10-year-old girl whose world was anchored in one of the roughest parts of Pierce County, a neighborhood teetering on the edges of crime, poverty and revival.
Hers was a world highlighted by bicycle rides, laughs over jokes printed in Laffy Taffy wrappers, made-up games with friends and raising guinea pigs. It also was shadowed by parents who didn’t work consistently, who kept their distance from relatives and who had problems of their own.
To many in the South Sound, Adre’anna is the little girl with the big smile doing cartwheels in a home video that wallpapered television news reports after she disappeared Dec. 2. The video, shot last summer at a friend’s house, played again and again four months and two days later after two boys found her body in a blackberry thicket less than two miles from her home.
Mystery still shrouds what happened to the slight, strawberry blonde girl. No suspects have been identified in her death. Lakewood police have offered no explanation for how Adre’anna, who was reportedly last seen heading to school on a snowy morning, ended up in an undeveloped lot on the other side of Interstate 5.
The Pierce County Medical Examiner’s Office still has not ruled how Adre’anna died and why.
“Everybody knows who she is and not one person saw her?” asked Jean Olson, one of Adre’anna’s Sunday school teachers at Tillicum Baptist Church. “It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Yvette Gervais is tormented by questions about her daughter’s death. Her eyes suddenly fill with tears when she talks about Adre’anna’s disappearance. Just as quickly, a smile lights her face at memories of her little girl’s artwork. Then anger flashes against the unanswered and the unknown.
Adre’anna’s father, Jon Federici, 52, remains out of the public spotlight and has declined repeated requests for interviews.
On a recent day outside the family’s small apartment, Gervais, 49, looked over the flower bed that was sprinkled with sea shells Adre’anna had collected.
“She slipped through all our fingers,” she said. “Not just mine. The neighborhood’s, too.”
A big, healthy baby girl
Adre’anna was born Sept. 25, 1995, at Tacoma General Hospital to Gervais, a Penobscot Indian from Maine, a mother of three and the daughter in a military family; and Federici, a former Army private with a criminal history that includes convictions for theft, assault and harassment.
The couple met in Oregon and spent time there before coming to the Tacoma area in the 1990s in search of work. They’ve never married.
Adre’anna came a week before her due date and weighed in at nearly 11 pounds.
“I couldn’t sit up. I couldn’t stand up. I couldn’t eat,” Gervais said, describing the end of her pregnancy. “She was a very healthy, giant child.”
Federici chose the name Adre’anna; Gervais said she doesn’t know how he came up with it. Gervais rounded out Adre’anna’s full name with Anita (Gervais’ mother’s name) for the middle and Jackson (Gervais’ maiden name) for the last.
Gervais and Federici were distant from others in their families.
Gervais’ three other children are older – a grown son and a grown daughter in Oregon and a young daughter in Colorado. The kids knew Adre’anna but didn’t see her often. (In a fourth-grade creative writing class, Adre’anna was asked to list her best vacation. She said it was a trip to Colorado to visit her sister, who is two years older.)
Federici’s mother lives in the Portland area but never met Adre’anna. Until she came to her granddaughter’s memorial service in April, she hadn’t seen her son in more than 15 years.
The family moved to Tillicum when Adre’anna was about a year old. Adre’anna’s fiery personality showed up early. She’d quickly get upset if she couldn’t do something or get excited when she could.
“People on the bus would comment, ‘Don’t ever put that fire out,’” Gervais recalled. “She was the sweetest little thing you could ever imagine.”
Justine Robb remembers meeting Adre’anna when she was 3. The little girl was helping Gervais plant flowers at the Tillicum/American Lake Community Center.
“She was just always busy,” said Robb, who got to know Adre’anna better through her frequent trips to the Tillicum library branch, where Robb has worked for 14 years. “She just loved to help anybody do anything.”
Family made due with less
The family didn’t have much money, a phone or a car.
Gervais is hobbled by arthritis in her knees and previous injuries to her ankles. She survives on disability payments. Federici has been unemployed in the past and worked odd jobs for cash, according to court documents.
Their small apartment is No. 4 in a row of seven connected, single-story units on Wadsworth Street Southwest, just footsteps from American Lake.
Inside, a bedsheet hangs over the window blinds to help darken the room. A Bible and a scattering of papers are on the floor. Federici’s bicycle leans against one wall.
A frosted glass elephant candy dish and a figurine of tiny dressed-up bears riding in a car – trinkets Adre’anna bought at garage sales – adorn the top of one of two televisions stacked in a corner. A mattress and a box frame for Gervais to rest on sit just inside the doorway. Visitors sit on a burnt orange couch with sunken cushions.
A wooden bookshelf in Adre’anna’s small room overflows with stuffed animals, including a horse rivaling the size of a large prize from a carnival. A small television sits in the center of the bookshelf and a cushioned chair is turned toward the screen.
Police reports indicate the household wasn’t always happy. Officers were called to the apartment on Sept. 11, 2002, after neighbors said they’d heard the girl scream. Police found 7-year-old Adre’anna with a mark on the right side of her face and a bump on her head.
She told the officers her father had punched her in the stomach and the arm, and pulled her hair, according to court documents.
She also said he had hit her in the head and scratched her face. Paramedics took her to Mary Bridge Children’s Hospital and Health Center for an evaluation.
Officers booked Federici into Pierce County Jail, and prosecutors charged him with third-degree assault of a child.
A temporary restraining order kept him from contacting his daughter, but a permanent order was not granted because Gervais did not appear in court.
Federici remained in jail, and in October 2002 he pleaded guilty to fourth-degree domestic violence assault. Court documents noted that prosecutors lowered the charge because of problems proving the allegations and a belief that the victim was against prosecution.
Federici received a suspended sentence and credit for the 48 days he was jailed. He was ordered to have no hostile contact with his daughter and to participate in alcohol- and anger-management counseling, according to the court documents.
When he failed to take part in the counseling, his suspended sentence was revoked and he was put on probation until June 2004, according to the court documents.
There were better times, though.
Adre’anna and her father played baseball and kickball on the weekends at nearby Harry Todd Park, Gervais said. The two twice attended the father-daughter dance hosted by the Lakewood Parks and Recreation Department at Clover Park High School.
“One of the most fun things is to watch the daughters convince their dads to go out and dance,” said Dennis Higashiyama, one of the recreation coordinators. He remembers seeing Adre’anna and Federici out on the dance floor, and he took photos of the family at a dance in March 2005.
Adre’anna was close to her mother, learning the ways of gardening from Gervais, reading her stories and singing her songs like “Row, Row, Row Your Boat.”
The fourth-grade creative writing assignment asked Adre’anna to name her “best hero.”
“My herow,” she wrote, getting no points for spelling, “is my mother.”
‘A real, real delight’
Adre’anna attended Tillicum Elementary School, starting in kindergarten. There, her artistic side flourished.
“She was a very serious art person,” her mother said.
Gervais chuckles when she brings out one of her favorite Adre’anna drawings – the face of a tan dog with floppy ears and a speckled patch of fur over his right eye. The family always gets a laugh out of it, Gervais said, because Adre’anna kept it so simple, unlike many of her other drawings.
“She knows how to do facial expressions,” she said, her face brightening.
Adre’anna also was an enthusiastic reader and liked to discuss what she was reading, said Robb, the librarian.
“She was just always so cheerful and so bubbly and willing to talk and a real, real delight to have in the library,” she said.
Adre’anna usually checked out several books at a time and laughed while standing in the checkout line.
“I bet I am one of your best patrons,” she’d say to Robb.
Using her allowance from her father, Adre’anna bought a copy of “Where the Sidewalk Ends,” a children’s book of poetry by Shel Silverstein. Her favorite, poem, she told Robb, was “Lazy Jane,” about a thirsty girl lying on the ground waiting, waiting, waiting for it to rain.
From the time she was little, Adre’anna loved raising guinea pigs. As a fourth-grader, she shared her expertise with younger students.
Caressa Fennell was volunteering in her 6-year-old son’s first-grade class in late November when Adre’anna made a presentation with Misty, her white guinea pig. She told the kids what to feed a guinea pig and how often, as well as how to take care of the animal.
“She gave a very eloquent speech,” Fennell said. “She was just at ease, very well spoken.”
Adre’anna left that kind of impression, even on people she met only once or twice.
“She had just a way about her that was very attractive and charming,” said Olson, the Sunday school teacher.
Roger Laybourn got to know the then-5-year-old Adre’anna when he brought her a bicycle after she missed a Clover Park Kiwanis Club giveaway and her mother asked Laybourn to bring by a bike.
“When she came out of the house, she wanted to introduce me to her guinea pig,” said Laybourn, who chairs the Bicycles From Heaven project. “She kept looking at the bike but she wanted to make sure I met her guinea pig.”
She eventually put the pet away, grabbed a helmet and took off on her new bike.
By December 2002, Adre’anna needed another bike and Laybourn delivered again. This time, Adre’anna invited Laybourn inside to see how well she did on the math games installed on a computer.
“I consider myself fortunate to have spent just that little bit of time with her,” Laybourn said.
Neighbors helped watch over her
Outside school, neighbors became Adre’anna’s family, the streets of Tillicum her playground.
“We didn’t have any relatives out here, so she had people basically adopt her,” Gervais said.
David Anderson wears many hats in Tillicum – he’s president of the neighborhood association, children’s pastor at Tillicum Baptist and owner of Bill’s Boathouse on the shore of American Lake.
“Any kid I see wandering, I try to follow up who they are, where they live,” Anderson said.
Adre’anna was one of those children.
“She became my shadow and we would just pal around in the evening,” he said. “She was just happy to be there.”
Once she spotted Anderson under a car he was working on at Harry Todd Park, and she wiggled underneath.
“She saw my feet sticking out from a car and probably wondered what I was doing,” Anderson recalled. “She was just real eager to help.”
In addition to helping Anderson at the Boathouse, she pitched in at the office at the community center and raked a neighbor’s leaves when she could.
Adre’anna rode her bicycle everywhere and played with her friends, among them Sierra Hernandez, 9, and her sister, Tyanna, 6.
The three made up a game they called Statue. Tyanna would lie under a coffee table, and Sierra and Adre’anna would take turns knocking on it. Then they’d sprint to a nearby couch and sit still, like statues. Tyanna would have to guess who’d knocked on the table. Adre’anna was good at the game.
“She was fun to play with,” Sierra, perched on her bike, said on a recent sunny afternoon. “She gave us candy a lot.”
‘SHE WAS SO PROUD OF HERSELF’
Sundays were reserved for church. A bus picked up Adre’anna and took her to either Bethel Baptist Church or to Tillicum Baptist, nearby churches that offer free rides to needy children.
For 21/2 years, she was in Jean Olson’s Sunday school class at Tillicum Baptist. Adre’anna absorbed the Bible lessons each Sunday and could answer questions about them even several weeks later, Olson said.
Last summer, when a group of missionaries visiting from Africa was about to leave, Olson taught her students a few songs in an African language and, as part of the goodbye program, asked the youngsters to wear something from the visitors’ country.
Adre’anna was the only one to dress up. She and her mother bought a piece of fabric Adre’anna thought looked African. She made a skirt, a top and a wrap for her hair.
“She was so proud of herself,” Olson said. “She always went the extra mile like that.”
In Anderson’s children’s program at Tillicum Baptist, Adre’anna strained to win the prize-filled treasure box given each week to the child who sat the quietest during the lesson.
“It’s no big deal, but to her it was,” Anderson said. “When she got it, it was like her day if not her week.”
For the most part, Adre’anna was a happy child, Anderson recalled, but a couple of times she sat in the back of the room and remained quiet. It was hard to get her interested in the day’s lesson, he said.
“When she was sad, she was very sad,” Anderson said. “More than once, we saw her in tears.”
He doesn’t know what was bothering Adre’anna.
“In hindsight, I wish I’d known,” he said.
Sometimes she played alone
Within the last year, Adre’anna wanted more independence. She battled her mother after seeing other children out in the neighborhood at night.
“Her and I fought tooth and nail all the time,” Gervais said. “She couldn’t understand why she’d see younger kids playing hide-and-seek after dark.”
Gervais told her daughter she wanted her close because she didn’t know whether other adults would be around to watch her play with friends at the other end of the neighborhood.
Gervais said she kept an eye on Adre’anna when she was outside but occasionally the youngster was out of earshot.
“If I couldn’t find her, I’d get up off my butt and go look,” Gervais said.
Olson frequently saw Adre’anna out in the neighborhood, visiting people, usually within three or four blocks of her home. Sometimes Olson worried about the child.
“When she was by herself,” she recalled, “I would think, ‘Oh, I wish she wouldn’t do that by herself.’”
Anderson also saw Adre’anna out and about, sometimes with her mother, other times alone.
“That is true of so many kids out there,” he said. “They would just wander.”
During the summers, at least, Adre’anna had somewhere to go. Every weekday she attended the free summer camp offered by the Lakewood Parks and Recreation Department at Tillicum Elementary.
“She was the kid who would come by herself,” said Alysha Kaplan, a recreation coordinator. “She didn’t have anywhere else to be.”
Adre’anna usually was at the camp from the time the doors opened at 7 a.m. until they closed 11 hours later.
Adre’anna enjoyed the camp but could be moody, requiring patience and some nurturing from counselors, she said.
“She had stress in her life at a very young age,” Kaplan said, “and that definitely came through in the social setting.”
‘Come right back’
Gervais doesn’t remember much about the day before her daughter disappeared. That Thursday, Adre’anna went to school and afterward stopped by the library.
“She was her usual bubbly self,” librarian Robb said. “She checked out books like usual.”
Adre’anna did some homework with a friend who lives nearby and came home for the night, Gervais said.
“She seemed happy,” her mother said.
The next morning the family had the television on to see whether Adre’anna’s school was closed because of snow. When they didn’t see anything after a few minutes, Adre’anna headed out the door.
“I gave her a hug and told her if school was closed to come right back,” Gervais said. “She said, ‘OK, Mom. I will.’”
Gervais has said Federici walked Adre’anna to the door and then watched her walk to the corner of Wadsworth Street and Portland Avenue about 7:45 a.m. Gervais turned the TV off and put on some music.
When Adre’anna didn’t show up by midafternoon, Gervais said she started to worry and went looking for her daughter.
Before, she said, “every time I caught up with her, she was doing OK. This last time I could get no connection at all and that’s when I knew something was wrong.”
Gervais went to a friend’s house and made a phone call at 4:19 p.m.
“911,” the dispatcher said, “what are you reporting?”
“Missing child,” Gervais responded.
Stacey Mulick: 253-597-8268
stacey.mulick@thenewstribune.com
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/story/5755968p-5148478c.html