At 7:13 on the evening of April 12, 2011 Lashanda Armstrong posted a message from her BlackBerry. I am so sorry everyone forgive me please for what I am gonna do. This Is It.
Less than an hour later she put her four children into the family minivan and drove it down a public boat ramp at Newburgh, sixty miles up the Hudson from New York City, into the river. It was dark and raining.
Before the van went in she climbed into the back seat and held all four of them at once, and said that if they were going to die, they were going to die together.
Her eldest son Lashaun was ten. He screamed at her to stop, crying "Mommy, Mommy, what are you doing," and she went in anyway. At some point in the water she changed her mind and tried to reverse the van out, and it was too late.
The power windows were still working. Lashaun got one open, climbed out over his mother and swam to the shore. Divers later found the van submerged in eight feet of water about twenty-five yards out, in a river at forty-five degrees. The fire department estimated he had under two minutes.
Landon Pierre was five. Lance Pierre was two. Lainaina Pierre was eleven months old. All three drowned with their mother, who was twenty-five.
Their names were printed several ways at the time: Lainaina and Laianna, Landon and Landen, Pierre and Pierce. Lashaun appears as LaShaun, La'Shaun and LeShaun, and as Lashaun Alexander, and his mother as LaShanda and Lashandra.
On the bank Lashaun stood waving his arms at passing cars until one stopped. The driver was Meave Ryan, who was thirty-one. She went halfway into the water herself to look for the car, then put him in her own vehicle and drove him to the nearest firehouse, which was almost empty with every truck out on a call, so she knocked on the dispatcher's door. He stood there soaking and shivering and could not get the words out. The fire chief, Michael Vatter, said he kept repeating that the car was in the water with his mother and his brothers and sister. He was probably already hypothermic. The firefighter who opened the door, named in reports only as Torres, at first thought the boy had come to put air in his bicycle tires, then saw he was soaked and crying, saying over and over, help my mommy, help my mommy and the baby.
Ryan said afterwards that she would never forget his face, because the fear in that little boy's eyes was just terrible.
Police were six blocks away at the time, at Armstrong's own apartment, answering a domestic dispute call. Her aunt Angela Gilliam had telephoned them out of concern for her. They found the house empty, and minutes later Lashaun was being handed over at the firehouse. That same day Armstrong had obtained an order of protection, and at around the time of her Facebook post Pierre had reportedly been banging on her door and shouting.
The dispute was with Jean Pierre, the father of the three younger children. She had found out he had been unfaithful. Neighbors and friends said she was distraught that day, and her relatives said she had been paranoid in the days before. Police said there was no history of domestic violence at the apartment, though people who knew the couple described the relationship as combative. In February Pierre had been arrested and charged with endangering the welfare of a child, after a neighbor found two-year-old Lance wandering in front of the apartment at one in the morning, in the cold, in his underwear, on a night Pierre was supposed to be looking after the children. How that charge ended is not on record.
Eight days later Pierre issued a statement through lawyers. He said he had been inaccurately portrayed as directly responsible for the tragedy, and that if he could he would have changed some things in his past.
Lashaun has a different father, Todd Johnson, who spoke from prison, where he was serving a sentence for robbery. He said he was proud of his son and of his ability to face danger as bravely as he had. He was twenty-six and due for release the following year, and he said prison officials would not let him attend the funerals because he had never been legally married to Armstrong. He wanted his son to know that none of it was his fault.
Armstrong worked and was studying at Orange County Community College, and the children went to day care while she was in class. The day care director, Desiree Watson, said she had had issues off and on but that nobody would have thought her capable of this. A neighbor said she was always out with the children, playing. Her mother, Datrice Armstrong, said the last thing she heard her daughter say was that she was sorry, and that she would be hurting for the rest of her life.
Lashaun went to live with his great-aunt, Angela Gilliam, the woman who had called the police that evening. Asked what he needed, she said love, a lot of it. He was kept out of school and given counseling, and two days after it happened he went out to play.
The two families fell out. Relatives of Armstrong were asked to leave the children's funeral service after a confrontation with Pierre's family. The Orange County District Attorney, Frank Phillips, said the mother alone was responsible for the deaths.
The van was completely submerged on a dark, wet night, twenty-five yards offshore, and nobody had seen it go in. Divers who knew where to look still needed about an hour to find it. Had the ten-year-old not got that window down, the five of them would have been reported as a missing family.