As they were leaving the hospital, a black SUV with tinted windows raced through the parking lot toward them and screeched to a halt in front of them. In classic “Law & Order” style, several police officers emerged. They said a disruption had been called in from the hospital by the mother, reporting a disturbance between the two sisters.
“That’s not true!” said Chrisandria. “I’m the girl’s mother, and I did not call in a disturbance!” The officers then said Miashah was being arrested for several “failure to pay” warrants for unpaid fines. An internal police memo, however, states that the police were dispatched to the hospital “in reference to an arson suspect being there”—even though federal Alcohol Tobacco and Fired (ATF) fire investigators concluded arson was not suspected as the cause of the fire.37 Regardless, “They just do what they want to do,” Chrisandria said.
Miashah was handcuffed and burst into tears.
Still traumatized by the death of her nieces less than 24 hours earlier, an exhausted and shell-shocked Miashah was taken to the TPD Detective Division where she was read her rights and asked to sign a virtually blank Miranda form with only her name scribbled at the top that would waive her right to an attorney. “The police told me when they arrested me it was for restitution I owed,” she said. So, believing she had no reason for an attorney, she signed the waiver. She was then interrogated by two detectives and promptly booked into the David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center (commonly referred to as the Tulsa County Jail) on two counts of child neglect.
Chrisandria was now dealing with not only the loss of her two granddaughters, but the slow emotional demise of her entire family.
“I lost four people,” she sobbed. “Two granddaughters and two daughters who will never be the same. People don’t understand how hard this is to live with. I can’t sleep. I can’t eat. I can’t do anything.”
In the days after the fire, Chrisandria searched desperately for something of Noni’s and Nylah’s to cling to. “I was having such a hard time, and I couldn’t find any of Noni’s toys or anything around my house. And I said to myself, ‘God, please, let me find a shirt, or a sock, or anything.’ It was really too soon, but I went to the babies’ apartment and they had put up a memorial outside the apartment, and there were all these teddy bears and stuff like that. I bought Noni that doll in 2010, and she named the doll “Sheah” after Miashah. And when I went there that night, right in front was Noni’s doll. The only thing on her was soot on the bottom of her feet, where I could tell she had been in the apartment. And it was my 39th birthday.”
Chrisandria Moses outside the Tulsa County Jail (David L. Moss Criminal Justice Center) where Miashah was first locked up.
5
A mother like no other
THERE was no doubt that Chrisandria was a fighter. She had seen her share of trouble from an early age.
A mother at 13, she was seven months pregnant with Miashah, her second child, when her husband attacked her with a screwdriver.
It was 1990. They lived together in their north Tulsa apartment. Only moments earlier, their two-year-old son, Keontae, had been playing nearby on the floor of the apartment. As an argument between Chrisandria and her husband grew heated, he turned and unleashed a torrent of anger on the two-year-old, landing a blow across the child’s back that sent blood gushing out of his nose. Defiantly, Chrisandria stepped between them to block his fury. He flung her against the closet door.
Clambering for the first thing she could grasp to defend herself, she reached up and tore a clothes rod from the closet and swung it at him with all her might. He jerked it out of her hands and threw it across the room. It wasn’t until he was on top of her that she saw the eight-inch screwdriver over her head, lashing at her wildly—first across her chest, then across her back as she turned and hunched to protect her unborn child. Chunks of flesh were punctured out like divots.
With fists flying, the fight continued into the front yard and out into the street. The last punch blacked her out and she fell to the ground. When she came to, she was drenched in blood. A neighbor was standing over her with a shotgun pointed at her husband. “If you hit her again, I’ll blow your head off,” he said. It was the only thing that saved her life. Twenty-six years later, the pink jagged scars hashed across her dark skin still bear the signs of his rage.
This was the first battle she fought to protect her children, but it wasn’t the last. In the aftermath of the London Square fire that engulfed her daughters’ apartment in flames, a debate raged about whether it was a tragic accident or a criminal act.
And Chrisandria vowed to fight.
6
The aftermath
FIVE apartments were heavily damaged and 32 individuals were displaced by the fire. Fire Marshalls and ATF investigators swarmed the scene. Questions of how and why the fire started were answered within 24 hours: unattended cooking with grease.
London Square’s insurance company moved swiftly to assess the scene. Within a matter of days, #716 was gutted, and all physical traces of the fire or its cause were destroyed. Somewhere along the way, the stove was removed, its whereabouts unknown.
Tulsa fire investigators officially ruled the fire “accidental,” since according to fire analysis there was no indication of foul play. Tulsa’s DA Tim Harris, however, drew a different conclusion: The deaths of the children were more than an accident—they were depraved, criminal neglect.
From this point, things moved quickly. On November 26, only a week after her arrest, the DA upgraded Miashah’s charges from child neglect to two counts of second-degree murder, one for each dead child, citing “an act evincing a depraved mind” when she fixed the children lunch and left them unattended for eight minutes to empty the trash. She had abandoned the children, he alleged, to do something other than merely empty the trash. The specifics would come later.
The charges came on the same day that Noni and Nylah were laid to rest in Crown Hill Cemetery in two unmarked patches of earth. Money was scarce for the Moses family and grave markers would have to wait. Miashah was not present when the children were lowered into the ground; she was in Pod F-18 of the Tulsa County Jail clad in an orange jumpsuit.
Noni and Nylah’s cousin, Marvin, a devout light-skinned youth, held a dozen pink balloons tight in his fist and lifted his eyes to the sky with a simple, heartfelt prayer:
“Give us a sense of peace, Heavenly Father, as we release these balloons up into the heavens that they may receive them, for we do not know why this happened to us, but we do know that you are in control. And we ask in the name of Jesus that you continue to show us the way. Help us to be normal and deal with our regular lives. We ask in the name of Jesus that you comfort us and give us the strength to move forward with this tragic situation that has occurred. We give our faith to you, Heavenly Father, as we release these balloons into the sky. We ask in the name of Jesus that you give them to the babies.”
A plethora of pink balloons filled the sky and vanished from view, finding their way to other hearts and places where someone might find them later and wonder—and perhaps in some odd way, sense the import of their journey.
Whether the children’s death was a tragic accident or a criminal act depends on which version of the story you believe: that of the scribbled, fifteen-line police report, that of the DA’s deductive reasoning, or that of several witnesses who were never questioned.
The police report stated that Miashah was “cooking with grease” and referred to the neighbor who had waved her down as a “homie.”38 But Miashah’s neighbor, Tina, contradicted this, saying that Miashah told them she was only heating, not frying, the pre-grilled chicken strips