Shatika Lynn Smith: Losing The Light -- Her Potential Wasted, She's A Drug-Related Murder Victim At Age 15

People saw her dimples first, because that's the kind of girl she was - always smiling.

Shatika Lynn Smith, "Tika" to her friends, could laugh and clown her way out of nearly anything, they said. Nearly anything, until the plucky 15-year-old stepped into a car for a ride with a man, a woman, drugs and a knife.

The visitors had come to 12th and Yesler for the drugs, and the drugs were there at the end. Stabbed beside a lonely road in a wooded area of Capitol Hill, Shatika made it to the middle of the road, blood oozing from two deep wounds in her chest. In the early morning hours of July 16, police found a plastic bag of what looked like crack cocaine beside her lifeless body.

Ralph Lorenzo Nelson, a Metro bus driver and former Seahawk, has been charged with second-degree murder in her death. According to court papers, police said Nelson and a companion were buying drugs from Shatika. Nelson has pleaded not guilty.

Until her death and Nelson's arrest, Shatika Smith was just another teenager selling crack in front of Deano's Yesler Way Market in the early hours of morning.

"We call it `Yesler Terrace Summer Youth Employment,' " said Janet Preston, a family-support worker from the school district, who tries - with too few successes - to keep the kids from the low-income apartments at Yesler Terrace in school.

Shatika was another one who got away, pulled by the lure of fast money and escape from a life that seemed to offer few choices. Once, those around her had her pegged for success - until she began a downward slide into a hole whose sides were steeper than she knew.

Two of her close friends had already been knifed, friends of theirs shot. So far this year, 34 people - 12 of them 21 or younger - have lost their lives in Seattle in violent crimes. And the bulk of those murders, said Sgt. David Ritter of the Seattle Police Department's homicide unit, are drug-related.

Drugs, Shatika told her school counselors, were omnipresent. "It's all around me; everywhere I go, it's all around me," she told one.

But Shatika was sure of herself.

"I'm not going to turn out to be like one of those crack skeletons on Yesler," she confidently told Catherine Hynes, director of the student assistance program at Ingraham High School, where teachers and others were impressed with the bright, polite 9th-grader who seemed to want to succeed.

"She had tremendous potential, a tremendous personality. She was a very quick, astute learner . . .," said Colleen Walls, the freshman class counselor.

"She had a light about her," Hynes said. "She was a beautiful person."

Always impeccably dressed, Shatika looked older than she was. A snapshot of her at age 5 captures her precocious poise: Posing in a giant wicker chair, she holds a telephone receiver to her ear, legs crossed with an air of supreme self-assurance, a bouquet of roses in her hand.

At school, staff members remember Shatika at her best, helping friends and giving advice. Once, she delivered a stern lecture to a fellow student who complained that his father was about to throw him out of the house for not going to school.

"She came in and told him: `Well, why haven't you been going in the first place? You have to attend school. Don't you realize education is important? You better wake up and get with it; you better get your act together!' " Walls remembered.

At the gym at the community center at Yesler Terrace, where neighborhood kids come and go to play basketball, pool and just hang out, she would often come in to check on her younger brother and sister and other young relatives.

"We thought she'd go far, because she was very vocal, very talented," said Al Frank, the former rec-center coordinator. "She could talk to anybody."

Responsible, funny, full of fun, Shatika wasn't easily intimidated.

"Out of all the group of kids, if you had to hold someone up as an example, you would have chosen her and said: She's going to be the one to make it," said Isaiah Anderson, a recreation attendant.

Shatika was strong, everyone said. She was a leader, not a follower. She had potential. And she knew how to take care of herself.

Like the trusting little children who crowd the gym in the afternoons, Shatika had a light in her eyes, the light of possibilities, of future successes. But little by little, those around her saw it flicker and grow dim. Step by step, Shatika Smith moved closer to the darkness of a lonely road on Capitol Hill.

Shatika's life began in 1975, the result of a brief liaison between her father, a good-looking 24-year-old working construction on Yesler, and her mother, a slim, pretty 17-year-old who walked by one day.

He was living with another woman, the woman who would become his wife, and six or seven years went by before he even knew he had a daughter, said her father, who agreed to talk about his daughter on condition he not be identified.

For most of her life, he didn't have much to do with Shatika, partly because he felt harassed by her mother, who demanded money and "talked real bad to my wife, cussed her out," he said. Most of his friends and co-workers at his civil-service job didn't know he had a daughter. But when Shatika was about 12, he decided he wanted to be more of a father, and he began visiting with her.

He was charmed by the sweet, funny girl, and Shatika loved the visits. She liked to show off her handsome, successful father, who lives in a comfortable middle-class area near Lake Washington and drives an expensive imported car. "She was so proud of me. She'd always tell her friends: `That's my daddy,' " her father recalled.

Their visits were brief and sporadic, mostly shopping trips and short outings. Sometimes, her father would talk to her about her life, but it troubled him that she seemed to be relating to him not as his child, but as another adult.

At home, Shatika spent last year shuttling between her mother, who was having troubles of her own, and her grandmother, who lived at Yesler Terrace. Cassandra Smith, her mother, says she struggled with a drug problem in the past and that Shatika had difficulty living with her.

Living at her grandmother's house, a tiny, cramped apartment at Yesler Terrace, Shatika began to skip school more and more, staying out late with friends who were selling drugs.

"She kept lying to me," said Katharyn Smith, her grandmother, an elderly woman whose bad knee makes it difficult for her to get around. When she'd ask her about drugs, Shatika would always deny it.

"I'd sit down and try to tell her that wasn't the way to go," her grandmother recalled. "I'd say there'll always be someone out there to try to influence her, that's their right, and it's her right to turn them down."

Like other teens, Shatika coveted designer clothes, makeup and jewelry. "Asking for 40 or 50 dollars didn't mean a thing to her," her grandmother said. "Every time she'd tell me about the prices of pants she just had to have, or shoes."

Soon, Shatika was spending most of her time at the apartment of an older friend who was heavily using crack cocaine.

In some ways so adult, in other ways Shatika was "soft and innocent," said "Mary," 33, who describes herself as a mother figure to Shatika and her friends.

Like a little child, "Tika always wanted to sleep next to me, so she was touching me," Mary recalled.

Shatika and her friends began using Mary's apartment as a home base while they sold drugs on the street, Mary said. Out from midnight until 5 or 6 a.m., Shatika would return and sleep until midafternoon, making calls and excuses to her grandmother.

Her mother began to have awful premonitions, mixed with guilt. She had started something, and now Shatika seemed to be finishing it, Cassandra Smith said.

"I told my boyfriend, `I'm scared for her.' I said, `My baby's gonna die,' " she said.

Before she disappeared from the street that night in July, some of her friends said, Shatika seemed to have had a change of heart about her life.

Mary remembers Shatika urging her to go to treatment, which she has done.

"I'm already packing my stuff," Shatika told Mary as she prepared to go back to the street to make one last deal. "I'm getting out of Seattle and going to school. The Terrace isn't for me. It isn't my style."

At the rec center at Yesler Terrace, Shatika was drawing away from the kids who were in school, spending more time with others, girls with defensive, angry eyes and expensive shoes from Nordstrom.

Sometimes at night, Preston, the family-support worker, would drive by the corner of 12th and Yesler and see Shatika.

"She'd throw up her hands" and make excuses, Preston recalled. "She didn't feel comfortable doing wrong."

Still, "in this area for that (drug dealing) to be a summer job is socially acceptable, because the kids can't do anything else," she said. "How many ways do you see African-American low-income kids making money? Nobody wants to hire them because they think they steal. But they want the things everybody else has. . . . There is no lack of want up here in the Terrace."

Shatika often bought food with the money she brought in, Mary said. Three or four days before she died, she bought $70 worth of food at the market, giving half to her grandmother and half to her, Mary recalled.

Like most of the kids they see, Shatika and her friends avoided going home, say Preston and Pat Warberg, the rec center coordinator.

"If the center stayed open all night, there'd be kids here all night," Preston said.

"If I had 25 bunks, I'd have 25 kids and 25 waiting," Warberg added.

"These kids go home to frustrated parents - if the parents are there at all," Preston said. They only go home when there's nowhere else to go."

The street, of course, was always there for Shatika, who never seemed afraid of what she saw there. "She was a risk-taker," Warberg said. "She was such a success-type person that if she saw the others doing it, she'd say: `I could do that and more.' "

As she speaks, the girls with the hard eyes wander in and out, and Isaiah Anderson listens as Preston and Warberg talk about how bleak the future begins to seem when you're 15, black and poor.

"Some places, girls that age talk about getting married," Preston muses.

"You don't hear about that, not around here," Anderson says.

In the year before his daughter was to turn 16, Shatika's dad was becoming increasingly frustrated, and their new-found relationship was slowly going on the rocks.

Growing up in a hard-working family, her father worried about the influences on her. "I know that fast money is prison money and slow money is steady money," he said.

Sometimes when he'd see Shatika, he could tell she'd been drinking, and he knew she wasn't always going to school. "I was mad. I said, `You're a child; you don't drink,' " her father recalled. "I told her she should get back in school."

But Shatika acted as though her father were just another friend expressing an opinion - which she felt free to ignore.

A few months into the school year, Shatika began calling late at night, asking for money or a ride. One night about eight months ago, she called about 1 a.m. and told her father she needed help. "I'm in trouble at somebody's house, and I can't get out," she pleaded.

"I was trying to be the father then, so I went and got her," her father remembered. But when he got there, she'd been drinking, and there didn't seem to be any trouble other than her needing a ride home.

"Then it got worse between us," he recalled. Her friends began calling at night. "Are you really Shatika's dad?" they'd ask. Although he'd asked her not to give his telephone number to her mother, she began calling, too.

"Finally I told her: `You didn't keep our agreement - you gave my number to your mother and friends. I can't deal with it. You're too grown up for me. If you're going to be like this, I don't want anything to do with you right now,' " he recalled. "It hurt her real bad, but I didn't know what else to do. It was just too hard for me."

About that time, Shatika began pulling away from school.

"It would start with being there three days a week, then two days a week," recalled Walls. "You'd see her on Monday, then you wouldn't see her until Friday."

At first, she would return to classes full of optimism, assuring teachers she planned to make up all the work.

"I have to get my diploma; I am going to graduate," she told Walls in the first semester.

But her absences became more and more frequent, and Shatika was identified as having a substance-abuse problem.

"At first, it was alcohol. Then it moved into the drugs. Near the end, she made no bones about it," Walls recalled.

Right after Christmas, Hynes convinced Shatika to begin attending a counseling group for kids with drug and alcohol problems. But soon, Shatika began skipping sessions, which put her in jeopardy of being suspended from Ingraham.

Around Easter time, Hynes went to find Shatika at school. Hynes pulled her aside.

"I talked to her about her spirit and how I saw her light going out," recalled Hynes, who had noticed Shatika was forgetting names and having other memory lapses.

"Yeah, I know, but it's not going out," Shatika told her.

Hynes tried to get her to agree to go to inpatient treatment, even setting up a bed for her in a Bellingham treatment facility, with the costs paid by the state.

Politely but firmly, Shatika refused.

Suspended from school, she showed up on the last day of class, stealing a single rose and a calculator from the desk of the school's career specialist - a very uncharacteristic act.

"When I saw her at the first of June, the light had just gone out," Hynes recalled. "The drugs had her."

In mid-June, Hynes called her at her grandmother's apartment, again pleading with her to go to treatment. Again, Shatika refused.

Heartsick, Hynes left Shatika her home number and urged her to call, day or night. She never did.

A few weeks later, Shatika's bleeding body was found on the secluded road at 4 a.m. by a 30-year-old newspaper carrier, who said he was surprised that anyone was very interested in the crime.

"I thought people got murdered every day," he said.