Esme Barrera and the womanly art of imaginary self-protection

When I read about the murder of a woman, I do what most women do. I ask: Where did it happen? Was it on the street? In a car? Her home? Did she have an abusive partner? Or was the victim chosen at random? Was there a break-in? Was the victim alone? Was she doing anything risky? Did she ever do anything risky?

These questions have one purpose: To give me a false sense of security, much like the question incessantly asked of cancer survivors: Does cancer run in your family? (Translation: Please tell me it does, because cancer doesn’t run in my family, and I need to believe I won’t
(Cody Duty - AP) get sick like you.)

Women never run out of imaginary ways to protect ourselves. In the wake of a stalker death, we might obscure our online profile. After a street robbery or rape, we may take a martial arts class, or vow never to walk alone in that neighborhood. After a home invasion, we might buy a security system. Or even a gun.

Domestic dispute fatalities are the least alarming. We can tell ourselves that our partners would never, ever do anything like that.

Most disturbing are random victims who took every reasonable precaution, but died anyway. We will look for the flimsiest explanation to avoid the awful, inescapable conclusion: She was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Dumb bad luck.

Such were my thoughts when I read about 29-year-old Esme Barrera, murdered inside her home near the University of Texas in Austin. The special-education teaching assistant, camp counselor and devoted music fan had just celebrated New Year’s Eve at a venue near her West Campus home.

According to a Yelp review, the 29th Street Ballroom evolved from “blood bank to a gutted ‘art gallery’ to DIY venue to dive bar” and was now a “homing beacon and safe haven for Austin’s creative community.” Sounds like the Austin I knew in the 1970s. The city has tripled in size, but remains an oasis of diversity and joie de vivre in the conservative state of Texas, where I’m from.

In the wee hours of New Year’s Day, Barrera left the 29th Street Ballroom. She was alone. The walk to her house would have taken eight minutes.

Street-view photographs reveal the same overgrown bushes, unpaved driveways and peeling paint I remember from the old days, suggesting now (as then) more of a free-spirited neglect than decay.

Around 2:15 a.m., on the sidewalk near Barrera’s house, another woman, a 21-year-old walking home from a party, was thrown to the ground by a man. He ran away when the victim screamed.

A half-hour later, Esme Barrera was found fatally wounded inside her home. She died at the scene. Photographs of her house show flowers and candles left by the fence gate, and a black plastic bag taped over one of the windows.

The same day Barrera was killed, around 5 in the morning, a third attack occurred several blocks away. A 19-year-old woman awoke to find a man assaulting her. He fled.

Police have not confirmed the three attacks are related, but they have released a sketch. The “person of interest” looks remarkably similar to another sketch, of the man known as the Christmas Day flasher.

Since Barrera’s death, the famous laid-back Austin attitude has undergone a subtle shift. Her friend Christina Jarrous said, “There’s a sense of safety [that is gone]. My friend was not in an accident; she did not die from natural causes; she was not killed because of someone’s negligence, but because somebody out there with an ugly and disgusting way of seeing the world has come into our world now.”

As it did in North Dakota, when 22-year-old Dru Sjodin was walking to her car in a mall parking lot in the late afternoon. And in California, when 17-year-old Lily Burk was picking up some papers for her mother in the middle of the day. And in Florida, as 21-year-old Denise Amber Lee was cutting her son’s hair on the porch of her suburban home.

All three women were murdered by strangers. Sjodin and Lee were raped before they were killed.

The movies are full of tough-talking, revenge-seeking, leather-clad women who are armed and dangerous. The reality is quite different. A young woman in a pink and purple blouse holding a purse and a cell phone. A teenager driving a Volvo. A young mother cutting hair.

And an Austin teacher ringing in the new year. On Dec. 31, the sky was sunny, and the temperature topped out at 79 degrees, warm even for Texas. It was a perfect night to enjoy music and friends. A perfect night for a leisurely stroll home.

Donna Trussell is a Kansas City-based poet, blogger, cartoonist and former film critic..