A Silence Filled With Regret

Neighbors Wonder How Signs of Tragedy Could Have Gone Unheeded

There is always someone who saw something strange. Afterward. Sucked her teeth and smelled a peculiar smell. Afterward.

Noticed an abnormal silence. Afterward.

Thinking it strange the furniture was in the back yard. Afterward.

Wondering where the children could have gone.

After a horrible thing happens, there is always someone who looks back over a shoulder and thinks he or she should have, could have, would have acted differently. The neighbors into whose houses that strange smell drifted. The neighbors who saw the kids, then saw them no more.

If only.

But in a harried society, suspicions are often unchecked, until Afterward. And foul odors are left to permeate, with no one seeking the source, until Afterward.

And so it happens that four children went missing for more than eight months, their bodies decomposing in a rowhouse that their mother guarded -- not allowing anyone inside. Banita Jacks, 33, is charged with murder in the deaths of her four daughters: Brittany Jacks, 17; Tatianna Jacks, 11; N'Kiah Fogle, 6; and Aja Fogle, 5.

"How did you not see the kids? Didn't the neighbors see kids move into the house? Wouldn't you wonder where the kids were if you saw them go in and didn't see them leave?" It is the thought on so many minds, given voice by Dorell Thomas, who came by the house to mourn the children's deaths. .

Prosecutors say Banita Jacks told police, "They began dying in their sleep one at a time -- all within a seven to ten day period," court documents say. "She said that as the first three younger children died, she placed them side by side in the room in which they died." She told police the children all died sometime after the electricity was cut off. She said that no one else had been in her house from May of 2007 until Jan. 9, 2008, when marshals came to the house to evict its occupants. And found the bodies of the four girls in empty rooms.

And now people gather outside the house on Sixth Street in Southeast Washington and wonder how such a horrible thing could have happened, how four bodies could have lain dead all those months with nobody seeking the source of the horrible smell.

You go in search of hindsight -- the Would Haves, the Should Haves that now challenge Afterward and Regret. Go on down to 4249 Sixth St. SE, where it happened. And find that people have turned the light blue brick rowhouse into a memorial site. Lining the fence with teddy bears and sad balloons and brown and pink dolls and cardboard signs offering prayers that the dead children will rest in peace.