LOST IN AMERICA
By Timothy Pratt

Las Vegas Sun
st-america/
Jan 21 2010

A writer recalls a Las Vegas family ripped apart by the immigration
system – and, ultimately, violence

The first time I saw her, I was ordering a pizza. Mariam Sarkisian
was a teenager helping her father, who owned the place, a typical
pizzeria in a mall in the suburbs of Henderson five or six years ago.

Months later, I found myself on the phone with Mariam and her
sister, Emma, calling me from a Los Angeles jail. Federal immigration
authorities were attempting to deport them to Armenia, the place they
were born but whose language they had only heard relatives speak and
about which they had no clear memory, after spending most of their
short lives in the United States.

It was the start of that rare relationship between a newspaper reporter
and his subjects. For the next five years, I entered their lives
and they, mine: stress and relief, anger and fear, utter panic,
near-death. Many times, I felt the embrace of the family’s five
sisters, the father, the mother, the aunts, the Russian and Armenian
expatriate friends. They baked me cookies, handed me pizza, passed
me cups of thick coffee. They cried to me. I cried, too.

That’s all over.

Mariam and her mother, Anoush — the matriarch, the planet around
which all the other moons, the daughters, revolved — are dead.

They were victims last week in the sort of crime of passion that makes
for a feast on the evening news in the full-fledged metropolis that
the Las Vegas Valley has now become.

After hearing how a distraught boyfriend shot the two of them after
breaking into their home, apparently upset over not seeing the infant
daughter he had with Mariam, I flashed back on Emma’s phone call from
jail that day.

Talking to me, then a reporter from the Las Vegas Sun, she said the
only thing propping up her spirits was Mariam’s imitations of "bad
American Idol singers."

They were, after all, typical suburban American teenagers.

Mariam was the creative, artistic performer among the sisters. All
of them possessed a haunting, dark-eyed beauty that somehow spoke of
times and places long ago and far away from all this.

Mariam came to the phone in jail that day and confided that she didn’t
know how to pray, but that her sister was teaching her. "I’m trying
to keep a level head," the 16-year-old said.

What happened afterward is mostly in the public record: my stories
for the Sun, television news coverage, other stories to follow from
other publications, public outcry. It drew an unprecedented, cinematic
last-minute phone call from Sen. Harry Reid to then-Homeland Security
Department chief Tom Ridge, who called off the deportation flight.

Someone said the incident’s only parallel in recent history was the
notorious Elian Gonzalez case in Miami in 2000.

After the family celebrated the return of the girls, the adults
drinking and dancing and everyone eating Anoush’s cooking, years of
equally impossible contortions followed, including Anoush getting
jailed for two months, then hospitalized, near death, and also saved,
at the last minute, from deportation. I was told, off the record,
by more than one person close to the case that immigration officials
were growing to hate this family.

I met Anoush before her former husband and father of the girls,
Rouben, sold his pizzeria, one of those days when it was unclear if
Mariam and Emma were being sent to Armenia. The pizzeria had been
converted into an Armenian/Ukrainian/Russian outpost-slash-media
circus, as American suburbanites streamed through at all hours to wish
the family well and show their outrage over the idea of teenagers,
high school students like their own sons and daughters, being kept
behind bars over some paperwork.

Anoush was drawn, nearly drained of vital energy, which you could see
came from her family. But she only came through the pizzeria once or
twice, as her own immigration status was still in question and she
knew appearing in public could mean danger.

The Sarkisians were living a story that had been seen before: A family
comes to the United States from elsewhere, attempts to obtain a way
of remaining in the country from immigration authorities–in this
case, through a political asylum application filed more than a decade
ago–and is denied, only to appeal, which places them squarely in
limbo, while they continue building lives, including having children
— in this case, the three younger daughters ̬ only to receive,
one day, a dry order of deportation. And then that is rescinded,
other appeals are made.

Years fall away, taxpayer money is spent, both sides argue right and
wrong with equal passion.

At one point, I spoke with the family about a raid they said
immigration agents made on the house, seeking Anoush. Patricia,
the youngest girl, barely into her teens, said agents followed her
around the house while she brushed her teeth, getting ready for school.

In February of last year, authorities caught up with the 50-year-old
mother. She spent two months in jail, including, she said, 3 a.m.

visits from immigration officials attempting to get her to sign papers
needed for her deportation.

She wound up in the hospital, victim of her bad heart, of stress,
mostly. The five girls lived days of panic, unable to obtain an
answer from the jail or the federal government about the whereabouts
of their mother.

Finally, she was released, again, it appeared, because of last-minute
phone calls.

The family had gone through so many cycles of angst and celebration
that I remember the hollowness — or maybe it was bitterness —
in their voices that day.

I would often think of my own children at home when talking to the
girls, about how I, and most parents, struggle to lay some sort of
ground floor for building a life, using materials such as hope and
optimism. These girls seemed to be losing that fast, focused always
on the day in front of them, unsure of anything else.

Several months later, in July, the whir of anxiety repeated. Anoush got
a letter telling her to pack her bags in a matter of days. Once again,
stress entered her body; she was admitted to North Vista Hospital. And
once again, the federal government gave her a stay.

Mariam, now 21, revealed that the family had not been the same since
her mother had left jail, with Anoush closing herself off in silence,
staying home, leaving the phone unanswered, depressed. All the while,
as always, the five girls tried to build lives, in school, at work,
and, in Mariam’s case, with a small baby named Soraya.

I didn’t know about Soraya. Early last year, I saw a photo of the
baby in their suburban kitchen, the same one that I imagine now must
be stained with the blood of Anoush and Mariam. But Emma waved away
my questions about the infant.

Later that day, I think it was this past summer, apparently feeling
the weight of her family’s bizarre journey, Mariam said, "I don’t
think about the future anymore."

How could she? I have never had to explain to my two sons anything
remotely resembling the idea that their mother, or their father, or
one of them, may have to leave, go to another country, any day now,
and never come back. At the same time, we have endured the immigration
system, since half of my household is from Colombia, and we have
suffered the arbitrariness, the capricious abuse of power, the lack
of clarity or apparent resolution behind seemingly interminable waits,
while all you want is what’s best for your family. But we never lived
through raids, jails, early morning flights …

Anoush would send cookies, rich in butter and dusted with white,
powdered sugar, to the newsroom, to me. Everyone that day took at least
one, took away a piece of her gratitude granted to me just for being
someone in the vast universe of government agencies, lawyers, courts,
senators, television stations … someone to keep up with it all,
at least tell the story of the intersection of a family and the system.

But that’s all over now.

Patricia, the youngest one — the one who has been transformed from
an elementary school student who wrote a letter to President Bush
when her big sisters were in jail, to a teenager, nearly a woman —
was the only one home when Anoush and Mariam were killed. She heard
the bullets, saw her mother and sister on the floor.

She and her other sisters are moving through different houses now,
somehow making a new world which doesn’t include the only thing they
were suffering for all these years — family.

Emma has a court date soon, involving her own immigration status.

That court date was for Anoush as well. Only hours before she was
shot, Anoush left church, optimistic for the first time in months
about finally finding resolve in the world of laws, finally finding
peace in her house.

That day, Mariam spent some time as many young American girls do,
on her MySpace page. She wrote: livin life to the fullest … and
loveing every moment … its a new year and a new me …

— This story originally appeared in Las Vegas Weekly