http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/10-98/10-11-98/a01lo008.htm From Wareham to death rowManny Babbitt's slow march into madness  Editor's note: Wareham native Manuel Babbitt has been sitting on death row since 1982 for the murder of 78-year-old Leah Schendel. Manny Babbitt grew up poor in Wareham's Oakdale section and struggled to find his place in the world. That struggle led him to the Marine Corps, Vietnam and the battle of Khe Sanh. Ultimately, it led to a living room in Sacramento, Calif., where Leah Schendel was beaten to death. How Manny Babbitt moved from Wareham through the torture of Vietnam and finally, to San Quentin's death row, will be explored in this three-part series. By Gerald M. Carbone, New England Wire Service SACRAMENTO, Calif. -- On one side of the courtroom sat the family of Leah Schendel, the murdered woman. Nestled in the row of family was Laura Thompson, flanked by relatives, holding hands. Thompson knew Schendel as Gramma, a kindly old woman who baked cookies, passed out silver dollars, took kids to feed the ducks. Gramma Schendel had been the core of a large, loving family; her murder had left a hollow space at holidays and birthdays, an aching void that could never be filled. Thompson desperately wanted the jury to return a penalty of death. Only then, she felt, could the family begin to heal. On the other side of the aisle sat relatives of the defendant, Manuel "Manny" Babbitt. A brother, Bill Babbitt, prayed for the jury to spare Manny's life. Bill could not bear to hear a sentence of death, for he was the man who had gone to police with suspicions that his long-lost brother from Providence might have been sick enough to kill an old woman; Bill had even helped detectives arrest his brother, hoping to get him help. In front of the court sat the killer himself, Manny Babbitt, weeks after his 33rd birthday; he watched the penalty phase of his trial -- the stage that would determine whether he lived or died -- with the demeanor of a bored teen-ager. Manny, a muscular Marine veteran of the Vietnam War, was a survivor of the siege of Khe Sanh. At the time of his sentencing he had been home from the war for 13 years, but he still rarely spoke of anything else; sometimes it seemed to Bill that the war was Manny's only past, as if he'd been born in that war. The sentencing date was May 14, 1982, a full 16 years before the case spilled over onto CNN, the Los Angeles Times, the floor of the U.S. Senate. As the jury filed into the courtroom to announce its sentence, Bill Babbitt felt as dirty as Judas Iscariot, dirtier even, for at least Judas had not delivered his own brother to the hands of the executioners. With the jury settled, Judge Joseph A. DeCristoforo addressed the foreman, William Hampton: "Mr. Hampton, Will you please hand the verdict to the clerk of the court?" Hampton handed a crisply folded paper to the clerk. "Mr. Clerk, will you please read the verdict?" "We, the jury in the above titled cause ... impose the penalty of death." "Yes!" the word escaped Thompson's lips, a whispered exhalation. She clenched both hands tighter round the hands that held hers, and she wept. The family had held strong; it would endure. The condemned man, Manny Babbitt, tipped a bottle of water and swallowed. His brother, Bill, felt sick with shame. He half wished he had never told police about his suspicions, that he had instead bought his brother a one-way bus ticket back to Providence. His head tried to tell him that he had done the right thing, but his heart felt heavy with guilt. Today, 16 years after a jury ordered Manuel Babbitt's death, neither his family nor the family of Leah Schendel is happy with the outcome. Babbitt's family is upset that the sentence of death still hangs above Manny, now a soft-spoken 49-year-old grandfather living on San Quentin's death row. He still talks about the Vietnam War as if it were yesterday. Schendel's family is burdened by the fact that Manny Babbitt lives. And on March 20, 1998, that burden became harder to bear. That day, a friend called Laura Thompson and told her to turn on the morning news. There on the TV, Thompson saw that the Marine Corps planned on that very day to send two officers into San Quentin to pin a Purple Heart on Manny Babbitt's chest. How dare they honor the man who killed her grandmother? San Quentin's warden would not let the media witness the Purple Heart ceremony; the prison has a policy against allowing inmates to be interviewed. But those who saw the ceremony said that the pinning was so poignant it even moved the guards who escorted Manny from his cell to a conference room. Manny shuffled into the room shackled in a chain that wrapped around his waist, between his legs, to his handcuffed wrists. As a sergeant major read the citation documenting Manny's wounds at Khe Sanh, Manny tried to salute. He could not raise his manacled hands to his forehead so he scrunched forward at the waist, bringing his forehead to his hand, held stiff in salute. Four fellow veterans of the siege of Khe Sanh -- one of the most punishing battles in Marine Corps history -- stood at attention while a Marine Corps major pinned a shiny Purple Heart to Manny's prison blues. Then Manny's mother, Josephine Santiago, wrapped her thin arms around her husky son. In a firm, clear voice she said, "I'm proud of you." Word of this death row ceremony was more than the Schendel family could bear. "It's getting more and more that he's the poor victim," Thompson said. "And we're the victims. He committed the murder. The penalty was death. So be it." Thompson's nephew, John Rizzotti, called U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein to express his outrage; he found a sympathetic ear. Feinstein's staff researched the issue and found no prior example of the military honoring an inmate on death row. And if Feinstein has her way, it will never happen again. In May, Feinstein introduced the "Military Honors Preservation Act," a bill that would ban members of the armed forces from entering any prison to present medals to inmates serving time for violent felonies. Feinstein told the Senate: "For Mrs. Schendel's family, this medal ceremony was a slap in the face." Thompson and Rizzotti both feel that the medal ceremony was a ploy concocted by defense lawyers to generate sympathy for Manny as they appeal to the courts to spare his life. Charles Patterson, the defense lawyer who filed the paperwork for Manny's Purple Heart, is himself a Khe Sanh veteran; he says the Schendel family's view of his motives is understandable, but mistaken. At first glance, it seems odd that Charles Patterson would have any connection with Manny Babbitt. Manny is dark-skinned and dirt-poor, born in a house in Wareham, Mass., that was heated by wood and insulated with newspaper, a house with no toilet and no hot water. Patterson is southern and white, raised in Joplin, Mo., the great-grandson of a Union soldier. He's a tall man with gray brows, blue eyes, and a nose that's been broken so many times it's permanently crooked. He played college football, served as a Marine captain in the Vietnam War and still carries himself with the square-shouldered posture of a Marine Corps officer. Though Patterson wasn't born rich, he is certainly wealthy now. He is a managing partner of Pillsbury, Madison, & Sutro, one of California's oldest, largest and most conservative law firms. When the federal government needed someone to sift the wreckage of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s, it hired Patterson to probe Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, the Arkansas company that loaned money to the Whitewater Development Co. Democrats complained when Congress put Patterson's conservative firm in charge of Whitewater, but it was his report that cleared President Clinton of wrongdoing; information from the "Pillsbury Report" put former Arkansas Gov. Jim Guy Tucker and his business partner, James McDougal, behind bars. Patterson is at the top of his field, a trial lawyer who commands $400 an hour. Since he learned about Manny's case a year and a half ago, Patterson has donated nearly 2,000 hours of his firm's time on Manny's behalf. Patterson's interest in the case has puzzled Laura Thompson, who says, "I don't understand why Chuck Patterson is trying so hard." Charles Patterson and Manny Babbitt have matching scars: each has a lesion at the base of his left thumb, reminders of shrapnel exploding at Khe Sanh. Patterson carries another shrapnel scar in the muscle just above his right collarbone; Manny has one in his scalp. Patterson and Babbitt never met at Khe Sanh, where 6,000 Marines took a pounding from heavy artillery for 77 days. But the common experience of those days in hell forged a bond that goes deeper than their matching flesh wounds; deeper, for Vietnam also left both men with serious psychic wounds. Patterson's healed; Babbitt's did not. Patterson and Babbitt are part of a large class of Vietnam veterans whose minds were damaged in that war. Estimates of Vietnam vets suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder range from 500,000 to as many as 1.5 million. Patterson has seen enough war to know that it is an ignoble pursuit; he has felt the grief of too many deaths to perceive war as gallant. Yet he also respects the way war forges unbreakable bonds among the men who survive it. In war, he explains, everything is built around the unit. If a unit is ambushed, every soldier in it must turn and walk in the direction of the fire. If you're in combat, you have to have a group of people that will walk with you into that stream of bullets, because that's the only way to survive: to advance into the fire and kill the people who are shooting you. If you are digging a bunker, you have got to trust the person next to you not to slack off, to dig deep enough to provide protection from exploding shells. You have to count on your pilots to ignore anti-aircraft fire so they can get down low enough to put their bombs where they count. In war, "I've got to count on other people to risk their lives for me," Patterson said. "Now that's asking an awful lot of people I don't really know. But they're Marines and that's what Marines do. "Manny's a Marine. He was in Khe Sanh. I know I could depend on him to do what he could to save my life. He should be able to depend on me to do the same thing. There's that obligation." That is one reason why Charles Patterson is trying so hard. "Even deeper," Patterson says, "what hooked me into this case, was the description of what happened. I think I know what happened that night, and why it happened." But to understand Patterson's view of what happened the night Manny Babbitt killed Leah Schendel you have to know about Manny Babbitt's life, and about Khe Sanh. Josephine Babbitt lay alone in an unfinished bedroom when she gave birth to Manny on May 3, 1949. There was no doctor, no midwife, no one. Her five children were in school and her husband, Charles Babbitt, had gone to find the village midwife. The Babbitt house stood in Oakdale, the part of Wareham where many Cape Verdeans lived, then mostly first-generation immigrants who worked the cranberry bogs for the big growers. In those days, Oakdale was a slice of Cape Verde in America, where grapes grew on backyard arbors and chickens crossed streets of hard-packed sand. Oakdale was separated from the rest of town by the clam flats of the Agawam River, and by an equally wide cultural chasm. Manny's father, Charles, came from Cape Verde, a chain of 10 islands off the coast of West Africa. Charles Babbitt was 34 when he met Josephine Pina, the 18-year-old daughter of Cape Verdean immigrants. He was a strong man, a mason and carpenter, with a violent temper. She was an unstable teenager, whose mental illness had already required hospitalization at Taunton State Hospital. It would be easy to paint Charles Babbitt as evil, for he drank, beat his wife, and beat his children, too. He even fashioned a special strap for beating the kids. He cut a handle into a long strip of leather and flayed the ends so it would leave welts. "When he hit us with this strap he would come down on our faces and arms," Manny's brother Bill recalled. "Sometimes the neighbors would hear us screaming." But a portrait of Charles Babbitt as an evil man would be a silhouette, and people are more complex than that, families more forgiving. Even today, Bill Babbitt speaks lovingly of the father who used to raise welts on his face. "My father was right on," Bill says. "He knew that things were going to be tough for us. I think in his way he was trying to let us know that it was not going to be a cakewalk for us, that we were going to have to overcome a lot of obstacles." Charles had three children by another woman in Providence, and he used to disappear to Providence for weeks. Bill Babbitt recalls his father pointing to the clam flats of the Agawam River and saying, "As long as this river is here your family never has to go hungry." The river supplemented the family's diet with clams, mussels and whelks. The Massachusetts Department of Welfare left an envelope of cash for the family at the Main Street A&P, where the clerks parceled out the money. If the children tried to buy ice cream or fruit cocktail, the cashiers would tell them it was "inappropriate" and they had to put it back. "I ended up a fruit cocktail thief," Bill recalled. "I was like, I'm gonna get me some damn fruit cocktail. Now I can't stand the stuff," he said with a laugh. "God is good." During the raw winters, the Babbitt children slept beneath piles of coats because they could not afford sheets and blankets. Autumns they went to work in the cranberry bogs. "If you were big enough to carry a box, you went to work in the bogs," Bill said. It was hard work, picking. Sharp cranberry canes cut into the children's' hands and knees. The Babbitt children attended school dressed in cheap, ill-fitting clothes that they got from charity. Phillip Gomes, a childhood friend of Manny's, recalled that the Babbitts were "the butt of a lot of jokes about their tattered clothes and broken-down house." Manny's clothes smelled of wood smoke and body odor. He stayed back in the first grade, the second grade, the fifth grade. He had an IQ of 100 and was clever with his hands; but at least one of his teachers noted that his mind wandered. When he was 11, Manny fashioned a cane for his favorite uncle, Benny Babbitt, a sharp dresser with a quick wit. He walked to visit his uncle and to present his gift. When he arrived, he found Uncle Benny lying in a pool of blood. Benny Babbitt had killed himself. The suicide was so painful and incomprehensible to Manny that he refused to accept it. He returned again and again to Benny's home, looking for his uncle. Manny was a teen-ager when he made his second pass at the fifth grade. His teacher, Beverly Lopes, was one of two Cape Verdean teachers in Wareham, so the principal assigned all of the Cape Verdean fifth-graders to her class; as a result, more than half of her class was Cape Verdean. Lopes still teaches in Wareham, where she recently greeted her 38th class. She has taught more than 2,000 children, and she said, "I remember Manny Babbitt very well." As a teen-aged fifth-grader, Manny was older and more muscular than most of his peers. But Lopes said that instead of being a bully, he patrolled the playground to prevent bullies from picking on people. "Manny had -- not happy eyes, sad eyes." Lopes recalled. "A child's body language tells you everything. His eyes were always downcast to the floor." Despite his problems, both Lopes and Gomes remember Manny as a kid who got along well with others. He got in real trouble only once, the time he broke into a concession stand at the drive-in theater and stole some food. Police followed a trail of wrappers back to his house. In November 1961, Manny smashed his head on the pavement of Route 6. He and Gomes were riding bicycles along the busy thoroughfare to Cape Cod, and a car struck Manny. He entered Tobey Hospital with broken shin bones, deep cuts and a concussion that caused him to vomit for days. "My mother led us to believe that Manny would die," recalled Stephen Babbitt, the youngest of the Babbitt family. "When that didn't happen, everyone was so relieved that it took a while to notice that Manny had been somehow changed. ... It wasn't exactly like he had bad judgment. It was more like he had no judgment." Steve, like his brother Bill, still regards his father with a respect that goes beyond veneration to love. And he said that the bond between father and son was particularly strong in Manny's case, because Manny was the oldest child still home when Charles Babbitt began wasting away. At age 14, Manny often pedaled his bicycle from Wareham to Buzzard's Bay to visit his father in the Hightower Nursing Home, where Charles Babbitt lay nearly skeletal with colon cancer. Manny was there the day his father died, the last of the family to speak with Charles. Traumatic events triggered Josephine Babbitt's psychosis. She was hospitalized after the death of her mother, and after the birth of her third son. An investigator hired by Manny's public defender searched his family tree and found 16 close relatives who either committed suicide or required long-term hospitalization for mental illness. After her husband's death, Josephine donned black; for the next year the people of Oakdale saw her in her yard, garbed in widow's robes, talking to a pear tree. Josephine was terrified by visions of her dead husband. Sometimes she would "wake us in the middle of the night with her screams," recalled Stephen, who was then 9. "When my father died, he left us with nothing. We had to forage for wood every morning, dragging in dead trees to keep the fire going, and we were always cold and always hungry." Manny was 15 when he failed the sixth grade, and he was sent to Providence to live with "Brother Charlie," a half-brother nearly as old as Manny's mother. Charlie Jr. was a lot like his and Manny's father. He used to tell his children, "There's a right way, a wrong way, and Charlie Babbitt's way." And if they didn't do things Charlie Babbitt's way, they got the strap. Charlie Babbitt Jr. is a legend on Providence's south side. He owned a city block on Broad Street where he ran Sax's Steakhouse, and a strip club called Charlie's Cherries. Charlie taught martial arts and was considered by many to be the toughest man in Providence. Manny turned 17 in the seventh grade at Roger Williams Junior High; he quit, leaving school with a sixth-grade education. Manny then worked in a shoe factory, where he met a girl named Lorraine Estelle. Lorraine was attracted to Manny because he was a hard worker, outgoing, fun-loving. In the spring of '67, Manny and Steve were watching TV in their Potters Avenue apartment when a news clipping showed footage of the Vietnam War. Manny told Steve: "That's it. I'm going into the service." Manny walked to the Marine recruiting station in south Providence. The recruiter gave him a general intelligence test, but Manny could barely read it, so the recruiter filled it in for him. The U.S. military was building up to 425,000 troops in Vietnam that year, and was desperate for bodies. Ernie Spencer, a Vietnam veteran who edits a newsletter for Khe Sanh vets, put it this way: "In those days, if you could breathe on a mirror and leave a fog -- they'd take you." On June 1, 1967, Manny Babbitt shipped out to South Carolina, bound for boot camp at Parris Island, S.C. From the start, Manny liked the Marine Corps. The Marines gave him essentials that his life had been lacking: food, clothes and direction. He was assigned to an Ontos, an armored car that rode on tracks like a tank. It carried six recoilless rifles, three mounted on each side. The rifles fired shells as long as arms. Some of the shells were designed to pierce tanks; another kind of shell was loaded with 100,000 darts. Sometimes the Marines fired these "beehive" shells at jungle canopy as a defoliant; more often, they fired the darts at clusters of enemy soldiers. Manny's job was to load the shells into the rifles for firing. He still recalls shredding North Vietnamese soldiers with beehive shot. He once described the sight as, "Body parts like red rags flying." Six months after boot camp Manny was assigned to an anti-tank battalion at Khe Sanh, nestled in South Vietnam's high country, where clouds scraped a chain of mountains furred in green jungle. It was a gloomy, isolated outpost just 18 miles south of the border with North Vietnam. The village of Khe Sanh was a placid place with some stucco buildings of French Colonial design and a few thatched huts. The base was built above the village on a narrow plateau hemmed in by mountains. The base was small, one-half mile wide by 1.5 miles long -- about 55 acres. An airstrip ran through the middle, as straight and clean as a surgical scar. Manny arrived on Dec. 5, 1967. The pressure was building. U.S. intelligence showed that the North Vietnamese Army was amassing a huge force around Khe Sanh, nearly 40,000 strong. Many senior advisers suggested a retreat. Gen. William Westmoreland ignored their advice. He viewed Khe Sanh as the "Gateway to South Vietnam," a western anchor of defense against invasion by the North Vietnamese. He decided to reinforce the base, to dig in for a fight. Before the monsoons came, the soil at Khe Sanh was a dry red powder. Helicopters kicked up dust devils of red; Jeeps and wreckers and the treads of Manny's antitank vehicle lifted dust whenever they moved. Red powder coated everything at Khe Sanh, uniforms, skin; it even filtered into the letters that Manny mailed home. With the North Vietnamese massing in the mountains around Khe Sanh, the Ru Montagnards, mountain people, began to flee into the village, swelling it with 10,000 refugees. Winter brought rain, and with the rains came the fog, creeping down the valley, whiting out the jungle-cloaked mountains. The North Vietnamese pinched off Route 9, the only road to Khe Sanh; rain, mist and fog regularly shut down the air strip; the 6,000 Marines at Khe Sanh -- exposed to artillery in the mountains and surrounded by 40,000 invisible troops -- were on their own. When the North Vietnamese in the mountains dialed the narrow plateau into their artillery sights, the Marines at Khe Sanh were as helpless as fish in a barrel. Down on the plateau, they fortified their base against attack. They rolled out triple coils of barbed wire and German razor tape; they planted mines that shot shrapnel and trip flares that would illuminate anyone who tried to sneak up in the night. And then they waited. The siege began on Jan. 21, 1968. Under cover of night a North Vietnamese regiment attacked Hill 861, an attempt to seize the high ground around the base. In bloody, hand-to-hand combat, Marines held the hill. At 5:30 a.m., the artillery erupted. Explosive shells rained from the mountains into the base at Khe Sanh. Just 15 minutes into the siege a shell hit the ammunition dump. Nearly a ton of explosives blew at once, a black-and-orange fireball; the shock knocked over helicopters, flattened tents, collapsed buildings. Heat from the blast curled the matting on the air strip. The base's entire supply of tear gas went up, spreading an acrid cloud that blended with the fog and the smoke. Thousands of rounds of artillery, mortar, and bullets rose in the blast and rained down on the troops. Some exploded on impact, while others simmered, exploding throughout the day. Whole artillery shells fell in the trenches and glowed red; Marines took off their shirts and gingerly wrapped the hot shells to take them away. With 6,000 Marines under siege at Khe Sanh, Gen. Westmoreland drafted a plan of defense. Code-named Niagara II, the plan's purpose was, in Westmoreland's words, to "pour it on" the enemy, to maintain a steady fall of bombs on the North Vietnamese ringing Khe Sanh. U.S. jets screeched through the valleys, dropping bombs, Agent Orange, and napalm on the hills around Khe Sanh. Sometimes the napalm flared so close to the base that Marines on the perimeter could feel its heat. Every three hours around the clock came the "Arc Lights," squadrons of B-52s. A single bomb dropped by a B-52 weighed up to 1,000 pounds and gouged a crater 20-feet deep. Around Khe Sanh, the U.S. Air force dropped more than 150,000 of those bombs. The Marines on the ground could rarely see the B-52s, but they'd know the planes were bombing because they could feel the ground shake. Red powder sifted from the timbers into bunkers. In a single day in February 1968, 1,300 rounds of mortar, rocket, and artillery fire fell within the narrow perimeter of the base. That's one explosion every 66 seconds around the clock. For every round that came in, the Marines fired out 10. With heavy artillery roaring in, and the bang of howitzers firing out, the rat-a-tat-tat of small arms fire, and the bombs quaking in the mountains, no one ever really slept. In testimony as part of Manny's appeal, Navy Chaplain Raymond W. Stubbe, who survived the siege, described the scene: "Heavy rains turned the landscape into oozing red mud that seemed to blend with the blood of the dead and wounded. Mud soaked through everything and into the skin so that new arrivals could be distinguished by their lack of a red skin tone." There was no water for washing, nothing but C-rations for food. The constant shelling made it necessary for everyone to spend long hours inside a warren of bunkers and trenches, Stubbe said. The trenches were full of the stench of mold and urine. Even in daylight enemy soldiers were invisible behind a veil of jungle and mist. Most of the Marines at Khe Sanh were teen-agers; many developed a blank, flat expression they called "the thousand-yard stare." At Khe Sanh young Marines learned the difference between the smell of fresh death -- "a combination of powder from the weapons and blood," said one --and the wretched stench of a rotted corpse. Helicopter rotors blended the smells of death, of mold, of smoke from barrels of jet fuel burning human waste, the stench of the trenches, and the choking, burned-tire smell of napalm. Sometimes Manny's platoon would be assigned to climb the nearby hills on "body count patrol." On one hike Manny saw a North Vietnamese Army helmet. He thought it might make a nice souvenir; he bent, turned it over, and found a piece of head still inside, crawling with maggots. Scores of North Vietnamese dead lay beyond the barbed wire, and the bodies attracted rats. The rats became a serious problem. They were as big as rabbits and they had no fear. At night rats rattled around the bunkers, chewing on anything with food particles on it, including human hair. The rats developed a taste for the dead. Manny once saw a rat tugging at the intestines of a dead solider beyond the razor wire; the rats took to biting sleeping Marines too, testing to see if they were dead. Marines at Khe Sanh learned the nuances of incoming shells: mortar rounds sounded like a thump on a hollow log followed by a rustle like bird feathers; rocket motors came in with a sound like cloth ripping; artillery, the big shells, sounded like airborne trains. When they heard an incoming shell they had two seconds to take cover; two seconds to drop, cover, survive the explosion, then run for the nearest bunker. The drop, curl, and run became known as the "Khe Sanh shuffle." Whenever the fog lifted, U.S. planes swooped into Khe Sanh to drop reinforcements and to take out the wounded and the dead. Manny could see the planes' landing lights coming way down the valley, and when he saw the lights he'd know that the shelling was about to begin. The Marines called planes "mortar magnets" and "rocket bait"; just before any plane touched down incoming shells exploded near the tarmac. Robert Harrell, Manny's first Ontos commander, said in a court declaration, "We would be huddled around talking, waiting for the next round, and then a shell would hit and there would be legs, heads and other body parts all over and our friends would be dead." When a Marine was killed in combat his friends tried to protect the body from further damage by incoming fire. If they couldn't drag the body into a safe area, they'd cover the corpse with whatever was handy so it would not be hit again. Before bagging a corpse the Marines would try to tie something around the ankle or foot to identify the body before it was evacuated. These details are more than morbid curiosities of war, for when police found Leah Schendel her body was covered by a mattress, a leather strap tagged to her left ankle. Tomorrow: Manny survives Vietnam but struggles to cope with life in peacetime. Top photo by The Associated Press 1) Bill Babbitt holds replicas of military medals that were bestowed on his brother, Manuel "Manny" Babbitt, now sitting on San Quentin's death row for the beating death of Leah Schendel. 2) Phillip Gomes, a childhood friend of Manny Babbitt. 3) Charles Babbitt, Manny's father. 4) A young Manny Babbitt. 5) Leah Schendel, shown in a family photo. |