âBinged Making a Murderer? Try . . . [this] riveting portrait of a tragic, preventable crime.â âEntertainment Weekly
Finalist for the Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime
Finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize
A Pulitzer Prizeâwinning reporterâs gripping account of one young manâs path to murderâand a wake-up call for mental health care in America
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On a summer night in 2009, three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in loveâTeresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent many years trying to find themselves and who eventually found each otherâand a young man on a dangerous psychological descent: Isaiah Kalebu, age twenty-three, the son of a distant, authoritarian father and a mother with a family history of mental illness. All three paths forever altered by a violent crime, all three stories a wake-up call to the system that failed to see the signs.
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In this riveting, probing, compassionate account of a murder in Seattle, Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his newspaper coverage of the crime, offers a deeply reported portrait in microcosm of the state of mental health care in this countryâas well as an inspiring story of love and forgiveness. Culminating in Kalebuâs dangerous slide toward violenceâobserved by family members, police, mental health workers, lawyers, and judges, but stopped by no oneâWhile the City Slept is the story of a crime of opportunity and of the string of missed opportunities that made it possible. It shows what can happen when a disturbed member of society repeatedly falls through the cracks, and in the tradition of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, is an indelible, human-level story, brilliantly told, with the potential to inspire social change.
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