[The mundanity and insanity of gun death in America ]
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KILLED FOR WALKING A DOG  
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By Peter Sagal. Photographs by Benjamin Rasmussen
September 21, 2022
The Atlantic
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_ The mundanity and insanity of gun death in America _

, Benjamin Rasmussen / The Atlantic

 

There is no particular reason people should care about the shooting
of Isabella Thallas, which is why, as far as I can tell, not many
people did. She was the only casualty, and there was no mystery as to
who shot her, and in a country in which guns kill more than 40,000
people
[[link removed]] every
year—well, who has the time to stop and mourn for just one of them?

But there was something about this killing, on the side of a Denver
street on a sunny June morning in 2020, that captured my attention. I
couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to Bella Thallas. Maybe
it was her age—about that of my own daughters—or maybe it was the
specific circumstances of her murder, which were both mundane and
completely insane.

For two years I tracked down what news I could find in the Denver
press and looked in vain for the national coverage that I assumed
would follow but never did. Eventually, I wrote to Bella’s
family—her mother, father, sister, boyfriend—and talked to them
about who Bella was and what happened on the day she died. There
isn’t and never will be any satisfactory explanation for what
happened to her, but I came as close as I could to understanding what
was lost when it did.

“We were essentially raised by teenagers,” Bella’s sister,
Lucia, says, and it’s true. Joshua Thallas and Ana Hernandez were
high-school sweethearts who married right after graduation, when he
was 19 and she was 18. Isabella Joy Thallas arrived soon after—a
preemie, weighing less than six pounds—followed two years later by
her sister, Lucia, and that birth was just as quickly followed by a
divorce that was both inevitable and urgently necessary. Josh, by his
own admission, had no idea at that age how to be a husband and father,
and struggled to manage a dark and violent streak, at home and in the
world. Ana was combative and determined in her own way. After 10
years, they married again, when Josh felt he had gotten his act
together, and then divorced again for good five years later, when Ana
apparently decided he had not (although Ana kept using the last name
Thallas).

Bella and Cia, as they liked to be called, grew up in that cauldron of
rage and love, often forced to be the mature, careful ones while their
parents bickered or worse. Cia recognizes in herself the suspicious
reserve of somebody who grew up in chaos, but Bella was different.
“She trusted everyone the moment she met them,” Cia says.

Bella’s guilelessness could occasionally irritate Cia—“Haven’t
you heard about that person’s reputation?” Cia would demand. Once,
in high school, Bella acted as the designated driver for a bunch of
friends heading to a concert, paid a helpful attendant to park in a
Wendy’s parking lot, and came back to discover that the car had been
towed. “But I paid him to park there!” she said. “Yeah,”
replied Cia, “you paid a _completely random person_.”

[A photograph of sisters Cia and Isabella ]

A photograph of Cia and Isabella (Benjamin Rasmussen / The Atlantic)

Bella was good at school but a procrastinator—her father wondered at
how she would wait until the last minute to do her assignments, then
ace them in a late flurry of activity. But her abiding interest was in
fashion. She was always urging her sister to dress with more flair,
and eventually Cia would give in and raid Bella’s closet for some
piece or another. Rather than gloating, Bella would simply say: “You
look amazing!”

She was beautiful, with a gymnast’s petite physique, honey-colored
skin (Greek on her father’s side, Hispanic and Sephardic Jewish on
her mother’s), and flowing black hair. She did some work for young
Denver photographers and designers, sometimes modeling, sometimes
coming up with makeup designs or customized looks. Though she would
have liked to study fashion, she was taking accounting classes at
Metropolitan State University of Denver because her mother wanted her
to get a degree in something practical.

If Bella Thallas treated anyone with disdain or cruelty, it left no
trace. Instead, I was told of the lengths to which she would go to
help and befriend others. For someone raised as Bella was, it can’t
always have been easy to be so kind.

She had boyfriends during her high-school years, but none of those
relationships seemed very serious. Given that her parents made
marriage look like World Wars I and II, perhaps it’s not surprising
that Bella didn’t see love and sex as things to be trusted—at
least until she met Darian Simon.

Darian, six years older than her, was a photographer and co-founder of
Be a Good Person, a clothing company. He had also grown up in a broken
home, and he, too, had treated relationships as something to play at,
another thing to do with his time. He and Bella became close after
they met through friends, but without considering becoming a real
couple. (At least, they didn’t consider it openly—Cia remembers
Bella telling her that Darian was the man she was going to marry, so
they could have “adorable curly-haired children.”)

They spent most of 2019 “hanging out,” even though they were
dating other people, until one day, as Darian remembers, he finally
asked her, or asked himself, _What are we doing? We love each other.
We bring out the best in each other. Why aren’t we a couple? _Once
together, Bella and Darian spoke about each other the same way—this
was different than it had been with anyone else they had dated, or
even known. In each other’s company, they didn’t have to protect
themselves, keeping an escape hatch ready for when it went sour, as
they had learned love always does. They could finally let their guard
down.

At the same time, tensions were rising in the home where Bella and Cia
still lived with their mother and their half brother, Jacob. Both
sisters felt obligations to their mother—they worshiped with her at
a messianic Christian church, kept up a weekly commitment to an
extended-family dinner, and tried to live by her rules while under her
roof. This could be hard, as Bella tried to stake out some
independence while her mother kept a close watch on her. Ana worried
that Bella would repeat her own mistake—commit too young and too
seriously to the wrong person, before she knew who she was.

In April of 2020, Ana and Bella got into an argument. I was told
different versions of what caused it, but the result was a breach. Ana
told Bella to move out, and without other options, Bella moved in with
Darian, in his new apartment in Denver’s Ballpark District, a
residential and retail development, still under construction, near
Coors Field. That departure haunts Ana now. If Bella hadn’t left,
she would still be alive. Ana told me she sometimes wonders if
Bella’s moving out was God’s way of preparing her to say goodbye.

[Picture of Ana Thallas, Isabella's mother, at her home in Denver,
Colorado. ]

Ana, Isabella’s mother, at her home in Denver (Benjamin Rasmussen /
The Atlantic)

Cia and bella turned 19 and 21 within days of each other, so on June
7, Ana threw the girls a joint birthday party on a restaurant rooftop.
By then the family had come to a semblance of peace. Bella wore a
parti-colored knit dress with a pair of her mother’s designer
sandals—they were the same size; “solemates,” in Ana’s
words—and a fresh pedicure. Bella might have wanted to wear the
beautiful Dolce & Gabbana dress her mother had purchased for her, but
it was the one thing Ana wouldn’t let Bella take out of the house
when she moved; Ana wanted to keep it perfect for High Holy Days at
church later that year.

The birthday cake (white with guava filling) that Ana had ordered for
the party was too beautiful to touch, so no one did—Bella took it
home intact, and the next morning sent her mom a picture of herself
eating it for breakfast. Before the party was over, Bella posted to
Instagram—for the last time—a photo of herself and two close
friends and, referencing the protests over the death of George Floyd,
a message to her friends and followers to donate, advocate, and stay
safe.

On June 10, Bella and Darian woke up late. They had no pressing
obligations, although Bella was going to meet her mother for brunch
and to finally get her birthday present from her. Darian had no plans
other than playing video games with a friend later on, but he did have
a worry: His dog, Rocco, an affectionate 85-pound pit-bull mix,
hadn’t pooped in a few days. Rocco didn’t seem distressed, but it
was odd, and Darian wanted to give him another chance. To lessen any
distractions, he decided to take Rocco out alone. He put on some
flip-flops, grabbed Rocco’s leash, and headed for the door.

Bella was feeling a little stir-crazy and wanted to go along. A few
weeks earlier, in response to growing cabin fever, she had insisted
that they make a “bucket list” of things to do whenever they felt
aimless or trapped because of pandemic restrictions. Go to the
mountains and hike. Visit a lamp store. Take Rocco to the park.

Darian gave in. They walked out onto the street, Bella holding
Rocco’s leash, and headed for a nearby plot of dirt next to some
fresh construction that a lot of people in the neighborhood brought
their dogs to. Maybe Rocco would be inspired.

When they arrived at the patch of dirt, Darian took a few steps away
from Bella to sit in the shade. Bella stood on a low brick retention
wall. “Go ahead, Rocco. Go potty, go potty,” Darian said.

Darian remembers hearing a voice from the building next to them:
“Hey, are you going to train that dog, or are you going to yell at
it?”

Darian looked up. The voice had come from a dark first-floor window,
perhaps someone’s apartment or the building office. A lot of
thoughts ran through his head—_Who is this guy? Why is he so
hostile?_ He considered a bunch of responses, some angrier than
others, but decided instead to defuse. He said aloud, to whomever was
in the window, “My dog is trained fine. I’ve had him for four
years,” and stood up to walk to Bella, intending to get them both
away from there. Then he looked back to the window and saw the barrel
of a rifle. Darian said to the man he had never seen before, and could
hardly see now, “Are you aiming something at me?”

[Picture of Benihana in Denver, Colorado]

The Benihana in Denver (Benjamin Rasmussen / The Atlantic)

Cia had spent that morning driving her younger brother to a
friend’s house, and then she ordered chicken fried rice—her
favorite—from Benihana. She was still waiting for her meal in the
parking lot when one of Bella’s friends called her. The friend was
vague: “Hey, what’s up? You talk to your sister lately? Maybe you
should call her?” She tried Bella, got her voicemail, then checked
where her sister was on the location-sharing app they both used.
Bella, or at least her phone, was safely at home at Darian’s
apartment. Then Cia got a message from another friend telling her to
get in touch with Darian’s family, along with a link to an article
that had just been posted on a local news site—a shooting, one dead,
one gravely wounded, in the Ballpark neighborhood. She started trying
to reach her mother.

Ana had gone to Target that morning, which happened to be next door to
Benihana, to buy a gift bag for Bella’s birthday present—a new
pair of designer shoes, so Bella would no longer have to borrow her
mother’s. Cia remembers seeing her mother’s car in the parking
lot, and calling her. “Mom, something has happened.”

They agreed to meet at Denver Health Medical Center. Cia peeled out of
the parking lot without her fried rice. As Ana raced to the hospital
in her own car, she got more messages about a shooting, a shooting
that involved her daughter and Darian, a shooting that had left one
person dead. And then Ana was at the emergency room asking if her
daughter was a patient there—“Isabella Thallas. Is there a patient
called Isabella Thallas?”—and then she thought to ask for Darian,
or maybe she finally allowed herself to ask for Darian, understanding
what the answer would mean, and they said that Darian Simon was in
surgery. And that’s when she knew.

Ana watched the news on her phone. One station showed drone footage of
the crime scene, and there was a blanket on the ground, and sticking
out from under the blanket, a foot. Ana could see the pedicure Bella
had gotten for her birthday party.

When Cia got to the hospital, she found her mother distraught, crying
on a bench with a sympathetic stranger. She realized there was nothing
more to learn there, at least nothing good. Cia called her father,
told him what she knew, and then took off toward the location of
Bella’s phone, still peacefully beeping out its whereabouts.

She arrived at her sister’s neighborhood to find an active crime
scene. She took in the roaming police officers and EMTs and officials,
who all refused to tell her anything. As she stood there, helpless,
she thought about her college courses in criminal science, which she
was studying to be a law-enforcement officer, and counted the yellow
evidence markers she could see from where she stood: 56 of them. She
saw somebody holding Rocco on a leash; he had been found walking down
a nearby street. She saw a white tent erected over something lying on
the sidewalk. She knew what, or who, or what, was inside.

[Picture of Josh Thallas, Isabella's father]

Josh Thallas, Isabella’s father (Benjamin Rasmussen / The Atlantic)

Josh Thallas had also raced to the hospital, and had also demanded
information on Isabella Thallas and been told nothing; he had also
asked about Darian and heard something, and knew what that meant. He
left and headed toward Darian and Bella’s apartment and, once there,
pushed his way through the police tape—Josh is a big, bearded man
and had gotten into enough trouble that he wasn’t particularly
afraid of getting into any more—until a cop saw him and understood
and said, “Are you the father? I’m so sorry.”

Cia watched this interaction. She knew her father’s temper and
worried that he’d end up in handcuffs. Instead, the cop persuaded
Josh to get back into his car and wait. Cia took it all in and walked
away to a secluded spot where she vomited up the lunch she never got
to eat.

The 24 shots rang out so fast, they couldn’t be heard as distinct
sounds—just _BANGBANGBANGBANG_. Darian saw Bella collapse to the
ground. He saw dust kicked up around them, could feel bullets and
fragments fly by. He turned to run but fell. Once on the ground, he
kept trying to move away from the window and the man and the gun, but
his leg would not follow the rest of his body, so he reached back to
pull it with him. Somehow, he made it about 20 feet, through gaps in
two fences, before he finally lost the ability to move. He remembers
lying there, dazed, staring at the ground in front of him, feeling
like a fighter knocked to the mat in a boxing movie. _Damn, that was
a horrible dream_, he said to himself. _Okay, wake up. Wake up. Wake
up. Wake up. Wake up_.

The next 30 minutes or so were not, sadly, a blur. Darian remembers
them with all the vividness of trauma. There were people around, but
for some reason they weren’t helping him. Then somebody took
charge—a neighbor who had completed EMT training just six months
before and had been drinking coffee and FaceTiming with his father
when the shots were fired. The man tied a construction worker’s belt
around Darian’s upper thigh, pulling it tight around his severed
femoral artery and saving his life. Darian didn’t know that, though:
As far as he was concerned, he was about to die, and it really
bothered him. He didn’t have his phone. He couldn’t call anyone to
tell them he loved them. He couldn’t see what had happened to Bella.

Other people gathered. An ambulance arrived. One of the medics stood
next to him, and Darian found himself staring at the man’s shoe—he
could see how well used it was, how many calls it had been on. He
reached out to grab it. The man said, “Don’t touch my boot.” But
the boot was real, it was solid, it belonged to someone still alive,
so Darian grabbed it again. “I told you don’t touch my boot!”
the man yelled. Darian relented, thinking, _Okay, I won’t, but man,
you’re a fucking dick_. He overheard someone say “DOA.” Who was
DOA? Was it Bella? Was it him?

Finally, he was put in an ambulance, and a kind EMT started speaking
to him about what was happening and gave him the sedative ketamine,
commonly used to calm trauma patients for transport. Darian relaxed.
They arrived at Denver Health. The woman said, “Are you prepared for
the amount of people you’re about to see?”

The ER was crammed with trauma surgeons and nurses, alerted to the
imminent arrival of a critically injured gunshot victim. As Darian was
wheeled into their urgent choreography of care, he looked back at the
ambulance and saw one of the cops who had ridden along. Stoned on
ketamine, Darian flashed a peace sign. The cop flashed one back.
That’s when Darian Simon knew he was going to live.

[Picture of a memorial for Isabella Thallas in Denver, Colorado. ]

A memorial for Isabella Thallas in Denver (Benjamin Rasmussen / The
Atlantic)

Michael close, the man who is charged with killing Bella and
grievously wounding Darian, was 36 on the day of the shooting, with no
criminal record and no history of violence. At his bond hearing in
November, a Denver police detective presented a portrait of a sad and
troubled man who had just shot two strangers and then tried to flee to
the mountains in a Mercedes SUV packed with weapons. Close has pleaded
not guilty, and his lawyer did not respond to requests for comment.

The detective said that a woman who identified herself as Close’s
girlfriend told police at the scene that they had had a fight the
night before, that he suffered from depression and substance abuse,
and that he had called her after the shooting to tell her how sorry he
was. Another person, identified by the detective as a friend of Close,
had received a text from Close that day, saying he was angry about an
altercation with a couple and a dog that morning, and then later, a
voicemail in which Close said, “Dude, I fucked up really fucking
bad. There’s no going back from this now.”

The weapon used to shoot Bella and Darian was not, as some early
reporting had it, an AR-15 but a relatively rare AK-47 fitted with a
large-capacity magazine that’s illegal in Colorado. That rifle was
registered to one Daniel Politica, who happened to be the friend who
received the texts. Politica owned a company called Tyrant Arms, but
didn’t have an active business buying and selling weapons. He
didn’t need to: He already had a day job, as a sergeant with the
Denver Police Department.

The police did not come forward with that information for seven
months, confirming it only after local TV-news reporters discovered
the connection
[[link removed]].
Politica didn’t even report the weapon as stolen until after the
shooting. His lawyer told _The Atlantic_ that as soon as he heard
that Close had used an AK-47, Politica went looking for the gun, and
only then realized that it was missing. A spokesperson for the police
department stated that Close, an old friend of Politica’s, had taken
the weapon without Politica’s permission or knowledge when visiting
his home. Darian and Bella’s family filed a civil lawsuit against
Politica, accusing him of negligence.

It has been more than two years since Bella Thallas bled out on a
sidewalk, for no reason at all. Darian has been in and out of
surgeries to essentially rebuild his leg after the high-velocity
rounds liquefied the bones. After many delays, included a rejected
plea of insanity, Close is now on trial for first-degree murder and
attempted murder, as well as for possessing and using an illegal
magazine.

Politica has retired from the Denver Police Department. His lawyer
maintains that it was voluntary. A spokesman for the department
told _The Atlantic_ that it had looked into the matter and
determined that “no apparent policy violation occurred.” The civil
suit filed against him was settled by his insurance company, which
paid out his policy maximum of $500,000, with no admission of
responsibility. Josh Thallas says that, during the depositions,
Politica never expressed any remorse for allowing Close to take the
gun—or, as Politica would have it, steal it. He now has a new
job—as a police officer
[[link removed]] in
Colorado Springs.

Josh is bothered by still-unanswered questions: Why did the police
delay identifying the weapon and its owner? Why wasn’t Politica
charged with improper storage of the weapon, or in any way held
criminally liable? (When asked this by _The Atlantic_, the Denver
District Attorney’s Office did not reply.) And given that Darian is
mixed-race, and Bella had black hair and olive skin, was there a
racial angle to the killer’s sudden rage? Did an angry white man
look out his window and see two enemies walking their dog?

Cia had wanted to be a police officer, but now she’d like to go to
law school, to become the kind of attorney who can empathize with
victims. Ana takes comfort in her faith. She says she pities Close,
whom she considers a deeply damaged person. Both wish for the only
resolution they can’t have: for Bella to come back.

Darian has struggled terribly since the day he was shot and Bella was
killed. First, there was the physical insult, as they call it in
trauma medicine, of having his leg shattered by high-velocity
ammunition. Then there’s the PTSD and the guilt. He has run over the
details of his interaction with Close countless times—but he
didn’t do anything to provoke Close, just tried to be polite and
walk away, and the guy fired on them anyway. He still hears the
whispers, some in his own head, but some from Bella’s
friends: _Couldn’t he have protected Bella?_ She fell, and he
turned and ran. Was he a coward? It gnaws at him, an ache as deep as
the one in his leg.

He eventually sought out combat veterans and confessed his fears. They
assured him that, no, there was nothing he could have done
differently—it was too late for Bella, and under fire, your reflexes
take over. His body wanted to save itself, so his body moved away from
the threat, and by doing so, he gave himself a chance to live, and
did.

“I don’t want to feel survivor’s guilt,” he told me. “But I
don’t know how to get past it, because I am here, surviving.”

There is now a memorial park named for Bella near where she died,
complete with a small dog run. And the state of Colorado has enacted
the Isabella Joy Thallas Act, requiring all stolen weapons to be
reported to police within five days of the theft. Violators will be
fined $25. If they fail to report a second stolen gun, they could have
to pay up to $500.

[A picture of a memorial for Isabella Thallas in Denver, Colorado. ]

A mural at the memorial for Isabella Thallas in Denver (Benjamin
Rasmussen / The Atlantic)

This past fourth of july, while I was at home near Chicago, in the
process of reading news stories about Bella and trying to contact her
family, I got up, put my toddler son in his jogging stroller, and went
out for a run. It was too early for our town’s parade, but we
admired the fire trucks waiting to lead it and all the uniformed and
armed police directing traffic as the various bands and floats got
themselves in line. It looked like it would be a grand parade, but we
had already made plans to attend another town’s festivities. So we
were not there in Highland Park when another young man with a rifle
sprayed bullets down on people he did not know but who angered him for
some reason, killing seven of them, wounding many more, and putting
one child in a wheelchair, possibly for life.

Those killings, unlike that of Bella Thallas, made national news,
although I assume that pretty soon, they, too, will be supplanted by
the next atrocity, or simply be forgotten, except of course by the
victim’s families, who can’t forget.

We all now live in a kind of permanent Sarajevo. Whenever we go
outside, to work or school, to walk our dogs, to attend our parades,
we know without saying and accept without protest that gunshots might
ring out and take our lives or the lives of those we love. But we
don’t think about it—we don’t scan the rooftops, because
there’s no point. The gun could come from anywhere at any time, and
so we do what humans do: We pretend that nothing is wrong and go about
our day. We do not think of the deaths around us in the same way that
we do not think of our own, inevitable deaths, because to think too
deeply about them would paralyze us. Even Bella’s family, even her
parents move on, because what else is there to do?

Bella should have lived and, if she liked, gone on to marry Darian and
have those curly-haired children, and love them and fail them just as
she had been loved and failed. But because yet another man had a
moment of rage and the lethal means of expressing it, she is gone. And
because we can’t bear to confront how suicidal it is to privilege
over all else the rights of those damaged young men to use killing
machines, we must bury the knowledge of this insanity along with
Bella, who was interred in Block 117, Lot 108 of Denver’s Fairmount
Cemetery, forever wearing the Dolce & Gabbana dress her mother had
been saving for a special occasion.

_Peter Sagal [[link removed]] is the
host of NPR’s Wait, Wait…Don't Tell Me!  His latest book
is The Incomplete Book of Running._

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