“The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die” by Erika Hayasaki Is a Compelling True Crime Story of Survival When All Seems Lost
All Things Crime Blog is delighted to post the following teaser for “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die”, by Erika Hayasaki.
Mike, Vince, and Eddie offered the girl a ride home. Suspecting nothing, Christina accepted.
It was a warm summer night in Los Angeles and the moon was bright. In Mike’s green Mitsubishi, they sped past billboards in Spanish scrawled with graffiti, past check cashing shops, liquor stores, taco stands, and men wearing long sleeves to cover their tattoos.
Christina and her son, Alexander, who was only a year old, lived with her mother, farther north in Lennox, adjacent to Los Angeles International Airport. Everything seemed fine until Christina realized the car was heading east, farther and farther from her home.
“Where are we going?” she asked.
No one answered. Lil Wayne spewed from the stereo. Christina had always had a hard life, growing up, as one friend put it, “in the ‘hood.” She knew she was tough and that, no matter what life threw at her, she could survive. But nothing could have prepared her for that night, which began at a party in Bellflower and ended in the depths of Turnbull Canyon.
Notorious for its violent history, Turnbull Canyon is a place where people dump bodies and get away with murder. The three men she traveled with that night might have gotten away with their crime, had Christina not survived. This is the violent and incredible true story about a young girl who should have died — but didn’t.
Erika Hayasaki, a former reporter for the Los Angeles Times and current professor at the University of Irvine, wrote “The Girl Who Wouldn’t Die” after exhaustive reporting. For an insider’s look at how Erika contacted Christina and the men involved, how she reported the story, and why she needed to write it can be found on the the Big Roundtable’s blog. The Big Roundtable is a new publishing platform dedicated exclusively to longform nonfiction.
Based in Manhattan with a global readership, the Big Roundtable is like a kickstarter for writers.
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