0:01 [SPEAKER_08]: Listener, some phone calls you are never ready for, and they never come labeled. 0:07 [SPEAKER_08]: This one came as a co-workers phone, ringing in the dark, somewhere in Palm Beach County, Florida, in the small hours of Friday morning in the middle of March. 0:17 [SPEAKER_08]: A familiar name on the screen, a woman this man worked with, calling at an hour when people do not call, unless something is wrong. 0:26 [SPEAKER_08]: He answered it, and on the other end was a voice he knew, saying something he could not take in the first time he heard it. 0:33 [SPEAKER_08]: She thought she had done something to her mother. 0:35 [SPEAKER_08]: She thought she might have killed her. 0:37 [SPEAKER_08]: She needed help. 0:38 [SPEAKER_08]: He drove to the house. 0:40 [SPEAKER_08]: The drive took him through streets built to reassure, curving residential lanes in royal Palm Beach. 0:46 [SPEAKER_08]: A master planned village, west of West Palm Beach, where the roads carrying names like country clubway, and the house is sit close and neat. 0:56 [SPEAKER_08]: Behind their small lawns, the sodium lights burn their flat orange over empty driveways. 1:02 [SPEAKER_08]: The warns were black and wet from the timers, and the heat had not broken with the dark, so the air came in thick and still, through the open window, and smelled of cuck grass and warm asphalt. 1:15 [SPEAKER_08]: This smell of every safe suburb, on every ordinary night and fort. 1:19 [SPEAKER_08]: He pulled up to a house that looked like all the others, and he found her outside on the sidewalk in the dark, and she was covered in blood. 1:28 [SPEAKER_08]: Not a little blood covered in it, soaked. 1:31 [SPEAKER_08]: Her hands torn up, a woman sitting on a suburban sidewalk at one in the morning, and a state nobody is built to make sense of at a glance. 1:40 [SPEAKER_08]: Behind her, the house held its lights, 1:45 [SPEAKER_08]: He had come because she called and said she might have heard her mother. 1:49 [SPEAKER_08]: He arrived as something the word heard, does not begin to reach. 1:53 [SPEAKER_08]: He dialed 911. 1:55 [SPEAKER_08]: The call went out at roughly 140 in the morning on March 16th, 2018, and it pulled the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office toward a scene that the deputies who responded would not be able to put down easily afterward. 2:09 [SPEAKER_08]: Because some scenes do not let go of the people walk into them. 2:13 [SPEAKER_08]: Well, we did inside the house as among the worst the show has had the occasion to describe when we will get there when the deputies did. 2:28 [SPEAKER_08]: Welcome, listener. 2:29 [SPEAKER_08]: I'm glad you're here. 2:31 [SPEAKER_08]: Take a seat. 2:33 [SPEAKER_08]: Next to the fire. 2:37 [SPEAKER_00]: Welcome to Obscura, where we shine a light on the dark. 3:05 [SPEAKER_01]: We were just kind of talking maybe something about the news that day, I don't remember exactly, but it was something about a situation that had happened about somebody being on Flocka. 3:14 [SPEAKER_01]: And then that might too we thought, this is so weird. 3:16 [SPEAKER_01]: She just admitted that she had done that and we were all kind of like, you try that. 3:22 [SPEAKER_01]: And she's like, yeah, I sprinkled some on a cigarette. 3:25 [SPEAKER_08]: Two women shared the house on Country Club, one day. 3:28 [SPEAKER_08]: The mother was Franciscan Monteiro Baya, she was 55 years old in the spring of 2018, and there's not much public record of her, because there's rarely much record of ordinary people. 3:41 [SPEAKER_08]: She had done nothing to make the world look at her, until the way she died, forced it to. 3:46 [SPEAKER_08]: She was a mother. 3:47 [SPEAKER_08]: She lived with her daughter. 3:48 [SPEAKER_08]: She kept a home in a quiet suburb. 3:51 [SPEAKER_08]: What survives of her are the fragments of a normal life. 3:54 [SPEAKER_08]: The daughter was Camille Baja. 3:56 [SPEAKER_08]: She was 32. 3:58 [SPEAKER_08]: She worked at a FedEx facility. 4:00 [SPEAKER_08]: She had lived a wife that, on its surface, looked like a great many South Florida lives, a working adult in her early 30s, sharing a home with a parent. 4:10 [SPEAKER_08]: Underneath that surface ran something else, a long and worsening struggle with drugs. 4:15 [SPEAKER_08]: In the defense would later argue with mental illness that the drugs either unmasked. 4:20 [SPEAKER_08]: or set on fire. 4:22 [SPEAKER_08]: The two strands of Camille Balia's trouble are tangled together so tightly that even the court system, with years to work on it, never fully separated. 4:32 [SPEAKER_08]: There was the drug history, neighbors who spoke to reporters afterwards, described a woman that they had reason to be uneasy about. 4:40 [SPEAKER_08]: There was a paper trail of low-level trouble. 4:43 [SPEAKER_08]: The residue that 4:49 [SPEAKER_08]: a charge that was not prosecuted. 4:52 [SPEAKER_08]: In 2015, she had been arrested for driving under the influence, pleaded guilty, and had been placed on a year of probation. 4:59 [SPEAKER_08]: What the relationship between the two women was actually like behind the door of that house is something that's never been made clear, listener. 5:07 [SPEAKER_08]: There was no one documented history of domestic violence calls to that address, no long simmering feud that the neighbors all knew about. 5:15 [SPEAKER_08]: When reporters asked in the days after what the motive had been, the honest answer, given from the authorities, was that they had none. 5:24 [SPEAKER_08]: The drug important to this case was Flaka, and in South Florida, everyone knows the name. 5:30 [SPEAKER_09]: A naked man caught on camera running through downtown Fort Lauderdale allegedly high on Flacca, a synthetic drug known for causing hallucinations, and violent outbursts. 5:41 [SPEAKER_09]: Like the one scene here, a man trying to break into this building because he thinks he's being chased. 5:46 [SPEAKER_09]: In another case, police say Kenneth Crowder exposed himself in a Melbourne floor to neighborhood scaring people on the street. 5:54 [SPEAKER_06]: Scraming and he's doing this, like a bird, just keeps doing it, keeps doing it. 5:58 [SPEAKER_06]: And he's like, I am God. 6:00 [SPEAKER_08]: It was a cheap synthetic stimulant, a cousin of the stuff that got sold as bat salts, made overseas and shipped and sold for a few dollars a hit. 6:09 [SPEAKER_08]: And for a stretch around 2015 and 2016, it tore through the corridor from Fort Waterdale. 6:16 [SPEAKER_08]: up through Palm Beach like a fever. 6:18 [SPEAKER_08]: The police reports from that era read like dispatches from a horror film. 6:23 [SPEAKER_08]: People running naked through traffic. 6:25 [SPEAKER_08]: Sure they were being chased. 6:27 [SPEAKER_08]: People trying to break into police stations to escape pursuers who did not exist. 6:32 [SPEAKER_08]: People biting, screaming about demons, fighting off four grown men at once. 6:37 [SPEAKER_08]: The press called it the zombie drug, which 6:42 [SPEAKER_08]: The thing about a bad flock of episode was that the person inside seemed gone. 6:48 [SPEAKER_08]: The body stayed. 6:49 [SPEAKER_08]: The body went on walking and feeling around and speaking. 6:53 [SPEAKER_08]: But the person inside no longer was at the wheel. 6:57 [SPEAKER_08]: And something else had its hands on the controls. 6:59 [SPEAKER_08]: At a small dose, it was a stimulant like any other. 7:03 [SPEAKER_08]: At a large one, or in the wrong brain, or in a dose nobody can measure. 7:08 [SPEAKER_08]: They could tip a person into full psychosis. 7:11 [SPEAKER_08]: And there are documented cases of people who took it once and never came back. 7:16 [SPEAKER_08]: Tamil Baya told police treating her that night that she had smoke marijuana she believed was laced with flaka, but there was something else inside her, besides the drug. 7:27 [SPEAKER_08]: And the drug may have only opened the door. 7:32 [SPEAKER_11]: And they say, I got my big wings now. 7:34 [SPEAKER_11]: I got a story and you could tell the century was, do you know what that means? 7:40 [UNKNOWN]: I had no idea. 7:41 [UNKNOWN]: You were prophetic? 7:42 [UNKNOWN]: Yeah, okay. 7:43 [SPEAKER_11]: I'm a manager, okay. 7:45 [SPEAKER_11]: So what did you do? 7:47 [SPEAKER_11]: She was a great girl. 7:49 [SPEAKER_11]: Both of you in, in she the time. 7:51 [SPEAKER_11]: I think that would've done before you. 7:53 [SPEAKER_11]: She was texting all the afterwards. 7:56 [SPEAKER_07]: My guess, my, strictly, my guess would be when she sent you, I got, I got my wings, I'm sorry, that would be my guess. 8:05 [SPEAKER_05]: Actually, I was asleep, and I got a call from Camille, and she sounded like something happened. 8:13 [SPEAKER_05]: She sounded, I don't know if I can take maybe. 8:15 [SPEAKER_05]: I don't know if that's the right word, but she told me, is that, can you come over? 8:19 [SPEAKER_05]: I need somebody to talk to, and I was like, okay. 8:26 [SPEAKER_05]: I just and I came over here and I saw her outside of my way outside her house and when I saw her she was kind of mumbling a little bit I kind of understand everything that she was saying But she was saying something about that she's been all for months that her we'd got at least then she told me that she murdered her mom 8:47 [SPEAKER_08]: We do not have a minute by minute account of what happened inside the house on country club way and the hours before that 911 call because the only living witness was the person who did it and her account came in fragments to remind that was not operating in any ordinary way. 9:04 [SPEAKER_08]: What we have is the aftermath, reconstructed by the deputies and the detectives, and the medical examiner from the physical evidence. 9:12 [SPEAKER_08]: When the first deputy crossed the threshold, he walked into the kind of interior that does not match what it holds. 9:19 [SPEAKER_08]: Their conditioning was running somewhere in the walls, a low-study hum, pushing cool air through the rooms that were furnished and lived in, an ordinary, a home with its smaller arrangements still in place. 9:32 [SPEAKER_08]: And over all of it, made the iron smell of punch and blood, he found blood spattered throughout the residence. 9:39 [SPEAKER_08]: 9-1 room threw out and there was a trail. 9:43 [SPEAKER_08]: A blood trail is a record of movement and the detectives documented this one carefully because it told them where the body had gone and what stayed. 9:52 [SPEAKER_08]: It began in the living room. 9:54 [SPEAKER_08]: It ran through the kitchen. 9:55 [SPEAKER_08]: And as it went, 9:57 [SPEAKER_08]: They noted, it grew heavier until it reached the door to the garage and passed through it. 10:03 [SPEAKER_08]: It trail the thickens as it travels is not the mark of a single spot where someone fell. 10:09 [SPEAKER_08]: It is the mark of a wound still being opened where a body still being moved. 10:14 [SPEAKER_08]: Across the rooms of an ordinary home, past the walls and the counters of an ordinary life, it is not a moment. 10:21 [SPEAKER_08]: This is a stretch of time. 10:22 [SPEAKER_08]: And the distance it covers is part of how the investigators knew that whatever happened here was not quick. 10:31 [SPEAKER_12]: Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank 10:52 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:52 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:53 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:54 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:54 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:55 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:55 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:56 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:57 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:57 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:58 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:58 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:59 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 10:59 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:00 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:00 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:01 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:01 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:02 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:02 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:03 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:03 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:04 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:05 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:05 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:05 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:06 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:07 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:07 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:08 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:09 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:10 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:10 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:11 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:11 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:12 [SPEAKER_12]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:13 [SPEAKER_08]: I'm not gonna wait! 11:13 [SPEAKER_08]: I 11:13 [SPEAKER_08]: The garage was where it ended. 11:15 [SPEAKER_08]: A house tells you the order of things, if you read it right. 11:19 [SPEAKER_08]: And this house was telling the story that began near the front, and ended at the back, past the frame photographs in the mail, in the counter with all the utensils, and the casual kitchen items that everyone owns. 11:31 [SPEAKER_08]: toaster, air fryer, ordinary people. 11:35 [SPEAKER_08]: It suggests that nothing happens here. 11:37 [SPEAKER_08]: Francisco was in the garage. 11:39 [SPEAKER_08]: She was partially clothed, she was dead, and she had been dead by the time anyone with the capacity to help had arrived. 11:46 [SPEAKER_08]: She had suffered several large, deep-lass erasions and traumatic injuries throughout her body, not in one place. 11:54 [SPEAKER_08]: The affidavit lists the regions, and it describes an attack that did not stop. 11:59 [SPEAKER_08]: That was not a single fatal wound, but a sustained assault across the whole of a human body. 12:04 [SPEAKER_08]: Her head, her arms, her chest, her stomach, her groin. 12:09 [SPEAKER_08]: The wounds were across all of it, and there was the broken glass. 12:13 [SPEAKER_08]: The garage floor was littered with it, large pieces of it. 12:16 [SPEAKER_08]: scattered around the body and around the scene, catching what white there was. 12:21 [SPEAKER_08]: The glass was the weapon. 12:23 [SPEAKER_08]: There was no knife at the center of this case. 12:26 [SPEAKER_08]: No gun. 12:27 [SPEAKER_08]: The instrument of Francisco's death by the investigators' reconstruction was a shard of broken glass, wielded by hand and march. 12:35 [SPEAKER_08]: We know this in part because of what the glass did to the person wielding it. 12:39 [SPEAKER_08]: Camille Baya's own hand, and fingers and knees, 12:43 [SPEAKER_08]: last rated and the detectives noted that the broken glass on the floor was consistent with those cuts. 12:50 [SPEAKER_08]: You cannot attack another person with fistfuls of broken glass without destroying your own hand in the process and her hands were a mess. 12:59 [SPEAKER_08]: As she attacked her mother, the glass was opening her own flesh the entire time, and she had not stopped had not been slowed down by the pain, which is itself one of the markers of the kind of disassociated state that both extreme psychosis and certain drugs can produce. 13:16 [SPEAKER_08]: A person in their right mind drops glass when it cuts them, she did not, and then, listener, there were the eyes. 13:27 [SPEAKER_08]: Taken out of their sockets, that was not something that happened in the chaos of the attack. 13:33 [SPEAKER_08]: It was its own act, done deliberately, and we know it was deliberate because of what was done with the next. 13:40 [SPEAKER_08]: If you feed from the body, set a cardboard box, and glistening human eyes, set a topit, taken from Francisco, and placed carefully on a box. 13:50 [SPEAKER_08]: The killing was frenzy, the blood throughout the house, the trail growing heavier, 13:55 [SPEAKER_08]: The wounds across every region of the body, all of it is signature of a frenzy and attack with no governor on it, but the eyes were not frenzy. 14:04 [SPEAKER_08]: The eyes on the box are a range man. 14:07 [SPEAKER_08]: Someone in the middle of or after the storm of violence performed an act that required a kind of focus and then did not simply discard what that act produced, but placed it. 14:19 [SPEAKER_08]: Positioned it on a surface 14:22 [SPEAKER_08]: A killer driven by ordinary motives, by greed or rage or fear of discovery, produces a scene with a certain readable logic. 14:31 [SPEAKER_08]: Even when that logic is ugly, the room served the killing, the killing serves the motive. 14:36 [SPEAKER_08]: There is a chain you can follow. 14:39 [SPEAKER_08]: A scene that combines uncontrolled violence with ritual arrangement. 14:43 [SPEAKER_08]: with elements that serve no practical purpose and answer only to some private symbolic system is a different kind of scene and it points towards a different kind of mind. 14:54 [SPEAKER_08]: The eyes serve only the internal logic of whatever Camille Baya was experiencing in the presence of that internal logic. 15:02 [SPEAKER_08]: written in blood is the single strongest piece of evidence that she had crossed out of the shared world entirely because the eyes were not the only sign of that. 15:12 [SPEAKER_08]: Around the garage, the investigators found the notes. 15:15 [SPEAKER_08]: They were handwritten. 15:17 [SPEAKER_08]: There were several of them scattered in the garage and around the worst of it and what they contained in the description that made it into the 15:30 [SPEAKER_08]: The clearing of the soul, hand-written, multiple, present at the scene of a killing in which a woman's eyes had been removed and arranged like an offering with the notes, all of it points towards a person who is not experiencing herself as committing a crime. 15:47 [SPEAKER_08]: She was experiencing herself as performing an act with cosmic significance. 15:52 [SPEAKER_08]: a purification, a clearing, the eyes, and the long symbolic vocabulary of religious delusion are frated things. 16:01 [SPEAKER_08]: The organs of sight, and therefore of knowledge and judgment, a mind shattered into religious psychosis, can build an entire urgent theology and an instant and act on it with total conviction and feel the whole time that it is doing something holy. 16:18 [SPEAKER_08]: This is the cosmic abyss, the case occupies, not a woman who hated her mother, not a woman who wanted something her mother had, a woman who, on the evidence of that garage, believed on some level, she was transcending, and who used broken glass to do so, whatever plane Camille Baja was walking through in those hours, had a population of one. 16:41 [SPEAKER_08]: In a logic that made sense, only inside its borders, and the only map of it she left behind was wreckage. 16:48 [SPEAKER_08]: And then, when it was over, when whatever had been driving her began to recede or shift, she came back far enough towards the world, understand and some partial and horrified way what she had done. 17:00 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm a man, I'm a writer, he's getting it. 17:05 [SPEAKER_04]: What? 17:05 [SPEAKER_10]: I can know. 17:06 [SPEAKER_10]: This just gets through. 17:07 [SPEAKER_10]: This is because we can't. 17:08 [SPEAKER_10]: So, don't make it any harder for the doctor. 17:11 [SPEAKER_10]: You want me to die? 17:12 [SPEAKER_04]: You want me to die? 17:13 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:14 [SPEAKER_04]: You want me to die? 17:15 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:16 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:16 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:17 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:18 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:19 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:21 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:22 [SPEAKER_04]: I don't want you to die. 17:24 [SPEAKER_04]: She goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in, she goes in 17:47 [SPEAKER_04]: Of course, I did it. 17:48 [SPEAKER_04]: I did it. 17:49 [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't. 17:49 [SPEAKER_04]: I wanted to see how I did it. 17:51 [SPEAKER_04]: Please don't mean to say how I did it. 17:52 [SPEAKER_04]: You'll feel like getting into the eyes. 17:54 [SPEAKER_10]: Are you trying to hurt yourself? 17:55 [SPEAKER_04]: No. 17:56 [SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't in me and I got too hurt. 17:59 [SPEAKER_04]: It wasn't Maddo because I did it. 18:00 [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't matter because I did it. 18:02 [SPEAKER_10]: It matters to me. 18:03 [SPEAKER_04]: It doesn't matter because I didn't find it. 18:05 [SPEAKER_04]: I didn't find it. 18:06 [SPEAKER_04]: I already know. 18:07 [SPEAKER_10]: Okay. 18:24 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so sorry, I'm so 18:53 [SPEAKER_04]: I hear the devil, and you hear that smile, ma'am. 18:55 [SPEAKER_04]: I'm such a man with a brand-new, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am, ma'am 19:19 [SPEAKER_04]: You're going to do this? 19:21 [SPEAKER_04]: So there's a lot of things. 19:22 [SPEAKER_04]: You're right? 19:23 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:24 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:25 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:26 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:27 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:28 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:29 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:30 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:31 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:32 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:33 [SPEAKER_02]: There's a lot of things. 19:34 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:35 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:36 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:36 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:37 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:38 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:39 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:40 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:42 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:43 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:44 [SPEAKER_04]: There's a lot of things. 19:45 [SPEAKER_02]: Oh my god, I don't know where to go, I don't know where to go, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god, oh my god 20:05 [SPEAKER_04]: Um, man, that's pretty to go. 20:07 [SPEAKER_02]: I've ready to go, we are. 20:08 [SPEAKER_02]: Present. 20:09 [SPEAKER_02]: So I just mentioned, which I couldn't, you know, be here for you, but just pray, girl. 20:14 [SPEAKER_08]: The coworker who arrived found her outside, covered in blood and cold 911, and the deputies came. 20:21 [SPEAKER_08]: What they encountered when they arrived was a woman in the middle of something that had no single, stable shape. 20:28 [SPEAKER_08]: The records describe her behavior shifting, sometimes within minutes, from one pole to the other, at moments she was calm and lucid. 20:36 [SPEAKER_08]: At other moments she was screaming in yelling, she mumbled, she ran around. 20:41 [SPEAKER_08]: At one point, while she was being treated, she fell to the ground. 20:45 [SPEAKER_08]: This is not the behavior of a person executing a plan, or managing a cover story. 20:50 [SPEAKER_08]: It is the behavior of a mind in pieces, 20:53 [SPEAKER_08]: surfacing and submerging, coming up into lucidity, walling enough to grasp the horror, and then going back under. 21:00 [SPEAKER_08]: And one of those lucid moments, she told the first deputy, the truest and simplest things she would say all night. 21:06 [SPEAKER_08]: I killed my mother, and I need help. 21:09 [SPEAKER_08]: She said her mother was in the garage, and she handed the deputy a set of keys to the house. 21:14 [SPEAKER_08]: In the keys, like everything else she touched, recovered and blood. 21:19 [SPEAKER_08]: As the deputies and the fire rescue personnel worked around her, treating the deep aspirations on her hands should begin to scream again. 21:27 [SPEAKER_08]: She was treated for her wounds. 21:28 [SPEAKER_08]: She was taken into custody in a long second life of this case, the part that takes place in core rooms and psychiatric facilities began. 21:38 [SPEAKER_08]: Camille Baja was arrested in charge with first-degree murder. 21:42 [SPEAKER_08]: First-degree murder is the gravest charge the state of Florida can bring. 21:46 [SPEAKER_08]: and it carries the gravest consequences, up to and including the death penalty, and a conviction at trial would, at a minimum, have meant the rest of her wife and prison, the charge reflected the brutality of what had been found in the garage. 22:00 [SPEAKER_08]: Whatever the eventual legal arguments about her state of mind, the threshold facts was not in dispute and never would be. 22:07 [SPEAKER_08]: She had killed her mother, she had said so herself, within minutes, repeatedly, 22:13 [SPEAKER_08]: The physical evidence was overwhelming and pointed exactly one direction. 22:17 [SPEAKER_08]: There was no who done it here, listener. 22:20 [SPEAKER_08]: They only living witness had already named herself on the sidewalk to the first deputy who reached her. 22:27 [SPEAKER_08]: There was only the much harder question that the criminal law has wrestled with for centuries. 22:32 [SPEAKER_08]: which is not what happened, but what it meant, at our early court appearances, the woman who showed up in the courtroom was visibly not well. 22:41 [SPEAKER_08]: During one initial appearance on the murder charge, she began screaming and had to be removed from the hearing. 22:47 [SPEAKER_08]: A judge ordered a mental health evaluation. 22:50 [SPEAKER_08]: She was held without bond, Camille Bias case, when not resolved until late in 2023. 22:56 [SPEAKER_08]: In the time between, she spent her days in custody, some of it in jail, and some of it in mental health facilities. 23:04 [SPEAKER_08]: What Camille Baya represented to the legal system was a terrible ambiguity. 23:09 [SPEAKER_08]: She had the defense was prepared to argue. 23:12 [SPEAKER_08]: Skitsophrania, a real diagnosable severe mental illness. 23:16 [SPEAKER_08]: She also, by her own account, had smoked something that night that she believed set her into psychosis. 23:23 [SPEAKER_08]: So which wasn't? 23:24 [SPEAKER_08]: Was she a Skitsophranic woman in the grip of a genuine psychotic break, in which case the killing might be excusable under a law? 23:31 [SPEAKER_08]: or was she a woman who voluntarily took a powerful street drug and did something monstrous while high, in which case it was not legally excusable, or is so often the actual truth and so rarely a clean legal category was she both at once. 23:47 [SPEAKER_08]: a person with a serious underlying mental illness which she had by introducing a powerful psychosis inducing stimulant into her body with like a fuse. 23:57 [SPEAKER_08]: The lawn is not handle that middle case, well, because the lawn needs to sort people into boxes, guilty or not guilty. 24:04 [SPEAKER_08]: Responsible or not, and the human reality of a sick person who makes a bad choice, the interacts catastrophically with their sickness, is not fit cleanly into either box. 24:16 [SPEAKER_08]: A jury would have been asked to perform that sorting. 24:18 [SPEAKER_08]: They would have heard the forensic psychologist describe the schizophrenia and the PTSD. 24:24 [SPEAKER_08]: They would have heard the state argue that whatever her diagnosis 24:28 [SPEAKER_08]: She had chosen to smoke a drug. 24:29 [SPEAKER_08]: She suspected was the least. 24:31 [SPEAKER_08]: The herpsychosis was therefore voluntary and no excuse. 24:35 [SPEAKER_08]: In 12 people would have to decide beyond a reasonable down which story was true. 24:41 [SPEAKER_08]: In a case where the truth was almost certainly some unbearable combination of both. 24:46 [SPEAKER_03]: I knew she was having a problem with this sort of okay, draw some. 24:51 [SPEAKER_03]: And many times, she didn't want to go home. 24:53 [SPEAKER_03]: People go, after we go here, we go to the restaurant and they have, you know, happy hours going to eat. 25:00 [SPEAKER_03]: Because she didn't want to go home. 25:01 [SPEAKER_03]: She didn't want to go home. 25:02 [SPEAKER_03]: How long is that in going on? 25:04 [SPEAKER_02]: That's about a year now. 25:05 [SPEAKER_03]: But you know, yeah, how more, you know, OK. And she was having trouble sleep in and you could see things will bother enough that she wouldn't talk to anybody. 25:14 [SPEAKER_08]: That trial was scheduled, and then, days before it was set to begin, it did not happen. 25:20 [SPEAKER_08]: The trial of Camille Baja was set to begin on the 1st of December 2023, with jury selection slated for that Friday, the insanity defense was prepared. 25:31 [SPEAKER_08]: The forensic psychologist was ready to testify about schizophrenia and PTSD. 25:36 [SPEAKER_08]: The state was ready to counter that the psychosis was bought and paid for, with a drug she chose to smoke. 25:43 [SPEAKER_08]: And all the makings of one of those trials that turn on the most profound questions, the wall can ask, the kind of that wall student study and the public argues about, and never reached a jury. 25:54 [SPEAKER_08]: On Monday, November 27th, 2023, days before the trial was set to start, Camille Baya, except to a plea agreement, she pleaded guilty, not the first to remurder, but to the reduced charge of manslaughter with a weapon. 26:09 [SPEAKER_08]: Circuit Judge Jeffrey Gillen sent its her 15 years in prison to be followed by 15 years of probation. 26:16 [SPEAKER_08]: She was credited with time she had already served awaiting resolution. 26:21 [SPEAKER_08]: 2008-03 days, which is more than five and a half years, with that credit and the way prison sentences are actually administered, the reporting at the time concluded that Camille Baya would serve roughly 10 more years and then would be released into probation into the world. 26:38 [SPEAKER_08]: On the plea paperwork in her own hand, next to her signature and the signatures of the public defender and the assistant state attorney, Camille Baya wrote three small words, thank you, Jesus. 26:53 [SPEAKER_08]: an old phrase caused the eyes the window of the soul. 26:56 [SPEAKER_08]: It is the kind of phrase that gets worn smooth from use that we say without hearing until a case like this one drives the meaning back into it with terrible force. 27:07 [SPEAKER_08]: The eyes taken and set on a box. 27:09 [SPEAKER_08]: We're not random in the symbolic logic of a shattered mind. 27:13 [SPEAKER_08]: The window of the soul set aside as if to clear the way. 27:17 [SPEAKER_08]: As if the act had a purpose that made sense in a reality that only one person in that house could see, that is the nature of psychosis, and it is a different or than that of evil. 27:29 [SPEAKER_08]: Evil we can understand, even when we hate it, evil won't something and takes it. 27:34 [SPEAKER_08]: And we can follow the wanting, 27:36 [SPEAKER_08]: What happened in that garage did not follow the logic of wanting, if all the logic of a private universe, urgent and total and real, truth to exactly one person in which the destruction of her own mother became necessary, there was no window into that universe for the rest of us. 27:55 [SPEAKER_08]: We can only stand outside it, looking through and see what was left behind.
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