There had been a fight the night before and now Mommy seemed to be asleep, stretched out on her back between the bed and the wall. Hungry for breakfast, 5-year-old Marcus tugged her hands and called out, “Mommy! Wake up!” Her eyes were open, but she wouldn’t rouse from her stubborn slumber.

Marcus took charge, as he often did when their mother wasn’t up to it. He was the second of Latisha Barnes’ four children, a tall kindergartner with huge brown eyes and a protective way around his family. His older brother was slow to learn things, so it was Marcus who made a breakfast of microwave popcorn to share with his brothers, 7-year-old Michael and 3-year-old Donté, and Nylah, a 2-year-old with hair soft as cotton and Latisha’s only girl. One of the children brought Froot Loops to the bedroom and dropped a few by Mommy’s head, hoping perhaps to nourish her back to consciousness.

The Barnes family had moved into the duplex on East Minnehaha Avenue in St. Paul just a month earlier, and Barbara Jandl, who lived across the street, didn’t know them well. But as the cold November Sunday wore on, past breakfast and people coming home from church services, she noticed the boys playing in the street, unsupervised and underdressed. She saw Nylah standing in the doorway, wearing only a pajama top. Jandl wasn’t surprised. She had seen that sort of thing before.

The children hadn’t always been slighted. Latisha Barnes, a pretty, plump woman of 25 with a broad face and dimpled smile, doted on her children, especially Nylah. “You are my world,” she wrote in a baby book. She dressed the toddler in Winnie-the-Pooh outfits and taught her to sing most of the alphabet song. When Latisha had money, she took the children to Camp Snoopy. When she was broke, she mixed homemade play dough with food coloring. When the children got on her nerves, she put her hands on her head, shook it wildly and sang the rap hit “Y’all gon’ make me lose my mind, up in here, up in here … ” It became a family joke. The kids would join in and everyone would end up laughing.

A year and a half before, Latisha had divorced her unfaithful husband and begun dating. Her new boyfriend, Areece Manley, was generous with money, clothes and drugs. But he was crazy jealous — slapping her for the smallest offense, checking her caller ID constantly, accusing her of having other lovers, shutting her off from family and friends. She stayed with him at first because she thought she could change him, then because she was afraid. By moving to the duplex, she had hoped to leave him behind.

On Saturday night, though, Manley had surprised her in the duplex, and they fought. Then the children saw him drive away in Latisha’s blue Pontiac.

Now it was Sunday and in the East Side duplex, lunchtime passed, and then nap time. The phone rang but the children didn’t answer. The older boys took off Nylah’s soggy diaper but could not manage to hitch on another. They tried to make dinner but the spaghetti burned.

Finally, around dusk, when the neighbors were sitting down to dinner, the children gathered around their mother and saw blood trickling from her mouth. She might be dead, they thought, not really understanding the finality of that word. Marcus prayed for an angel to come down, as he had seen on television, but the angel didn’t come. Marcus thought it was because Donté, usually bouncy as a squirrel, now could not stop crying.

Jandl saw the three boys cross the street through the rain and recognized Michael’s gangly gait and short cropped hair. He had taken rocks from her rock garden shortly after his family moved in, and she had scolded him gently. Michael became her buddy, following her around when she worked outside, trading his hugs for her attention. She was perplexed at the sight of Marcus, wearing his mother’s robe of pink and red hearts that trailed like a bridal train behind him. She opened the front door as the boys climbed the steps.

“My mother is dead,” a weeping Michael said.

“Honey, she’s probably just hurt,” Jandl said. But when Michael described the blood trickling from his mother’s mouth, she dialed 911. The older boys watched through her living-room window as a squad car pulled up and two blue-uniformed officers went inside. Little Donté, exhausted from fending for himself for more than 12 hours, fell asleep on the couch. Jandl coaxed Michael and Marcus away from the window with a promise of hot dogs and potato chips.

DIFFICULT QUESTIONS

The front door of 426 E. Minnehaha was wide open when officers Theresa Spencer and Scott Wendell arrived. The house was a mess: dirty dishes piled in the kitchen, clothes and Styrofoam bits strewn on the floor. A hockey game played on the television. The air smelled of burned spaghetti.

From the upstairs hall, officer Wendell saw Latisha’s bare legs stretched out on the bedroom carpet. He rushed into the room and found a naked child — Nylah — curled in a fetal position on her mother’s bare belly and crying.

Nylah wailed more loudly as officer Spencer snatched her up and felt her icy toes and hands. The first pair of socks she found were an adult’s, long enough to cover the toddler’s thighs.

In an instant, the children’s long, lonely day of trying to wake Mommy became the rapid-fire routine of a homicide investigation. Yellow tape went up. Latisha was identified through the title to her car. Homicide detectives arrived and searched the home. Crime-lab technicians ran cotton swabs over blood smears on the wall and picked up the cigarette by Latisha’s hand. Someone from the medical examiner’s office probed her jaw muscles to determine the extent of rigor mortis and estimate the time of death. Investigators found a car registration card for an Areece Devon Manley; an officer was sent to his sister’s home to ask where he could be found.

Meanwhile, Latisha’s three boys were brought downtown to police headquarters, where they were questioned by Sgt. Patricia Englund, a homicide detective and experienced child interviewer. Marcus had the most to say. After letting the kindergartner choose some snacks, Englund led him to a small white room, where his bare feet dangled from the chair. He still wore his mother’s silky robe.

“What are you going to eat first?” Englund asked.

“The nuts,” said Marcus.

The detective opened the bag of peanuts and the child lifted his arms so the slippery fabric slid back and bunched at his elbows, freeing his hands to crack the shells.

“Are they good?”

“Uh huh,” he said, absorbed with the task of eating.

Englund asked him about school, his family and friends and whether he had a pet. Marcus was friendly and quick to answer. Then she asked him about that day.

“Did you have any breakfast?”

“Yeah, I made it myself.”

“What did you have?”

“Popcorn.”

“Microwave popcorn?”

“Yeah.”

“Was Mom there?”

“Uh huh.” v “Was anybody there with Mom?”

“Noooo.”

“How about Dad? Is there a dad?”

“He’s mean.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Reece.” Marcus paused. “You know what he did?”

“What did he do?”

“He had a gun.”

“How do you know he had a gun?”

“Because I saw it. I was going to tell the police.”

“Where did Reece have it?”

“In his hand. Can I go to the bathroom?”

When they returned, Englund asked more questions about Reece.

“You know what he did to my mom’s mouth?” Marcus offered. “He put a gun in my mom’s mouth and shot my mom. I heard the gunshot. I woke up and heard the gunshot. I looked in my mom’s room and he said ‘Get out of here.’ He started to get out of the bed and I ran.”

Marcus was matter-of-fact, a quality common in children describing violent events they’ve witnessed. Their minds repress much of the fear and sadness that is too painful to bear.

“After the gunshot, was Reece still in there?”

“Yes.”

“What did you do?”

“I said, ‘I heard a gunshot. That was you, Reece.’ ”

“And what did he say?”

“‘I don’t care.’ He said, ‘I don’t care.’ ” Marcus seemed distressed and looked away. “I don’t know the rest.”

Englund asked a few more questions, but it was clear Marcus no longer wanted to talk. Before they left the room, the boy struggled to carefully push his chair under the table.

That evening, the four children were taken to a foster home in Little Canada. Nylah had grown attached to officer Spencer and had to be pulled from the officer’s arms when she was dropped off. Because the children were potential witnesses at a murder trial and the suspect was still at large, police decided to leave them in foster care. Their maternal grandmother sent messages through the cops: She loved them and was thinking of them. But they were not allowed to see her or speak to her. For the time being, Latisha’s children were delivered to strangers.

The police got a break two days later when they received a call from a woman who said she was Areece Manley’s girlfriend. She had read about Latisha’s slaying in the newspapers and had just discovered the missing blue Pontiac parked in her unused garage. But Manley was gone. Homicide detectives turned their hunt to Kansas City, Mo., where he had relatives.

‘I’LL BE BACK FOR YOU’

Nine days after they found their mother dead, without contact with anyone they knew, the children woke up Nov. 14 as a wan sun struggled through the clouds for the first time in a week. They were going to their mother’s funeral, they were told.

In a parking lot behind Ramsey County’s human services building on Kellogg Boulevard in St. Paul, they ran to their grandmother. “Grandma!” they cried. “Do you know what happened? Do you know what happened?”

Joy Perez, a big-boned woman with a careworn face, embraced them and held up the dress clothes she had brought for the funeral. Nylah’s red velvet dress was the only one that fit. So they raced to Target, where she bought small suits for the three boys. At Mt. Olivet Missionary Baptist Church, she dressed them hurriedly. In the sanctuary was their father, who had been allowed to leave prison for the funeral. The two older boys ran to him, while the younger children stayed with Joy. Donté asked if his mother was with angels. Nylah bounced in her grandmother’s lap through the service.

The casket remained closed. Even skilled morticians could not erase the damage of a gunshot to the head.

After the burial in Elmhurst Cemetery, they drove back to the county parking lot, where a car from child protection waited for the children. Until Areece Manley was arrested, they would remain in foster care. But they wept and clung to their grandmother.

Joy Perez did the only thing she could think to do. She dropped to her knees on the frozen ground and told her grandchildren to look at her. Searching each child’s face in turn, she asked, “Do you trust me? Do you trust Grandma?”

When the sniffling children nodded, she pledged: “I’ll be back for you. I’ll come and get you. I promise you.”

Then Joy Perez walked to her car without looking back. On that cold November day a year ago, there was no way the children could know how steadfast that promise would be.

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