Nick Coleman : How Sidney slipped away

December 4, 2005

She was a girl who once brought an injured sparrow to school and stuck it sweetly inside her locker -- next to the gang signs.

A girl who brought a sick kitten to a doctor, but who also was expelled from an after-school program for punching another girl in the face.

A child who rescued animals, but who could not be rescued herself.

Just a few weeks before she would have turned 12, Sidney Jade Mahkuk was found dead one morning last month of a cocaine overdose on a south Minneapolis street, a tragedy and perhaps a crime that police are investigating.

Her body was found lying just a block from Children's Hospital, left to the hard streets she already knew all too well.

Dr. Stephanie Tucker, a pediatric resident at the University of Minnesota, who met Sidney through a mentoring program, remembers seeing those streets through the girl's eyes when they walked down them together.

"Sidney would say, 'See that person over there? That person is selling herself. That person is a drug dealer,' " Tucker said at a recent community memorial for Sidney. "She was much older than her years. To see so much, to be exposed to so much ... She was looking for another way ..."

"She was a girl of extremes," said Sarah Wippich, the principal of Trinity First Lutheran School in south Minneapolis, where Sidney did well in class until she dropped out of fifth grade last fall, "loving and kind, and tough as nails at the same time."

Hardship and trouble surround the modest house on 14th Avenue South where Sidney lived, a child in a family whose roots are on the beleaguered Menominee Indian reservation in northeastern Wisconsin.

Plastic toys adorn the fenced yard outside the blue wood-frame house, which was rehabbed by Habitat for Humanity and turned over to Sidney's family in 1997.

But there are few safe places for kids in the neighborhood: Drug dealers ply their trade on nearby corners, gangs fight over turf and prostitutes loiter.

The neighborhood has made progress in recent years, but 40 percent of the children there, most of them minorities, live in poverty.

Sidney, the sixth of seven children, who sometimes spoke of becoming a cop or a teacher, lived in a single-parent home where the conditions were at times chaotic.

Her brother, Edison, 20, is serving a life sentence in prison for a gang shooting. Her mother, Glenda Askenette, 45, who declined to be interviewed, has been subject to recurring interventions by child-protection officials in Hennepin County concerned about alleged neglect and alcohol abuse in the home.

Authorities once removed one child from Askenette's care for medical reasons and placed another in a juvenile detention center. Courts placed restraining orders on two of three fathers of Askenette's children. Sidney's father has since died.

His death and her older brother's imprisonment hit Sidney hard, those who know her say. They also took a toll on her family, especially her mother.

"I had more rules put on me, because I was the oldest girl," said Sidney's eldest sister, Sugar Askenette, 21. "We weren't even allowed out of the house after dark, or to listen to music with swear words.

"But when Sidney came along, my mother and my brothers couldn't lay down the law like they did before. They're really broken up about it, because they feel like they let down Sidney."

Askenette called Sidney "the heart of her family."

"She could make you laugh and smile, and she could make you mad," she said. "When she passed, it ripped our hearts out."

Smart and mischievous

Sidney's solution to the turmoil swirling through her young life was simple, her sister and others said: She wanted to grow up, fast.

When she was 9, she told people she was 10. When she was 10, she said 11. When she died, it was first reported she was 12 -- she had said so for so long, people thought it was the truth. She was tall for her age and, with her eyebrows plucked and wearing makeup, she could pass for 15 or 16.

On the street, those can be dangerous ages, especially when they are just make-believe.

"Sid had all the personality characteristics and strength it takes to develop into a healthy, strong person," Wippich said. "But she was mischievous, and she had a mouth."

Sidney started school at Trinity First Lutheran when she was in first grade, and repeated the grade because of unexplained absences. In third grade, she moved to Heart of the Earth, a Native American charter school. There, she missed 50 full days. The next year, she came back to Trinity First Lutheran and did better.

Teacher Terry Bentz said she helped Sidney by making her stay after school to complete her homework. Bentz remembers her as a smart girl handicapped by low self-esteem and high frustration. Sometimes she would bang on a desk and denounce school as stupid.

Once, she crumpled up a science test and tossed it away in anger after scribbling "I'm dumb" on the page.

But after Bentz smoothed out the page and helped her with the instructions, Sidney scored a B-plus.

The school tried to show Sidney she could talk her problems through. But outside the school, Sidney experienced a different world, one with no rewards for school success.

"Kids learn you have to fight to stay respected," Wippich said. "You have to stay tough so you're not messed with. What they live within these walls is different than what they live when they leave."

Troubling spirits

Things started to go dreadfully wrong a year ago.

Last fall, at the start of fifth grade, Sidney grew defiant. She refused to commit to doing her homework. She started missing school again. Do the work and you can stay at Trinity First Lutheran, she was told. Sidney said she was leaving.

She began saying she was troubled by spirits she saw from time to time, especially after her father died. They were evil spirits that frightened her. Teachers told her Jesus was more powerful and to call on him when she saw other spirits. She told them she tried it once and it helped. Before leaving the school, Sidney drew a picture of a cross and wrote the names of all her family members around it.

"I love God," she scrawled at the bottom of the picture. "But I don't know why."

Sidney's school odyssey helped mask the trouble she was in. Her truancy problems got lost in the shuffle as she bounced between public, private and alternative charter schools.

She transferred to Heart of the Earth, but left after repeated absences. Then she transferred to a public school, but her truancy continued. This year, she enrolled in another public school but never showed up for classes. The school dropped her from its rolls.

Justin Kii Huenemann, who leads a program at the Minneapolis American Indian Center to help parents and kids build stronger connections, said Sidney's case raises questions about how a multitude of institutions responded to her.

"In an unfortunate way, we become sort of desensitized to the chaos and dysfunction," Huenemann said. "After a while, you just go with the flow. But this was not a throw-away family. They did have spark. Sidney did have dreams."

Huenemann got to know Sidney and her mother a year ago when the pair participated in the Strengthening Families program at the Indian Center, an eight-week course to help parents show love, set limits and help kids deal with issues they face on the streets.

Other than a superficial toughness, Huenemann said, the kids have little in the way of survival skills as they run a gauntlet of sex, drugs and violence.

"They put on a persona much older than they really are because they are trying to survive," he said. "They don't have much of a youth. Their youth is suppressed. Most folks can't even begin to fathom what it's like to be an 11- or 12-year-old in that situation, having so many opposing forces facing you. They've seen it all, and they've done a lot of it. There aren't many families who would make out very well facing only half that many problems."

Huenemann remembers Sidney looking like she was 16 or 17, not 11. She was taller than her mother, who suffers from arthritis and other health problems and seemed frail and beaten-down. But they kept coming to the course, mother and daughter, for eight weeks.

Sidney was like many of the kids, he said, covering her head in a hooded sweatshirt, covering her ears with earphones, listening to hip-hop and hiding behind an aggressive attitude that masked defensiveness and insecurity. After she was forced to take off the hood and earphones, Sidney was asked to join a circle of kids and talk about one good thing that had happened in the past week.

It was an awkward moment. It took her a long time to come up with an answer: She had not missed any school that week.

It may have been the last time she could report good news.

Dropping off the radar screen

By last spring, Sidney was missing often from school. In May, she was suspended from the Golden Eagles, an after-school program at the Indian Center, after she punched another girl in the face -- hard enough to break the girl's glasses.

Sidney's mother did not respond to a request to meet with program staff, a step that could have allowed Sidney to rejoin the program. Sidney was dropping out of school, out of her circles of support and off the radar screen. At one point, she lived briefly in a shelter for runaway youths.

"It had seemed like she was going to be able to overcome a lot of the stuff that kids in our community are exposed to," says Julie Green, director of the Golden Eagles program. "The kids are very street wise. They see drugs and prostitution and stuff all around them. I believe Sidney's mom was doing her best -- our families do the best they can. But the kids have to be tough because if they don't put up that front, they get picked on. That's the way it is -- it's a preventive thing. But they can get over their head .... they don't know how to really protect themselves. They are still just little kids."

When a former teacher who was visiting a friend saw Sidney last summer, she was hanging out with young men she called uncles, but they were not related. Sidney told the teacher that the friend she had come to visit should move somewhere else.

"This is not a good neighborhood," the teacher remembers her saying.

On Saturday, Oct. 22, she borrowed $5 from a family member and left home, reportedly to go to a dance or party near Lake Street.

She never returned.

"She just went off with the wrong people that night, and they didn't have any respect for her," Sugar Askenette said.

Just before dawn the next morning, a Sunday, her body was found behind a funeral home. Police and investigators on the scene did not realize they were looking at the body of an 11-year-old. They said they thought Sidney was much older.

That morning, pastors of a church down the block, Messiah Lutheran, offered prayers in church for the nameless, lifeless girl on the street outside.

Police continue to investigate her death as a possible murder and are looking for a number of people, adults, they believe she was with in the hours before her death. They are also trying to determine whether Sidney had any history of drug use before overdosing on cocaine -- a drug rarely available to 11-year-olds.

"She wasn't fast," Sugar Askenette said. "She wasn't out there doing what people say she was doing. She didn't dress like a tramp. But she did have a mouth on her. That's what I liked about Sid the most: She didn't have a filter between her brain and her mouth. Whatever was on her mind, she said. If your shirt was ugly, you'd hear about it. She'd always say, 'Can't you do something different with your hair?' She started a lot of stuff that didn't need to get started."

Askenette did not finish school. None of Sidney's siblings did. Askenette dropped out when she was pregnant with her daughter, Cameron. Sidney was thrilled, Askenette said, to have her little niece born on her 7th birthday. Last Tuesday, Cameron turned 5 -- the same day Aunt Sidney, whom she idolized, would have turned 12.

Twelve, Sidney had always told her friends, would be great. Because once you turned 12, you were on your way. She died five weeks short.

A wake for a child

Sidney was buried two days before Halloween, after a traditional four-day wake on the Menominee Reservation, where her mother was born and where Sidney spent childhood summers with an aunt, playing with puppies and surrounded by relatives.

Her coffin, transported from Minneapolis to the reservation by her family, was laid out in her aunt's home. Her cousins prepared her for burial, dressing her in moccasins for the journey to the afterlife, giving her body a traditional cedar bath and gluing her bangs to her forehead, just like she used to do.

On the last day of the wake, tribal elders bestowed a traditional Indian name on her in a ceremony usually reserved for the living. They said Sidney's face lit up with a big, beautiful smile when she got her Indian name. The name won't be revealed until she has been dead a year, at which time friends and family will hold a Ghost Dinner to honor her spirit and offer a feast of her favorite foods from life.

So far, Sugar said with a smile, the only foods the family can think of bringing to her Ghost Dinner are Flamin' Hot Cheetos and Coca-Cola.

"That's all she ever ate, it seemed like," she said.

"But we don't want people thinking Sidney was a wild child or a delinquent, a truant or some kind of drug addict," Sugar said. "She was a young and beautiful girl. She was still just a little girl.

"That's what she was: The little girl that got lost."

Nick Coleman • 612-673-4400

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Special thanks to Bea Woodward for passing this on.

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December 2005 Reports

Last updated on December 04, 2005