COMMENTA RY
Charity Vogel: A tragedy that can’t go unresolved
You look into Leslie Brill’s eyes and see the pain. You look at her face, riddled with fatigue, and see the torment.
This is what happens to a parent who lives a nightmare. This is what happens to a woman who wants answers more than anything on Earth—and who may never get them.
“I don’t sleep anymore,” said Brill, softly, the wind rifling her auburn hair on a sunny spring afternoon. “I want the truth.”
Brill stands on a plot of grass at Clinton and Spring streets in the city. She shades her eyes against the sun and looks across a parking lot to where it happened: the end. She can bear to look, but only for a moment. After that the pain is too raw.
This is where Amanda Wienckowski, her daughter, came to rest.
Amanda, 20, disappeared the night of Dec. 5. An older man she was living with in Lewiston said he dropped her off at a Spring Street house—just across the street from this grassy plot—and never saw her again.
On Jan. 9, police found Amanda’s corpse—naked, frozen, her long blond hair shorn—in a blue plastic garbage tote that had been tucked into an alcove of a church on this East Side lot. Her 5-foot-4, 100-pound frame was curled into fetal position, upside down.
Nobody is calling Amanda a saint. She had made her share of bad choices. Authorities have said she had worked as a prostitute. Her parents admit she had been addicted to drugs for three years; but they said she had recently cleaned up.
Medical examiners studied toxicity levels in Amanda’s body and declared her death accidental, likely a drug overdose.
But her parents, City of Tonawanda residents, don’t buy that.
“She was murdered,” said Brill, who works two customer service jobs to support her family. “She was violently attacked.”
Brill and Ken Fink, her husband, recruited three out-of-town experts to analyze the autopsy. They insist those opinions show the drugs in her system were not enough to have killed her and that someone must have done so. So far, they say, no one in authority in Western New York has looked at their documents.
There are other unanswered questions, as well.
No one has said who put Amanda in the garbage tote. No one is saying who cut off her hair. No one has offered an explanation of where she was for a month.
The man Amanda went to see that fateful night is in jail on an unrelated rape charge.
At Buffalo Police Headquarters, officials wouldn’t say if they were talking to him about Amanda’s death.
Police also said Amanda’s case won’t be treated as a homicide unless there’s a declaration of intentional death by the medical examiner.
“They are charged with the duty and responsibility of determining causes of death,” said Dennis Richards, chief of detectives. Still, he said: “At the end of the day I would like to know who put Amanda Wienckowski upside down in a garbage tote.”
A death like Amanda’s is particularly hard. Not only does it leave a gaping hole in a family, but it leaves behind survivors who will never find peace.
Leave aside the less savory aspects of Amanda’s life. Here we have a young woman who suffered and died, then was left in a trash can, while the rest of us were going about our daily lives this winter.
If that chills you, it should.
Can’t we try a little harder to find out what happened to Amanda?
If the answer to that is yes, we’ll give a mother’s weary heart some peace.
If it’s no, that says something dark and unsettling about what we, as a community, are willing to live with. And what we can ignore.
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