Empty Promises

tragic tumbling-down for many of the children whose future had seemed so bright. Bellevue, Washington, wasn’t unique; drugs and more wars and assassinations and rock and roll and XXX-rated movies and videos and the erratic vicissitudes of fortune eroded family-based towns all over America. As Bellevue became a little grittier and far less inviolate, Jami Hagel’s desolate destiny began to take shape, despite her family’s struggle to save her.
    Judy and Jerry Hagel left tiny Carrington, North Dakota, in 1967 and headed for Washington State; Judy’s two brothers lived there, and they said the job prospects were good. Judy and Jerry’s oldest child, Randy, was five then and Jami Sue was almost three. A year later, Judy gave birth to twin boys, Rob and Rich.
    Rather than resenting all the attention the twins got, Jami was enthralled with them, and their birth gave her a tighter bond with her mother. Even though she was only three, she took care of the twins for her mother. “I wasn’t expecting twins,” Judy recalls. “I had no help, and Jami was there to help me. We had a little rocker, and I couldn’t feed two babies at one time, so I’d hand one baby to her and she’d rock it to sleep. And I’d get the other baby and hand it to her. She was very helpful for me. She was always holding them—they were so little.”
    And so was Jami. She was so petite as a child that she wore only size zero or size one. Her mother would seek out little specialty stores where there were clothes small enough to fit tiny Jami.
    Growing up in Bellevue as the only daughter in a family with three sons, Jami was in the thick of whatever her brothers were doing, despite her size. Randy was three years older than Jami, and her twin brothers, Rich and Rob, were three years younger. Jami looked like a little doll with bright brown eyes, luxuriant dark hair, and a “lovely smile,” but she could give as good as she got from her brothers, who teased her, as all brothers do. Even when she was grown, Jami weighed only 95 pounds and stood just a smidgen over five feet tall. Jami was sweet-natured, but she wasn’t afraid of anything. Judy and Jerry had raised her to be self-confident.
    Jerry Hagel and all of his children were involved in softball competitions early on. The whole family played in local leagues, and Jami was a tomboy. “She was small but feisty,” her brother Rob recalled.
    Judy Hagel stayed at home to raise her children. She was the mother who was always available to drive her children and their friends to Lake Sammamish to swim or to the movies or to go horseback riding. Jami loved horses even more than baseball, and she and her friend Lori Stratton also loved to climb trees.
    Besides playing softball together, the Hagels spent their vacations together. They usually traveled back to North Dakota to visit their extended family during summer vacations. Christmas and all holidays and birthdays were special for them, and the Hagels’ family album grew thick with photos of various celebrations. Judy loved her boys, but she delighted in her only daughter and the feeling was mutual. Judy and Jami shared secrets and discussed problems together.
    Judy couldn’t imagine that life would ever be any other way. Jami was close to her father, Jerry, too. In photographs she is usually sitting near him. He treated her as if she were made of porcelain, and Jami always expected to marry a man like her dad.
    Jami Hagel was a nice girl who grew up to be a kind woman. A friend several years younger remembers how she idolized Jami. “She had a wonderful bedroom,” the woman says, “with a rainbow theme. I thought it was so beautiful. Jami used to let me come in and look at her things, even though I was probably a little pest.”
    As a teenager, Jami Hagel went to Sammamish High School, near Lake Hills in Bellevue. When she was a sophomore, she began going steady with Greg Coomes, who was very handsome and a year older than she was. They went together for five or six years, all through high school and beyond. Jami’s family approved of Greg. The young couple had a monogamous, “very serious” relationship and eventually became lovers. “She was my first love,” Greg would recall one day. “She was the first woman I was ever intimate with.”
    Jami’s high school world would have been the envy of any teenager. She had her own car, but she wasn’t spoiled. She worked hard at her studies, and she was confident. Greg described her