A Free Man 
Brenham’s Paradise Lost
A once-idylic town finds itself in the middle of a controversial rape case involving your four older boys and an eighth-grade girl, but the greatest crimes may have been abdication of responsibility by adults and a total absence of values in their teenagers.
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The girls Sara had confided in at camp—and the boys in town—had started talking. It wasn’t long before most of Brenham knew something had happened. Decades of feminist indoctrination—males are responsible for their actions, for example—counted for nothing in this case. In the eyes of the community, the boys were not at fault for what had happened; Sara was. With school about to start, Susan Evans was deeply concerned; her daughter was growing increasingly more withdrawn and depressed—she stayed in her room, repeatedly playing a Meat Loaf song about a girl who is raped. Susan decided to call Matt Kenjura. “Matt,” she said, “we’ve got a problem.” (Matt Kenjura disputes Susan Evans’ account. He says he went to her house of his own volition and apologized profusely.)
A week or so later, he came to her house at the end of his shift as a lifeguard at the country club, and Susan Evans, herself a former cheerleader, greeted him not as a criminal but as a high school hero. She even made him a sandwich.
What Susan wanted, simply, was for Matt to get the senior girls to leave her daughter alone. He said he would try. Then, sitting comfortably on the couch while Sara occupied a nearby chair, he began to fill in the blanks from the night Sara could not remember. He and Matt McIntyre were the only boys who had had sexual intercourse with Sara. One boy had called Sara a whore and joked about leaving her by the side of the road. Kenjura apologized for his behavior and that of his friends, but he was certain who had caused the problem. It was her fault, he said, indicating Sara. “She got us together.”
“Matt, was she intoxicated?” Susan asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Sara, is that right?” Susan asked.
“I don’t know,” she said.
And then Susan asked the question that would be on any parent’s mind: Why? Why would any boys do something like this to a girl?
“Mrs. Evans,” he said, “I’m seventeen.”
“I’VE BEEN A PRINCIPAL AT ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, middle school, junior high, high school, and I’ve been a superintendent,” Jon Forsythe, the principal of Brenham High School, told me, attempting to explain how values have declined. “Twenty years ago, if you found a note from a student, you wouldn’t read those things you read today. It is alarming. My job is not only to educate students but to teach good morals. But society itself has changed the kind of morals and values we have.”
A teacher at the school was even more critical. “Values? They have no values,” she said of her students, adding that trying to teach appropriate behavior to adolescents is likely to be demoralizing for adults. One teacher asked a class to agree or disagree with the statement “Any guy who hasn’t had sex by the time he’s seventeen is weird.” Overwhelmingly, the students agreed.
Their reaction to this case was that Sara Evans had to be punished. Indeed, Sara brought some of the abuse on herself. She developed a private and a public persona—suicidal at home, unrepentant at school—and she tried to draw even more attention to herself by telling friends that she might be pregnant. As anyone who knows kids would expect, the approach backfired.
But as the hazing intensified, it was hard to believe that Sara’s most vicious critics didn’t have another agenda. Sara may have been exceptional in the extent of her sexual preoccupations, but she was far from alone. Sara’s junior high friends wrote notes to her in language just as offensive as hers. “Everyone thinks I f—ed Josh and now the whole school thinks I’m a whore,” wrote one. Sex seemed more a form of currency tied to power and social progress than a source of pleasure. “So when are you and Matt going to f—?” asked another friend. “I sure as hell hope soon.”
Indeed, a visitor would get the impression that there was a great deal of sex going on, but very little of it enjoyable. The senior girls who were so critical of Sara may have been ambivalent about sex, but they knew they did not want a freshman invading their territory. Her name was linked with Matt Kenjura’s in obscene graffiti; some kids tried to burn signs bearing her name at the homecoming bonfire. At one point a throng of students surrounded her and shouted encouragement to Bryce Pflughaupt to attack her physically. As far as the students were concerned, Sara’s sin wasn’t that she had violated some moral code; it was that she had let out the great secret that there was no moral code, and now not only their parents but the whole world knew it. The students I talked to sounded like beleaguered pros. “It’s been going on but not that bad,” one boy explained of rumors of sex involving multiple partners. “It usually happens with older girls, and they give consent.” “Yeah, we’ve had sex before, but not in a train or anything,” a senior girl told me, perfectly at ease with the street slang for group sex. I don’t think this is what my generation had in mind when we talked about the liberating power of sex.
”WHERE WERE THE PARENTS?” was a question I heard frequently while working on this story. People wanted to know why Susan Evans had let her daughter go to a party for much older kids. (Answer: She trusted the chaperone, and she trusted Brenham.) They wanted to know why the adults left the party. (Answer: That was the norm.) They wanted to know why the parents of the four boys didn’t punish them for their actions. (Answer: The boys’ parents know their children did wrong but do not feel the boys’ suffering fit their crime. The McIntyres, for instance, are devastated that Matt lost his baseball scholarship because of the incident.) In fact, the longer I talked to people in Brenham—the more time I spent with weeping parents who clearly loved their children—the harder it became to understand what went wrong.
Once the crisis arose, the parents’ first instinct was to protect their children. “I have not raised three children without teaching them to be respectful of others,” Pat McIntyre, Matt’s mother, told me. “He’s not guilty of what they said.” That her son could be both respectful and lustily participate in group sex—and even, according to court documents in this case, have sex with the same girl eight days later—was typical of the psychic somersaults required of the parents directly involved in this case: They had to believe they had raised good kids, and that Sara Evans had brought something to town that had not been there before. Only Matt Kenjura’s mother, Cynthia Robinson, seemed willing to sneak up on the truth. “Their whole life is sex, from the time our kids wake up in the morning to before they go to bed at night,” she said. “It’s on TV twenty-four hours a day, it’s in Ladies’ Home Journal. You want to know how to have an orgasm, you can read it right there,” she said. “This is the nineties, and any parent who doesn’t face reality is crazy.” But of course, they hadn’t faced reality, and now they had to save their sons from an unimaginable fate: If this case went to court, the boys could face prison terms and might have to register as sex offenders for the rest of their lives.
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