I learned the details later, from the fire department and from a work order with Verlene's signature on it. Meadowlark Commons has one gated entrance, a pair of steel swing arms between two stone pillars, with a keypad for visitors and a receiver for residents' remotes. Like most gated subdivisions in the county, it had for years had an emergency override: a siren-activated sensor on the pillar that opened the arms automatically when it heard the particular yelp pattern of an approaching fire truck or ambulance, plus a code that the board kept on file with county dispatch. In June, some teenagers had figured out that you could play a siren sound off a phone speaker into the sensor and open the gate for their friends at two in the morning. Verlene had been furious. She had called the gate company and had them disconnect the siren sensor. In August, after somebody posted the visitor code in a neighborhood group, she had changed the code, too. She had not told county dispatch the new one. She had told the board, in an email I'd later read, that she would "handle notifying the relevant parties after Labor Day, as the gate vendor is closed for the holiday."
So the ambulance from Olathe Fire Station 4, which had been dispatched as a priority call for a pediatric anaphylaxis at 2:43 and had made it from the station to our entrance in five minutes flat, was sitting with its lights going on 151st Street in front of a closed steel arm, and the paramedic in the passenger seat was punching a dead code into a keypad, and nobody inside the gate knew.
I had a remote, clipped to the visor of my truck under the honey locusts. I don't remember the run. I remember my thumb on the button and nothing happening, because I was three hundred feet from the receiver. So I started the truck. I backed out without looking, which I'm not proud of, and drove down the inside lane of the entrance toward the gate the wrong way, and held the remote against the windshield and punched it, and the arms swung open, slow, the way they always swing open, like a waiter who doesn't think you've earned the table. The ambulance came through with its siren off and its lights on. I swung the truck around and led it back up the drive and into the pool lot, and I pointed at the gate to the pool enclosure, and the driver nodded, and parked crooked.
The gate's own log, which the fire marshal pulled later, says the ambulance was stopped at the closed arms for three minutes and eleven seconds.
Three minutes is not a long time. It is roughly how long it takes for the first dose of epinephrine to reach its peak in a small body, and it's roughly a quarter of the time it lasts before it begins to wear off.
While I was in the parking lot, a police cruiser had come in through the gate behind a resident's minivan before the arms closed again, and Officer Sutter had walked onto the pool deck into a crowd of fifty people and a woman pointing at a teenager and shouting, "Arrest her. That's her. She drugged my grandson."
Sutter was twenty-nine, four years on the Olathe force. I've met him since, and he's a decent, careful, slightly awkward man, and I want to be fair to him, because his footage is not a story about a bad cop. It's a story about a man who got dispatched to "a juvenile injecting a child with an unknown substance, possible narcotics, caller is the child's guardian," and walked into exactly what the call said he'd walk into, and had about ninety seconds to figure out whether it was true.
On the footage, he goes to Archie first. That's the right call, and he makes it. He kneels and asks the boy how he's feeling and Archie says, "Itchy," and Sutter asks if he can breathe and Archie nods. Then Sutter stands and asks who gave him the injection, and Clem raises her hand. She's still on her knees by Archie's head. She raises her hand like she's in class.
"I did. It's my EpiPen. He's having anaphylaxis from tree nuts. He ate a lemon bar made with almond flour. We called 911. I gave him epinephrine in the right thigh at about two forty-two."