While the City Slept: A Love Lost to Violence and a Wake-Up Call for Mental Health Care in America

On a summer night in 2009. three lives intersected in one American neighborhood. Two people newly in love - Teresa Butz and Jennifer Hopper, who spent years trying to find themselves and who eventually found each other - woke up to find Isaiah Kalebu, twenty-three years old and with a history of mental illness, standing over them with a knife.

In this compassionate and riveting account of a murder in Seattle, Eli Sanders, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his coverage of the crime, offers a portrait in microcosm of the state of mental health care in America - as well as an inspiring story of love and forgiveness. Culminating in Kalebu's slide toward violence - observed by family members, police, mental health workers, lawyers, and judges, but stopped by no one - While the City Slept is the story of a crime of opportunity and of the string of missed opportunities that made it possible.