Killed for Walking a Dog

Photographs by Benjamin Rasmussen

Updated at 9:52 a.m. on September 23, 2022

This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here.      

There is no particular reason people should care about the shooting of Isabella Thallas, which is why, as far as I can tell, not many people did. She was the only casualty, and there was no mystery as to who shot her, and in a country in which guns kill more than 40,000 people every year—well, who has the time to stop and mourn for just one of them?

But there was something about this killing, on the side of a Denver street on a sunny June morning in 2020, that captured my attention. I couldn’t stop thinking about what happened to Bella Thallas. Maybe it was her age—about that of my own daughters—or maybe it was the specific circumstances of her murder, which were both mundane and completely insane.

For two years I tracked down what news I could find in the Denver press and looked in vain for the national coverage that I assumed would follow but never did. Eventually, I wrote to Bella’s family—her mother, father, sister, boyfriend—and talked to them about who Bella was and what happened on the day she died. There isn’t and never will be any satisfactory explanation for what happened to her, but I came as close as I could to understanding what was lost when it did.

“We were essentially raised by teenagers,” Bella’s sister, Lucia, says, and it’s true. Joshua Thallas and Ana Hernandez were high-school sweethearts who married right after graduation, when he was 19 and she was 18. Isabella Joy Thallas arrived soon after—a preemie, weighing less than six pounds—followed two years later by her sister, Lucia, and that birth was just as quickly followed by a divorce that was both inevitable and urgently necessary. Josh, by his own admission, had no idea at that age how to be a husband and father, and struggled to manage a dark and violent streak, at home and in the world. Ana was combative and determined in her own way. After 10 years, they married again, when Josh felt he had gotten his act together, and then divorced again for good five years later, when Ana apparently decided he had not (although Ana kept using the last name Thallas).

Bella and Cia, as they liked to be called, grew up in that cauldron of rage and love, often forced to be