Forgiveness
everything was normal. I don’t remember what music I was listening to, but everything else was normal, normal traffic flow, normal weather and a normal overall feeling.
But as I approached the neighborhood that we lived in, things were not normal at all. Things were actually quite abnormal.
To start, as I turned into our neighborhood, I saw police cars all over the place. I don’t think I had ever seen so many police cars at one time in one place, and all I could think was that something bad must have happened. As I continued to drive, I also noticed a few paramedic trucks, so now I was thinking, wow, something really bad has happened! As I continued to drive up the street going into my neighborhood, a police officer in the road was pointing and directed me to pull over. I rolled down my window, and the police officer asked me where I was going. I told him that I was going home and that I lived on the street they had blocked off.
The Freedom of Forgiveness
The police officer asked me for my ID. I gave my ID to him and he asked me to get out of the car. At this point all kind of thoughts were racing through my mind. As I got out of the car, the police officer asked me to walk with him.
At this point my heart was pounding as if it was going to jump out of my chest. I can still remember every step. While it was only a few feet from where I parked to where our street began, it seemed like one of the longest walks of my life. As we turned to walk onto my street, I noticed that all of this commotion was centered on our house. Yellow tape was stretched around the front of our house. I could see my aunt and my stepfather in the driveway, looking distraught. As the police officer and I came closer to the house, it became hard for me to breathe. I got so nervous that my body began to shake. And as I walked up to the driveway where my stepfather and my aunt stood, I could see that they were both looking at me and crying. I couldn’t take it anymore; I quickened my steps to a
The Freedom of Forgiveness
jog. “What happened?” I asked. They just looked at me, and it was as if things were moving in slow motion.
I asked again and again what had happened. Getting no immediate answer from either one of them I started screaming and crying out, “Where is Mama? What happened to Mama?”
Finally, my stepfather turned to me with tears running down his face and said these words to me, “Allen, Glo is dead, Glo is dead!” Glo was the name we sometimes used to call mom affectionately.
At that moment, I was flooded with emotions. I was overwhelmed. I screamed at the top of my lungs, “Noooooooooo, please God, noooooo!” I ran toward the walkway leading to the front door, but immediately a couple of police officers grabbed me and told me I couldn’t go in. I tried to pull away from them and go inside, but they continued to hold me and restrain me,
The Freedom of Forgiveness
telling me I couldn’t go in. At some point my body went lifeless as I dropped to the ground, screaming, “Mama, Mama, Mama! Oh God, my mama! I want to see my mama! I want to see my mama!”
The next thing I knew was that I woke up lying in the bed in the back of one of the paramedic trucks. I immediately jumped up, asking to see my mama. The paramedics tried to tell me in the most sensitive and thoughtful way that my mom was dead, I could see it in their faces, but there was no way to tell me that my mother was dead that would have been OK with me. I asked them to let me out of the truck and they did. I walked back over to my stepfather and my aunt standing in the drive way. By this time, my oldest brother had arrived and he was crying uncontrollably. I started to cry and scream again. But all of a sudden, it hit me: Why was my younger brother not there? Where was he? “Where is he?” I asked my aunt and my stepfather. “Has anyone called him?”
The Freedom of Forgiveness
They told me they couldn’t reach him. And immediately, as though I had seen it myself, I screamed, “He did this!” My aunt and my step-father looked at me in disbelief. “He did this,” I said again. “He killed my mama.” I walked up to one of the police officers. “My brother did this,” I told him.
The officer looked at me in disbelief, and tried to calm me down. “You’re upset,” he said. “We’ll find the person or persons that did this.” He told me my mom had been shot in the head at point-blank range as she slept. There was no evidence of a break-in, a robbery, or even a tussle. She was laying on her back as if asleep, with a pillow in her arms.
“My brother did this,” I insisted. “I’m going to find him and kill him.” Something had shifted in me. In a moment, I had moved from crazy grief to rage such as I had never felt before. The detectives in plain clothes came over to me and told me to stop saying that I was going to kill him. But I couldn’t; I kept saying it.
The Freedom of Forgiveness
Not only did I say it, but I really meant it. At that moment, my mission in life was to kill my younger brother, to make him pay for what he had done. I will probably never be able to explain why or how I knew he had done it. There was nothing strange about our family dynamic. Just like every other family, we had our issues, but nothing that I could point to that made me feel the way I felt. Even now looking back, it’s still surreal, and still unbelievable that he would have done this. But I just knew.
I managed to calm myself down for a few moments though, and I again asked one of the officers to let me see my mama one last time. He pulled me over to the side and told me that the coroner had taken her body away while I was unconscious in the ambulance. “Trust me,” he gently said, “You didn’t need to see her the way she was. Just remember her the way you last saw her.”
The Freedom of Forgiveness
I broke into tears again. All I could think about now was, “Why? Why would my younger brother do this?” I went back to the plain-clothes detective. “I know my brother did this.”
“Why are you so sure?”
I had no good answer. “I just know. That’s all I can tell you. I just know he did it.”
He gave me his business card. “If you need me, call me,” he said. “If you find him—call me.”
I looked around and realized darkness had set in. The day was over. It seemed like days had passed by, but it had only been hours. My stepfather, my aunt, and my older brother were still standing in the driveway. As I walked back over to them, another detective was
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telling them that the house was now a crime scene and we could not go into it. My heart skipped a beat when I heard his words. The place that had been our home was now a crime scene. And my family, what was left of it, was displaced.
My aunt told us that we could all come and spend the night at her home. Her invitation was open to us all, my stepfather, my brother and me. I’m not sure whether the rest of them went, but I didn’t. Even now I’m not sure where they stayed for the next few days, I went into my own world.
As I stood there in the driveway, my fury returned tenfold. Anger and hate were taking over my entire being. “I’m going to go find him and kill him.” I said. My aunt pleaded with me. “No, Allen! That’s not the answer. Killing him won’t bring Glo back. And how do you even know for sure that he did it?” I could not explain it, but I told her repeatedly, “I just know that he did.”
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