nothing of his friends or where he hung out so I had no idea how I would find him. As I got into my car, I decided to go to a hotel room for the night and to try and sort things out.
I drove until I came to the first hotel I found and I checked into a room. By this time it was after midnight. As I sat on the bed in the hotel room, my thoughts went wild. I started thinking about how he could have done such a terrible thing. I started wondering why. What had happened? And did my mom suffer? I lay back on the bed. How could I find my younger brother? For the next couple of hours my emotions vacillated between sadness and anger, hopelessness and fury. This was the longest night of my life. From time to time, in between
The Freedom of Forgiveness
the thoughts and the fury and anger, I would doze off to sleep in fifteen-minute intervals. Every time I woke, I looked at the clock. Time moved slowly. I turned on the TV. The lead story for the late night local news was my mother’s murder. I shut the TV off and fell back into my rage.
And all of a sudden, my beeper went off. I looked at it and didn’t recognize the number displayed. Who would be beeping me in the wee hours of the morning?
I dialed the number back from the hotel room phone. When the phone stopped ringing, the voice of my younger brother came through the phone loud and clear. “Allen, Allen! This is Jeff.”
For a second, I was speechless. Then I screamed into the phone, “Where are you? Where the hell are you?”
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“I didn’t do it! I promise I didn’t do it!”
I screamed louder. “You’re a liar! Yes, you did! I’m going to find you, and when I do, I’m going to kill you.”
The phone went silent, and then all I could hear was a dial tone.
Chapter 2
Christmas Eve 1993
It was the day before Christmas, and my hero, my role model and mother had been murdered, and I knew my younger brother had done it. But in spite of the pain and uncertainty, it was a beautiful day in sunny Fort Lauderdale, Florida. The sky was blue and clear, and the clouds seemed as white as ever. Seven days after the murder of my mother, I was still living in the hotel, and I hadn’t heard much from the police. I had not been able to contact Jeff, he never reached out to me again after that night I threatened to kill him.
As I prepared to leave the hotel room I got a call. It was the detective assigned to the case. I had given him the name and number of the hotel I was
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staying in. “I have some good news and I have some bad news,” he said. “Which do you want first?”
I said to him, “At this point it really doesn’t matter.”
“Well, the good news is that we have the person who killed your mother.”
My heart dropped and my mouth suddenly became extremely dry. “Oh really,” I said.
“Yes, that’s the good news,” he said. “But the bad news is that your suspicion was correct, the person who murdered your mother is your younger brother.”
I stood still for a moment, overwhelmed and flooded with mixed emotions. On one hand I had known it already, but on the other hand, to actually hear it—I just wasn’t prepared.
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“Mr. Jackson, are you still there?”
“Yes,” I said, and managed to compose myself. “Yes, I’m here.” I took a deep breath. “Where is he? What happened?”
The detective told me that earlier that Christmas Eve morning, Jeff had turned himself in and confessed to shooting my mother. He said that he and my mother had gotten into a heated argument, and he went into one of the bedrooms and waited. When he was sure she was asleep, he opened her bedroom door, stood next to her bed, and at point-blank range, he pulled the trigger.
Tears ran down my face as I listened. I felt hopeless and lifeless all over again.
The detective told me they had recovered the gun from the bedroom Jeff had hidden it in. “Now that
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he’s turned himself in and we have the gun, you and the rest of your family are free to move back into the house.” I said, “Thank you, sir,” and I hung up the phone. As I walked out of the hotel room, it was as if I was in the twilight zone. I knew Jeff had done it, but now, having actually gotten the confirmation, a million questions seemed to race through my mind. Why did I know he had done it? What did they argue about that made him so angry that he would do this? And why hadn’t my mother locked her bedroom door before laying down to sleep, knowing how Jeff would often come in and out, stealing things and wreaking havoc. As I reached the counter to check out of the hotel, the receptionist’s voice snapped me out of my trance. “How was your stay, sir?”
I blinked. If only she knew why I was there. “It was good.”
Before I reached my car in the hotel parking lot, I used a phone booth and I called my stepfather at
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the house because I figured he had been contacted by the detective and he was probably at the house about that time. When he answered the phone, he said, “You were right; it was Jeff.”
I replied, “I know, the detective called me.”
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