Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row Read Online Free PDF

for me to drop dead of shock and trauma right in the courtroom.
    If I hadn’t been sent to prison at such a young age there’s no way I could ever have adapted to it. Prison is bad enough, but it’s a million times worse when you know you did nothing to be here for. That fact magnifies and amplifies the shock and trauma. As it is, I grew up in this place. Perhaps that’s what robbed me of my inner flexibility.
    I no longer approach each situation in life with an open heart, ready to learn. Instead I come like a wary old man scared of being knocked on his ass again. An old man knows that at his age those bruises don’t heal as quickly as they used to. I used to learn as a youth because I was curious. I didn’t necessarily even think about learning; it was more like being one of those baby animals you see on the nature shows. They almost learn by accident, just from being wide-eyed and playful. Now I hoard knowledge out of fear. I figure the more I know, the more I’ll be able to control a situation and keep from getting hurt again.
    *  *  *
    I hate it. I hate the signs and symptoms of age I see more and more in myself as each day passes. I’m now the same age that Hank Williams was when he died. Our situations and circumstances made us both old before our time. Don’t think me cynical, though. I believe it to be wholly reversible. I believe love can fix damn near anything. Love and iced tea. I just need larger doses of both than I can get in here. Perhaps soon someone will correct this injustice and rescue me from this nightmare. Until then I have no choice but to struggle on as I have been. “Saint Raymond Nonnatus, hear my prayer . . .”

Three
    T he year, the idea of a year, has become paper-thin. I can almost reach out and tear a hole through it with my fingernail. December is coming. I can feel it waking up. It brings me a haunted place to rest my head and a clearer vision of all I see. The whole world seems to be putting on its holiday trim, and every day that passes is another mile traveled through the ice-cold desert.
    *  *  *
    W hen I was in second grade, a friend of Nanny’s decided to rent the tiny three-room brick building in her backyard to my family, because her Social Security check wasn’t quite enough for her to survive on. In hindsight it strikes me as incredibly odd that someone would have had such a structure in the backyard of a small suburban home. It was more like a bomb shelter.
    Someone had wired the place for electricity, and the water worked well enough, but there was no heat. Sometimes it would get so cold in there that the toilet would have ice in it. To keep from freezing to death my mother would turn the oven on as high as it would go and leave the door open. We had a small cat who would hop up onto the oven door and make herself at home by curling into a ball and sleeping.
    After a while my mother and father managed to borrow a small portable heater. My mother would stand my sister and me in front of it as we dressed for school in the morning, so that we wouldn’t shiver ourselves to pieces. One day as we were getting dressed, my sister backed into the heater. You could hear her shrieking all down the street, a loud, wordless wail of pain. I can still see my mother on her knees, clutching my sister and rocking back and forth as they both sobbed. After things calmed down my mother examined my sister, and nothing looked to be seriously wrong, so we were sent off to school.
    As we walked back home that afternoon, the back of my sister’s shirt and pants were soaking wet. The parts of her that had touched the heater had blistered during the day, and all the blisters had broken open. When my mother saw it, she started crying again. That year was one of the poorest my family ever lived through.
    There was much excitement one day about a week before Christmas when three older men in suits showed up at our door carrying boxes and bags of food. I think they were either Shriners