There are always two sets of secondary victims

I’ve been quiet the last few months on my blog. Life got in the way again in several big ways:

·        I’m in the process of getting a divorce.

·        I moved to Kansas.

·        And my family was trying to help the FBI locate, and apprehend, my father.

I don’t speak about my father much. When I was little, he was the funny man in army fatigues who came home from the base every day and saved me from my mother’s vitriol. To say I was a daddy’s girl is an understatement- he was my hero.

I was devastated when my mother filed for divorce and moved us back to Kansas, leaving him behind in Hawaii. She got custody of my siblings and myself because he was in the army, though he got kicked out shortly after we left.

At the time, and for years after, I blamed her for the bare bones relationship we had with him. She’d purposefully move us from house to house on his visitation days. She insisted that someone be with us when he did have us, and I don’t think we ever got to stay overnight.

When I think of my mother, I have a hard time seeing past the woman who hated me from the day I was born (who made no effort to hide how much she hated me). In many ways, my mother is the villain in my origin story. But in this case, she’s the unsung heroine.  

When I was 11, my father went to prison for the first time. For months, my siblings and I had heard whispered conversations about my dad and a trial. No one would tell us what he was charged with, only that it was “a mistake.” He’d been charged with “a crime he’d NEVER commit.” The victim was a liar, manipulated by her mother as revenge for my father declining to help her cheat on her husband.

Then, one slightly overcast day, my mother took us to Carey Park and led us up the stairs to the river bank. There, among the rustling grasshoppers and chirping birds, she told us about his sentence. And she told us what he’d been charged with: child molestation.

The moments after her announcement are the first time I can remember the world graying out at the edges. I felt nauseated and faint, my heart jackhammered in my chest, and all the air shot out of my lungs. “It’s going to be in the paper,” my mother warned us. “Everyone in town will know what kind of a man he is.” Not exactly a comforting thought for a girl who was already the odd girl out at school.

Whatever else she said that day is buried deep in my mind where I cannot, or will not, access it. Like those first few visits to prison, the protective part of my memory swooped in and shoved the painful stuff down so far that trying to recall it produces only static.

Instead, visiting my dad at the prison is a hundred little memories that all fade into one.

·        The way the checkers board was always slightly warped.

·        Him trying to teach me to play chess, and me failing miserably every time.

·        The acrid taste of RC Cola and too tangy taste of microwave pizza

·        My dad in a chambray shirt and jeans, institutional glasses that looked straight out of the ‘80’s, set adrift in a sea of men who looked almost interchangeable.

·        The prison guard who became the first man to touch my breasts after I hit puberty while he did a pat down that bordered on obscene. Then the mother of another family who leaned in after we’d finished going through security and whispered, “if you complain, they’ll ship him far away. Next time, wear a thicker sweater.”  

We were told that he was innocent and, in time, one of the court cases would pan out and he’d be freed. Deep down inside, I felt guilty. A little voice in my head softly calling, “I think he did it.”

It felt like a betrayal of my grandmother, so I kept those feelings to myself.

In the mystery/thriller writing world, we focus so much on the obvious victims. The secondary victims (family, friends, and employer of the victim) all take center stage. If the victim lives, their story is front and center.

The family of the criminal is often not mentioned at all. If they are mentioned, then they are awful people who created the monster in the first place. Their family members make excuses for them, they hide them from the law, they harass and bully the victim and their family. All and all, the family members are almost as bad as the criminal themselves.

Innumerable mystery and thriller books mention the criminal’s bad childhood as though it’s an acceptable excuse for abhorrent behavior. It’s another way to blame the victims though. Plenty of people, myself included, experienced poverty, verbal abuse, and mental illness without resorting to a life of crime. While many criminals share similar backgrounds, correlation does not equal causation.

Criminals choose to commit their crimes; they don’t happen by accident.

The FBI raided my grandmother’s house last year, a fact we just learned a few months ago. At the time, my dad had a warrant with Reno County for failing to appear for a court date. The level of law enforcement involvement over one simple infraction seemed like overkill.

Then she told us they took all of her electronic devices and hadn’t given them back. That’s the moment I knew why they raided the house. And I hoped that he’d turn himself in and spare my grandmother the pain of another long trial.

My father has a huge persecution complex and is more narcissistic than my mother ever was, which wasn’t something I’d thought possible. Instead of going quietly and sparing my grandmother’s feelings, he decided to hurt her more deeply every day. He’d steal things from her property- all the wire from the house I’d lived in during high school (which was the first place I’d felt safe in since we’d left Hawaii). Tools. Scrap metal. If it wasn’t nailed down, he stole it and used it to feed his drug habit.

The worst items that he stole were the guns.

My grandmother fell a few months ago and my father left her lying outside, essentially left for dead. She managed to make it inside, and by a confluence of events, she’s now living with my sister and thriving… aside from her belief that every person she meets on the internet is who they say they are and that they have good intentions.

My father has only called or reached out a few times to try to extort money, ask for the title for the car, and try to get her to go back to live in the hoarding house she’d existed in due to her loneliness and depression. He doesn’t care that she’s doing better now. All that matters is that she’s not providing for him.

Then the FBI came calling again, this time unannounced at my sister’s house. They questioned my sister and grandmother about my dad, and they told the agents everything they knew. When my father later reached out to my grandmother, she begged him to turn himself over to law enforcement. His response was to tell her he’d rather die than go back to prison.

When I spoke with the police (who were also involved in the case), I made sure to mention that statement, and that he had an unknown number of guns available to him.

My worst fear was that he’d go out via suicide by cop, and that he’d do his level best to take some of the officers with him.

My second worst fear is that he’d figure out where grandma lived and try to force her to leave with him. Throughout all the above, my grandmother still maintained that he was innocent.

The FBI came calling again on Thursday. They gently explained to my grandmother that they hadn’t recklessly charged my dad just because they felt like it. The evidence against him was staggering, and they had multiple grand jury indictments to prove it. They were pretty sure, as were my grandmother and sister, that some of his friends were hiding him from law enforcement.

When they left, my grandmother was bereft. Once the door closed behind the agents, she shook and sobbed in disbelief. She didn’t want to believe that her son would do something like that. But underneath the disbelief was the guilt. She was sure that she must have done something to cause him to turn out this way. It took multiple people, and hours, to calm her down.

We’ve tried to convince her that she didn’t make him this way, a series of bad and disgusting choices led him down this path. She lost her youngest son, my uncle David, law year and it devastated her. At several points she sobbed, “I can’t go to another funeral. I just can’t. I can’t.” All we could do was remind her that it wasn’t up to her whether he lived or died. She’s been asking him to turn himself into law enforcement for months. He’s the one who had chosen to live on the run instead.

I had nightmares every hour of Thursday night. My sister and my anxiety ramped up. Every sound was him sneaking on to the property. Every moment was the moment we’d hear that he’d started a gun fight with agents. That he’d hurt another child in a way that would scar them for life.

Then law enforcement captured my father at 10:50 pm CT time last night. He's currently in jail waiting for the FBI to arrive. And he went quietly.

The relief my sister, grandmother, and myself felt at receiving that news last night is hard to describe.

For my sister and me, it's knowing that we can keep my grandmother (and our nieces) safe from him, that he won’t show up at the house and hurt anyone.

It’s relief to know that he didn’t decide to go out in a “blaze of glory” and take law enforcement officers with him.

For my grandmother, it’s a relief that she won’t have to go to yet another one of her children’s funerals.

When we write about the victims’ families, we must remember that there isn’t one set of secondary victims to any crime. There are always at least two. And we do ourselves, and the readers, a disservice if we only focus on the family members and friends of the victim. Or if we only bring in the family members of the criminal as reinforcement of the idea that the criminal never truly had free will, that they were predestined to be bad.

If we’re going to include secondary victims, which we should because that is reality- crime affects everyone like a pebble causing a ripple on a placid lake-, we need to make sure that those victims are all as equally well-rounded. There are thousands upon thousands of prisoners’ families and our words, our judgement, affects their well-being. It takes a deft hand to portray them all in a gentle, and kind, manner.

Please, for the sake of secondary victims like my sister, my grandmother, and myself, take your time when crafting their story lines.  It affects them in ways you’ll never see, and damages them in ways society refuses to acknowledge.