Frank
December 10, 2014. I drove to Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Prison with my parents, my younger brother Tom, my wife and a van load of friends and family. We didn’t talk much in the car. There wasn’t a lot left to say that hadn’t already been said across nineteen years of trials, appeals, continuances, Supreme Court petitions, and all the other machinery that the legal system runs through before it actually does what it’s supposed to do.
We went in. We sat down. We watched.
And then it was over.
I had spent almost two decades building up some idea in my head about what that moment would feel like. I think most people would. You lose your brother, your best friend, your roommate, the guy you grew up sharing a room with on Lakeside Drive, and somewhere in the wreckage of that you grab onto the idea that there’s a finish line somewhere. That there’s a day coming when the account finally gets settled and something inside you unknots itself.
That’s not what happened.
What Nobody Prepares You For
My brother William was 26 years old when he was killed on December 17, 1995. He was a Baldwin County Deputy. He wore that uniform because he meant it, not because he needed the work. He was the kind of man who would have been something, and instead he became a case number and a headstone and a wound that never fully scarred over for any of us.
I was 25. I watched my family turn into something different after that. Not broken exactly, but permanently rearranged. My dad carried it in his face every day. Tom carried it differently, quieter. I carried it as anger, mostly, because that was the container I knew how to use.
The legal process didn’t help. Every appeal was a reopening. Every hearing was a reminder that the guy who did it was still breathing, still filing motions, still getting attorneys. Nineteen years of that. I’m not going to pretend it didn’t do real damage to all of us.
So when December 10, 2014 finally came, I went in expecting something. Resolution, maybe. Or rage finally finding a place to land. Or grief finally completing some circuit it had left open for two decades.
None of that. I felt something closer to exhaustion than anything else. The kind that lives underneath anger and only shows up when the anger finally stops having something to push against.
I still think about William every single day. That hasn’t changed. The execution didn’t change it. He’s still gone. The guy being gone too doesn’t give William his life back, doesn’t give my dad those years back, doesn’t give me back my twenties or the version of my family that existed before that night in December 1995.
What I’ve figured out since then is that I was confusing justice with repair. They’re not the same thing. Justice is what the system delivers, if it delivers anything. Repair is a different project entirely, and nobody hands you a roadmap for it.
I’m 55 now. I’ve got Kimberly, Lauren, Logan, and Kade, which is one of the few genuinely good things that has happened without a catch attached to it. I still carry William with me. I always will.
But I’ll tell you this: don’t wait for a finish line to start living. The finish line doesn’t fix the race. It just ends it.
