“You’ve probably never had a sweet potato biscuit, and that’s a shame.”
Still nothing. I kept going.
“I’m thinking about getting a new car because my car is so old.” I waited. Nothing. “Charlie, you’re supposed to say, ‘How old is it, Bryan?’ and then I say my car is so old—”
He never smiled or responded; he just continued looking at the spot on the wall, his face frozen in sadness.
“What kind of car do you think I should get?” I went through a range of ridiculous musings that yielded nothing from Charlie. He continued to lean back, and his body seemed a little less tense. I noticed that our shoulders were now touching.
After a while I tried again. “Come on, Charlie, what’s going on? You’ve got to talk to me, son.” I started leaning on him somewhat playfully, until he sat forward a bit, and then I finally felt him lean back into me. I took a chance and put my arm around him, and he immediately began to shake. His trembling intensified before he finally leaned completely into me and started crying. I put my head to his and said, “It’s okay, it’s all right.” He was sobbing when he finally spoke. It didn’t take me long to realize that he wasn’t talking about what had happened with George or with his mom but about what had happened at the jail.
“There were three men who hurt me on the first night. They touched me and made me do things.” Tears were streaming down his face. His voice was high-pitched and strained with anguish.
“They came back the next night and hurt me a lot,” he said, becoming more hysterical with each word. Then he looked in my face for the first time.
“There were so many last night. I don’t know how many there were, but they hurt me.…”
He was crying too hard to finish his sentence. He gripped my jacket with a force I wouldn’t have imagined he was capable of exerting.
I held him and told him as gently as I could, “It’s going to be okay. It’s going to be okay.” I’d never held anyone who gripped me as tightly as that child or who cried as hard or as long. It seemed like his tears would never end. He would tire and then start again. I just decided to hold him until he stopped. It was almost an hour before he calmed down and the crying stopped. I promised him that I would try to get him out of there right away. He begged me not to leave, but I assured him that I would be back that day. We never talked about the crime.
When I left the jail, I was more angry than sad. I kept asking myself, “Who is responsible for this? How could we ever allow this?” I went directly to the sheriff’s office inside the jail and explained to the overweight, middle-aged sheriff what the child had told me, and I insisted that they immediately place him in a protected single cell. The sheriff listened with a distracted look on his face, but when I said I was going to see the judge, he agreed to move the child into a protected area immediately. I then went back across the street to the courthouse and found the judge, who called the prosecutor. When the prosecutor arrived in the judge’s chambers, I told them that the child had been sexually abused and raped. They agreed to move him to a nearby juvenile facility within the next several hours.
I decided to take on the case. We ultimately got Charlie’s case transferred to juvenile court, where the shooting was adjudicated as a juvenile offense. That meant Charlie wouldn’t be sent to an adult prison, and he would likely be released before he turned eighteen, in just a few years. I visited Charlie regularly, and in time he recovered. He was a smart, sensitive child who was tormented by what he’d done and what he’d been through.
At a talk I gave at a church months later, I spoke about Charlie and the plight of incarcerated children. Afterward, an older married couple approached me and insisted that they had to help Charlie. I tried to dissuade these kind people from thinking they could do anything, but I gave them my card and told them they could call me. I didn’t expect to hear from them, but within days they called, and they were