didn’t show up for the court dates and rarely returned Cheryl’s calls. It was complicated. She was irked at her son. “I spent some time being angry with him,” she told me. “I could not imagine what he was thinking. The place I got to is, if he hadn’t been killed then, he still wouldn’t be alive today. You don’t rob drug dealers and survive.” On the anniversary of Darren’s death, two of his friends came by, both to comfort Lisa and to receive comfort from her. But she had little patience for their sorrow. I’m good, she told them. Don’t come up here with all that sadness. By that, she meant that they were all out there taking risks, and they knew the stakes. Stop feeling sorry for yourselves, she thought.
Through Facebook she tracked down the young woman whom she’d heard had been with Darren as he lay on the parkway. Lisa wanted to know about those last moments. She wanted to know that her son didn’t die alone. The young woman told Lisa that she and her sister were on the way home, just around the corner, when they noticed this young man bleeding on the ground. In a phone call, she told Lisa that while her sister called for an ambulance, she knelt on the ground beside him. Was he still alive? Lisa asked. The young woman told her that he was. Did you tell him it was going to be okay?
Yes, m’am, she assured Lisa.
She said that Darren was choking on his blood, and that she took his hand. Darren’s whole body shook, as if he was seizing, she told Lisa, and then his eyes rolled to the back of his head. Lisa was weeping at this point, but mostly out of relief, knowing that her son didn’t die by himself. The young woman said that Darren kept trying to say something but couldn’t get any sounds out. Lisa wonders what it was, but “I know it begins with ‘Tell my momma…’ ” That’s what she keeps telling herself—that he always knew he could count on her.
She finally got the strength to attend a court date. Reed had been charged with first-degree murder, and she thought it a straightforward case. But it was problematic. The key witness, Darren’s friend, had pled guilty to unlawful use of a weapon and so didn’t make for the best witness. And Darren himself had three felonies. Cheryl, the prosecutor, had no doubt that the defense attorney would revisit Darren’s past and paint him as a thug. Cheryl also told Lisa that Michael Reed argued he had shot Darren in self-defense. What do you mean, self-defense? Lisa countered. He killed my son. They came to rob each other.
“That was a gut check for me,” Lisa told me. “They didn’t care about my forgiveness. He was fighting for his life. And their belief was that if my son had not been there, Michael wouldn’t be having the issues he’s having. ‘So, get out of here with your forgiveness. Kick rocks with your forgiveness.’ That was a real moment for me. If he was found not guilty—the way I was thinking about it is, he got away with murder.”
Cheryl tried to break it gently, but given the problems in the case, she was inclined to let Reed plead guilty to a lesser charge, to second-degree murder. Lisa took her time. “I had to decide whether I believed what I said about forgiveness, whether I believed all the things I’d been preaching,” she told me. She prayed, and then told Cheryl she would agree to a plea deal if she got to read a victim impact statement at his sentencing. Reed and his attorney agreed to that. Twice the sentencing was postponed because Lisa wasn’t prepared, and then the third time Lisa arrived at court, Cheryl asked her for the statement, which she needed to submit to the judge. Lisa told her it was in her head. Cheryl put her in an office so that Lisa could write it out. Cheryl assumed that Lisa, like most family members of victims, would address the suffering of herself and her family. Lisa took the stand and in an unwavering voice read her statement.
“My name is Lisa Daniels and I want to thank you for this opportunity to share my heart today by allowing me to give this victim impact statement. I understand this to be a statement in my own words that informs the offender