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Suicide
of young sex offender told by his Mother to journalist Bill Johnson
| I
read the testimony of: "Desperate from unknown state". The fears for
children, grandchildren, etc. to be physically and severely emotionally persecuted
by peers and the rest of society. I live with that fear daily and I am only
"Secondarily Sentenced". I read this story in the newspaper and
I recalled "Desperate's" letter and I wanted to e-mail this article
to you to see ifyou would want to publish it. "Desperate", a sex
offender, lost his daughter (Secondarily Sentenced") to suicide and the Mother
(Secondarily Sentenced) in this article lost her son, a sex offender because of
persecution from his current probation officer and fear. | Johnson:
Grieving mom reflects on son's struggle with probation
November 22, 2003
She wanted me to write this one to Marie.
It is a hell of a thing,
tell her, to have to bury your only son. It is an even worse, totally unimaginable
thing to arrive home from shuffleboard league to have to cut him down from the
basement ceiling.
Debbie Gillis wants Marie, her 24-year-old son's probation
officer, to know that she didn't have to be so tough with him those final weeks.
That Jeremiah wasn't, at all, a bad boy. That she misses him so.
All of it goes back six years, to that 14-year-old girl who lived across the street.
Their entire Golden neighborhood knew she was smitten with Jeremiah, then 18.
The way she would leave roses, love letters and condoms for him on his car.
There was the party up in the mountains that summer, the one his friends
invited him to, the one the girl got herself invited to.
The people across
the way noticed the strange cars at the party house. And they called police. In
mid-raid, they noticed the rumpled bed. They pulled the girl aside.
If
she just told the truth, they told her, her parents wouldn't have to know a thing.
Jeremiah left the party in handcuffs. The judge sentenced him to a diversion program
on a sexual assault charge.
The mandatory urine testing sent Jeremiah
fleeing to California that first year. He'd smoked marijuana, he told his mother.
He'd never pass. And he couldn't go to jail.
She talked him back home.
They put him on more intensive probation. Soon, he failed another test. And he
fled again. This time, it was a year before she could talk him into coming home,
facing up.
His life had changed. Probation had been extended and, by
all accounts, he was doing well, passing everything. Mindy, his probation officer,
encouraged him, counseled him. He got a job.
Six months ago, with 1 ½
years left on probation, they assigned Marie to his case. "He felt he couldn't
do anything right for her," Debbie Gillis said.
Under terms of probation,
he had to reveal everything about his life. Jeremiah had met a girl, Jennifer.
The day Marie arrived, Jennifer was leaving the house, and everything spiraled
out of control.
Who was this Jennifer, Marie wanted to know. And out
of her briefcase came a breathalyzer. Jeremiah had consumed two beers.
She strapped a monitoring device on his ankle. She ordered him to take Antabuse,
a drug that causes a severe physical reaction when a user has been drinking.
The drug zapped him. He became zombie-like. He'd freeze in traffic on his
way home from work and call his mom to rescue him.
"He was dead
inside," Debbie Gillis said. "You'd look in his eyes, and nothing would
be there."
She briefly persuaded Marie to take him Jeremiah off
the drug. But then she ordered him to start taking it again.
When Jeremiah
began climbing into Debbie Gillis' bed at night, hugging her tight, she rushed
him to a psychiatric ward for an evaluation.
Doctors prescribed
three anti-depressants. Even with the Antabuse, it seemed to make Jeremiah better.
It was two weeks ago that Debbie took Jeremiah to his scheduled visit with
Marie. Although Jeremiah was better, Debbie said, he was still distant, as if
living in another world.
"I'm losing my son," the mother cried.
Debbie said Marie replied by saying, "That would be a scary thing."
Jeremiah came out of that meeting more afraid than ever.
"He
as so afraid, paranoid that she was going to send him to jail," Debbie Gillis
said. "He would have never made it in jail. He didn't have a mean bone in
his body."
She buried him Wednesday afternoon.
Debbie Gillis
had left him the Saturday morning before to go to her shuffleboard league. He
was watching TV. When the last of her matches was over, she called home. He barely
spoke. "What's the matter with you?" she asked him.
He barely
responded. "He was just hollow," she said, " just empty."
She asked Jennifer to call. There was no answer. Debbie tried three
more times. No answer. "I have to go. I have to leave," she told her
friends.
Her business partner accompanied her home. They found Jeremiah
hanging from the ceiling.
"I tried CPR," she said softly. "But
I know he was lifeless when I got there."
Jeremiah used to be "a
happy, happy kid," his mother said after the funeral, attended my more than
200 people. "He was so scared. He got that hopeless. And they scared him
into suicide. I believe this."
"He made a bad mistake when
he was 18. He didn't molest a 3-year-old baby."
Debbie expects that
Marie will say she just was doing her job. But Jeremiah's mom says the system
must have degrees of penalties and punishments that fit the individual parolee.
Jeremiah's mom remembers one of the last things she asked Marie: "Aren't
you here to help these people?"
She also remembers her curt reply:
"That's not my job. I'm only here to protect the community." | |
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