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Monday May 12,2008

Where do I go from here ?

by Jazilynn

On August 5th of this year I received the most terrifying phone call from my cousin in Alabama that I had ever received in my life. My cousin called to inform me that my younger brother's picture had been shown on the TV news in Alabama (which is where they live, I live in SC.)

What my cousin told me after that is something I will never forget as long as I live. She preceded to tell me that she had been trying to get my father on the phone all day. My father was 88 yrs old,losing his hearing and could barely walk due to arthritis.

My brother, by his own choice declared himself as my father's caregiver, something I tried to fight numerous times by trying to move in. I tried to provide my father with outside help, I even enlisted his neighbors to check on him because due to the fact that my brother and I didn't get along and I couldn't spend more than a few weeks in the house with him.

I always ended up leaving mainly because of the safety of my kids but also because my Dad believe that my brother would harm one of us. Well my brother did more than harm us! Apparently my brother, who had been known in the past to abuse drugs (although he hid this so well that not even his probation officer could catch him) took our dad's life.

Just a week before this all happened my husband who is a over the road truck driver was headed to Texas and was traveling through Alabama and stopped in to check on my Dad, which he often did. He later called me to tell me that my Dad was upset because 2 of his checks bounced that he had written for his medicine and he had to go to court about that. I called my cousin and asked her to go check on my Dad to find out what was going on. I did that because most of the time when I called my father (which is long distance) he wouldn't pick up the phone.

So she went the next day after church. Because of my brother she took along her husband and one of her brothers, and while they were there they called me. They informed me that my Dad was okay, he was alittle skittish about going to court. My cousin Sophie told him that she would go with him which would have been the next week, he said all he was waiting for was his SSI check to come on the 1st and he would pay off the checks.

I told my Dad to let God's angels help him to take care of this problem, knowing that my Dad was very stubborn and set in his ways and use to doing thing for himself. But this time he agreed that he needed help and I asked him if he wanted me to drive down to help him and he told me that that was okay now that my cousins were going to help him. So I felt confident that he was going to be well taken care of. With the exception of my brother everybody else in our family are church going Christians. I hung up feeling goodm not knowing that that would be the last time I would talk to my Dad.

In a matter of days my brother stole my dad's SSI check and when my Dad asked him about it, they, according to witnesses, got into a huge argument in the front yard and that was the last time anybody in the neighborhood saw Dad alive.

Police believe my brother shot my Dad while he slept, dragged him through the house and put him in the trunk of my Dad's car and then went and committed an armed robbery with my father dying in the trunk.

A week later while we were trying to make preparation to go down, they found the car at the airport in Birmingham and the day after we arrived down they caught my brother, not far from where they found the car, but not before he was seen back in the neighborhood near my Dad's house.

Later the police informed me that his motive was simply that he hated my father and me for sending all those people to check in my Dad.

It'll be 2 months October 3rd, 2005 and I haven't even begun to grieve yet. I'm so angry at my brother but mostly at myself because I wasn't there to protect my Dad. Everybody knew how my brother was. When my mother became ill 8 years ago while she was in the hospital she told me to give my brother his share of her insurance money and to get out of her house. My brother didn't even bother to show up at the hospital until the morning she passed. And that conversation was one I never told my Dad, mostly because I didn't know how to.

Now where do I go from here? How do I love someone who did this? I know I'm going to have to face him sometime soon and I can't even imagine how I'm going to get to that point. Right now the only thing I feel for him is hate and I know that's wrong, but he could have left my Dad there, he could have called me or one if our cousins or even one of the neighbors. He didn't have to take my dad's life -- somebody who basically took care of him long after he should have.

My brother was 39 yrs old, barely kept a job and when he did work my dad drove him back and forth, sometimes late at night never asking my brother for anything. My brother never paid any bill, didn't have any kids and never got married. My dad was all he had, everybody else in the family had given up on him years ago, including me. We all just put up with him because we had to. Now he's sitting in jail with a capital murder charge and nobody wants to have anything to do with him.

I'm a 42 year old wife and mother of 3. My children are ages 19,18, and 16. It's 2005 and I've been married now for 16 years.