How A Judge Opened The Door To Freedom
A lot can change in a year, especially as a teenager. For me, the year between age 15 and 16 shaped the next decade of my life.
As a freshman at Mason High School, I was beginning to live out my dream. My whole childhood, I craved the day when I would finally play high school sports. I almost worshipped football and baseball and spent hours each day in my backyard throwing the football to myself, pretending to score the last second touchdown in some miracle finish.
So, when I was starting to play and excel in high school sports, I was one happy kid. My freshman year, I started at running back in the fall and twice scored three touchdowns in a game. In the spring, I won the MVP award on my baseball team.
I was on my way to a solid career and had a decent chance to get some type of athletic scholarship. Instead, just a year and half after that special freshman season, I was sitting inside of a juvenile prison, subject to sexual abuse from a very cold staff at Wolverine Secure Treatment Center.
It is extremely hard to write about this. I wrote about the trauma that deeply affected my adult life several years ago but deleted the story a day later in a state of regret. But today, I can look back and put all the pieces together and see how my life spiraled out of control in a short time.
The summer between my freshman and sophomore years of high school, I tried a tiny pill that I had been hearing about from some of my friends. They described it as the best feeling they had ever had and, besides, it was just a pill, not some illicit street drug.
I wanted to experience that feeling they were talking about. I was going through an extremely tough time; my dad had recently lost his job and my family ended up homeless. Sports gave me an escape from the sad, dark feeling that my family was experiencing at the time. In the summer, though, there was no school or sports to play, so I turned to drugs and alcohol. They helped me run from my problems. None made me feel quite as good as Oxycontin, the tiny drug that – little did I know – was really just heroin in pill form.
I got hooked fast. In less than two weeks, opiate withdrawal appeared when I didn’t use. I started stealing anything I could get my hands on, including out of my Dad’s wallet. I can’t begin to describe the amount of shame I felt when I stole from my father when he was already feeling like a failure.
I spiraled further and further until I got caught up with the law. After a youth center and rehab didn’t work, I was sent to Wolverine, a prison masqueraded as a rehab for kids. I was one of the first kids Ingham County ever sent to the facility. When my probation officer recommended the place, the judge had to look it up on the internet, right from the bench. Without any further research, he nonetheless went with the recommendation and sent me off.
When I arrived at Wolverine, I was placed in a unit with mostly kids from Detroit who were waiting to turn 18, when they would be transferred to the adult prison system. There was non-stop fighting, gangs ran the place and most of the staff treated me like a piece of trash. If that was the extent of it, I would have probably just moved on with my life after. Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case.
I was sexually assaulted by three staff members in the showers. I’m not going to go into detail, but I cried myself to sleep every night, feeling like I was in a different world, some form of hell on earth. When my probation officer came to do a check-up on me, I explained that I was being hurt, but he brushed it off as if I was just trying to say anything to get out.
It broke me. I spent a year there, leaving as a completely different person. I gave up on life. Within a month of leaving, I got back into opiates and eventually got hooked on heroin. I’ve now battled heroin addiction for over a decade, in an out of the criminal justice system.
The hardest part hasn’t been the jails and rehabs I’ve been in. It’s been learning how to come to terms and cope with the trauma. Trying to understand that I was just a kid, that it wasn’t my fault, that I didn’t have any chance to protect myself.
For years I stuffed the trauma down, deep into my soul, buried by layers and layers of opiates and alcohol. But every time I’d get sober, those scars would reappear, and I refused to address them. I didn’t start talking about it until recently, and it helped calm the storm a bit, but still, I couldn’t quite utilize all the tools and find real recovery. It wasn’t until a judge showed me mercy and recognized my trauma that I started to get it.
That judge was the Honorable Rosemary Aquilina. Nationally known as the judge who presided over one of Larry Nassar’s trials and encouraged hundreds of young ladies to share their stories, she helped me in a unique way that I never thought was possible.
After getting kicked out of Drug Court in East Lansing, my case was sent back over to circuit court and Aquilina was assigned my case. Sitting in jail waiting to be sentenced, I was anticipating a long jail or prison sentence. Resources had been exhausted on me and I was labeled as someone who “didn’t want to be helped.”
Instead, Aquilina gave me a chance. She read about my trauma in a pre-sentence investigation report, and instead of handing down punishment, she addressed the root causes of my addiction.
“You’ve been sent to all these different facilities and rehabs,” she said. “You haven’t had the chance to get comfortable with a therapist. They keep sending you to new therapists; no wonder you don’t open up. You don’t want to keep re-sharing your trauma with strangers.”
So, she asked me if there was a therapist I had built a relationship with. She said if I wanted help I could accept it and start addressing my trauma, or I could go to prison for three years. I was stunned. It blew my mind that a judge – of all people – could understand my trauma better than anyone. I had always carried this bitter taste towards the justice system because of what happened when I was a teen.
My attitude and outlook changed that day. It hasn’t been easy. I checked myself into a 90 day rehab and put myself into sober living. I’m making the most of my life. I am healing. I am not living with shame on a daily basis. When I look back on who I was that day Aquilina sentenced me, I can see an entirely different person.
Instead of just simply staying sober, I am living. I am a person in recovery. Everyone has some kind of demon or battle, but once you confront it, it doesn’t hold as much power.
I just want people to know that there is hope. There is a way out. I wasted over a decade of my life because I was more content on accepting the pain of addiction rather than face my trauma. Not anymore, and a big part of that was because of somebody else’s compassion, even from the most unlikely source.