I have been out on parole for two weeks after serving elven years in prison. When I was sentenced my crime was almost eight years in the past and as was said to me by my arresting officer, “We would have had no case if you hadn’t told us everything.”

I am guilty of what I admitted to, when I was twenty-three. I sexually touched my five-year-old niece. However, it’s not that simple and it isn’t that cut and dry. In order to give the entire scope of how this came to be, I have to go back to my youth and explain my family. I am the youngest of four children. The oldest sister “Lynn” was nine years older than me. Next my other sister “Kiki” was eight years older, just a year and a day behind Lynn. My brother “Tom” is just over fours years older but that doesn’t stop him from acting like the oldest. It was in 1986 that I was five years old and it was here that I really first remember what life was like. My parents were not in the best place to be parents and it created a pretty tumultuous household.

My father was an abusive alcoholic and my mother was co-dependent and an enabler. We had a lot of the classic symptoms of an alcoholic household. No friends over, secrecy, that uneasy sense of fear when my father would come home, and a lot of behavioral problems between the kids. My father was cruel with his words and mean with his temper, but our mother was there afterward to comfort us.

It was in this environment that Lynn started to explore with us younger kids. Lynn was always angry and domineering and would constantly be at odds with my brother. I remember her as being very forceful and commanding me to do things to her sexually. This went on for a few years until she left when I was around eight. She moved out as soon as she could and something began that I at that age couldn’t understand until now, my brother began to molest me. My brother though was even more forceful and typically mixed violence with sexual abuse. He would have friends over and tell me I had to do things for them. One of them even found times when I was alone to come to our house and rape me. I even went to the hospital because I was bleeding so bad, to which the doctors ultimately decided it must have been a peach seed. I didn’t eat peaches as a kid. My parents, well I don’t know how you could just let that go, but they did. My brother didn’t waste much time though and any act of defiance, assertiveness, or aggression from me was met with quick violence or threats to subdue me.

When I was around twelve I had my first girlfriend who was the girl who lived next door. My brother caught us making out one day in my room and forced me out of the room. I tried so hard to get back in there because I knew what was happening. When the door opened and she emerged I caught her eyes and I couldn’t look. I hated myself for having her there and for my brother, I was deeply wounded as I could feel her pain. Yet as our house went you took what abuse came and moved forward.

At fourteen I was dating the first girl I had kissed. We had snuck downstairs to play Duck Hunt and in between fooled around. My brother found us, only this time he didn’t make me leave he made me watch. Something broke in me at that moment and I shut down a part of me inside. I again blamed myself, If I hadn’t been there with her my brother couldn’t have hurt her.

At that point, I gave up on trying to be anything else other than what my family told me to be. As time went on Lynn had come back around and was up to her old tricks, although she paid more attention to my brother than anyone. They would constantly argue about who is more important and then disappear. Both of them were highly promiscuous with others and often would get into arguments when my brother would “go after” Lynn’s friends. However, Lynn would also get upset when he would date a new girlfriend. Meanwhile, my sister Kiki and I were sidecar participants as it was easier to get along to go along. Physical abuse turned into verbal and emotional abuse. This went on for years and the only reprieve I received was my junior year in high school and my mother moved us down to the city by ourselves. It was the first year I got A’s and B’s in school. It was also the only year as the following year my father and brother showed up and I dropped out of high school. I went to prom before this and my brother was so kind as to help me get a limo as he worked for a transportation company. However, the price seemed to be my date, as I was dropped off he insisted on helping her get home and they had sex. Shortly after this, I was introduced to pot and quickly found that I could escape all my feelings by just getting high.

My father kicked me out as I was seventeen, not in school, and getting high. So what would be the best place to have me go, my brother’s? My eighteenth birthday comes along and a girl I like was coming to a party everyone wanted to put on. As the girl and I talked I went to get drinks and when I came back she was gone, it didn’t take long to figure out where she was. As I opened my brother’s door he and his friend Mark were in compromising positions with her.

So I really fell into drugs after this and started to abuse my prescription for ADHD, Dexedrine. My brother left for North Carolina, Lynn was living in my parent’s rental property and I was descending quickly into the darkest holes I could find. I found myself out of work, out of money, and out of a place to live. As well because of my new drug habit, I had lost a lot of friends and found myself homeless. I became very ill with bronchopneumonia and the people around knew about my parent’s rental property, because we had used it as a crash house when it was empty, and decided to drop me there.

I found very little help or support from my family as my father refused to help or allow my mother to help. My sister Lynn was not willing to take on another project as my sister Kiki already lived in the basement. As I slowly recovered my mother begged me to stay there so I wouldn’t go back to the streets but I could already tell Lynn was acting odd. She had gotten married to a Born Again Christian “Ben” and they had two children, “Ashley” and “Rick”. I ended up moving in because Kiki wanted to leave the house as it was too much for her and she found a place to go. Lynn’s husband Ben was not great at life and didn’t excel at much, in fact, many times other family members called him “loser”. He finally decided he couldn’t keep trying schemes to make money and joined the Army. He did quite well however this was the time of 9/11 and the Iraq war was in full swing. He was shipped out to Ramstein Air Base and soon it was just Lynn, Ashley, Rick, and me. It didn’t take long for things to become odd. One evening I came home from work and found Lynn, Ashley, and Rick in front of the computer looking at graphic sexual images. She was showing the kids’ porn pictures. I honestly couldn’t believe it and asked what the hell she was doing, to which she responded for me to go away it was just “learning anatomy”. I went and got high.

Lynn had begun her little games before this. She would call me up to her room and as I went up the stairs I would find her door open and her undressing. She would ask for help with clothes, or the laundry basket. Another time she called me up to her room and when I went in I couldn’t find her and heard her again from the bathroom connected to her room. I leaned in to find her naked in the tub and wanted help to find a towel. She would take pills and get so out of it she would pass out on her bed half-dressed. I wouldn’t join in, I would just go down to the basement and get high, a lot. So finally Lynn started to send Ashley, who was five, down to the base to “spend time” with me. Now please understand at no point is any of this my niece’s fault and it should not be a bad thing to spend time with her uncle who should have been loving and caring. It started one day very simply and over about four weeks progressed to very things despicable of me. I can only say that thankfully I came to the realization of what I was doing, I realized I had become like my sister and brother and was the one hurting.

I left the home immediately and began a long journey of getting clean. I stopped using speed almost right away, but it took some time to stop using any drug altogether. I began to mend relationships that I had lost due to my drug use and tried to go to college even though I hadn’t completed high school. I began to work, dated a few different women, and found that the more I began to talk about my pain with people the better I started to feel. I finally was clean in May of 2009 and knew from that point on I did not was to abuse drugs again. I began to talk about getting mental health therapy but just couldn’t find a way to afford it. I started to try and open up more about what happened to me and what I had done to people. I was having a hard time but it was a beginning. It was in 2011 that everything changed. Up until this point I had reconnected with my family and began to look at them differently. I no longer saw them as people who orchestrated my life and pain but just as people who themselves were hurt and broken. My friends were instrumental in my new outlook and it was making me a more open and compassionate person. I had a good relationship with all my nieces and nephews and they all constantly wanted to spend time with me, including Ashley. I hoped that one day, soon I would be able to open up about it all fully, however, at that point, I was still so afraid of telling even one part of it. You tell one part you have to tell it all. So it was here that my prison journey begins.

On August 3, 2011, two officers come driving up on me outside my work as if I was going to bolt for it. I sat confused wondering why two men were driving like idiots. They got out and identified themselves and asked if they could talk to me at the station. I couldn’t I was on shift for another few hours. So they agreed to meet with me in a conference room with one officer and me. As I sat I honestly had no clue what they were there for until the officer said Ashley’s name. I remember being stunned that this was suddenly coming up. Yet as he talked I started to nod my head and cry and I began to spill my story to him. I unrolled everything that had occurred over fifteen-plus years. He sat stunned and by the end of it, he didn’t move. He finally got up and stated I could stay around and that he had to call someone. I went into my boss’s office full of tears and told him I was going away. He was concerned and asked why to which I could only say what he knew and told him “Remember I had said I didn’t know if I could be forgiven by God because of something I had done?” He saw me off as the officers came and officially arrested me. I went to the police station in the back of their pickup truck and they let me call my mother. She cried and said she already knew, and said she would come and see me soon.

At the station, it was a much different approach for me. They read me my rights and began to ask me to clarify my statements from before. They began to ask me for more victims, and I admittedly denied any as there were not. That didn’t matter, they said if there is one there are more and they had done this work before and they knew. They continued to go back to it over and over until finally, they wrapped up. They walked me out and told me I was going to be booked, and even said I would be released soon. I didn’t know what they were thinking, it was here one officer said “We would have had no case if you hadn’t told us everything.” I sat for hours in the holding cell, freezing with no blankets and nothing to sit on. Time dragged on and finally, the door opened. I walked out to see it was almost midnight and I had been booked around five in the afternoon. I was processed and housed for what would be the longest eleven months of my life.

I began to get phone calls and visits from friends and family. I found out quickly Lynn had been told I was very helpful and compliant and they wanted to offer me a 3rd-degree felony with probation. Lynn became upset by this and demanded I be charged to receive the most time I could. From another family member, it was said she even got upset with the prosecutors for even trying to offer that. As well she was very upset with me for trying to avoid facing justice by making up stories that involve her. The prosecutor then came to me and gave me no options, take a first-degree aggravated or face three in a trial. I didn’t want to put my niece through that, I was guilty I had admitted that. We tried so hard to offer multiple second-degree charges or modified if certain conditions were met. For a moment the prosecutor offered that if I took a psycho-sexual and “passed”, she would work on a better charge. So we arranged to take the full battery of tests for impulse control, sexual attraction, deviancy, all of it. It came back great and I showed normal attraction to women, no deviancy with pedophilia or sexualized violence. The prosecutor hated it and wouldn’t accept the results. She pointed out that one part of the examiner’s report stated that I had similar thought patterns that have been found in some rapists who were sentenced to prison. On the stand, he stated that this was for treatment purposes and didn’t mean I was a rapist or like a rapist. This went on and on in court. The prosecutor left on vacation and the district attorney actually had a meeting with us and from his own mouth said that from what he saw he didn’t understand why they didn’t just offer probation and move on. My prosecutor came back from her vacation soon after and she was not happy with me. Eventually, I took the plea deal for having no choice but to avoid dragging things out more and thankfully was sentenced to 10 to life instead of the 15 to life the charge normally comes with. The judge’s reason for reducing the time was that there was just too much mitigating evidence to justify the full sentence. However, he also said he would leave the rest to the Board of Pardons to sort out and that was it.

If you don’t know, in Utah the Board of Pardons rarely, and in rarely I mean never, releases anyone sooner than their minimum when it comes to first-degree felonies. So for ten years and eight months I do everything I can to learn about what happened, how could it have been avoided, and what to do to make sure things change with me. I never receive a single write-up, and I work the entire time I was incarcerated. after almost 10 years of prison I go to SOTP and finally enter therapy. To which I learn how to deep breaths and count backward to help cope. The good part was being able to talk to a professional therapist and really start to get clarification. She learned fairly quickly as other staff did that I’m not interested in offending, I absolutely take accountability, and I really want to try and make something good out of all of what has happened. She even brought up that I must feel like prison is a lot like growing up in my family. I laughed at this and said for many years I had been saying growing up in my family was like boot camp for prison.

The good news is I was released on April 5th, 2022, and have been trying to acclimate to being out. The hardest part of all of this is not getting used to the people, the freedom, the responsibility. No, the worst part of all of this is the constant fear and worry of having to go back to prison for something minor, some misstep I could take. I have heard so many stories of people coming back to prison for things you wouldn’t think should be off-limits. Yet you have this constant reinforcement that you’re the worst piece of garbage because you’re a registrant and the world would be better if you just stayed in prison. I just learned I have to take polygraphs while on parole and if I fail them I could get more restrictions or get sent to prison, even if I’m telling the truth. All the while you’re constantly under the watch of the registry, never living down your worst moment.

I still wake up every day and try to be positive. I hold no hate towards anyone including my family for anything that happened. I just want to start my life, for the first time in my life I was to start a life. I lived in fear throughout my childhood. I was in a drug haze through my twenties. Then my thirties were incarcerated. I have not had a chance to show what I can do right, and I hope every day for that chance. Thank you for your time, thank you for your work.

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