My brother was recently charged with attempted murder. This is a typical case of a victimized child becoming a criminal. The last 20 years of his life were marked by alienation and the failure of a community.
I blame the education system that rejected him, my emotionally inadequate mother who didn’t step up to support him, the people around him who meddled too much in his affairs, the police who lacked insight and the school of crime that shaped the adult he became.
I am giving you my testimony in order to relieve myself of the shame that I have carried within me for all these years and to encourage you to denounce the violence that you witness. Whether you are a teacher, neighbor, uncle, family friend. It could prevent other cases like this.
I was very marked by the place where the crime took place. It happened a stone’s throw from the crescent where we grew up. As a teenager, my brother rode his BMX through the parking lots of businesses in this area.
The crime allegedly occurred in a bedroom. For me, it’s very evocative. This is where the violence happened in our home.
When the news of my brother’s arrest broke, I felt a conflicting emotion: relief, then a lot of rage. First of all, the relief of knowing he was out of harm’s way for a while. He who accumulated around fifty accusations of all kinds, if I trust his notebook, was a time bomb. On the other side, rage. That of not having been believed and protected when I was little and I asked for help.
The brokenness
Something I’m not sure happened to my brother, I’m sure. It was broken around the age of 9-10. Memories are vague. But, overnight, he no longer wanted to go to my father.
He washed six or seven times a day. He started having night terrors and breaking everything in the house. In his fits, he would force my mother to come to bed, because he didn’t want to be alone.
These crises continued until his first incarcerations and grew as his drug use worsened.
However, I have sweet memories of his pre-adolescent period. He was a sensitive being with great intelligence. At age 12, he found a summer job as a dishwasher in a restaurant. With his money, he launched a business selling pocket bikes. It was the early 2000s: he had managed to buy minimotos which he kept in his room and which he sold to his customers online. It was the beginning of dial-up internet (internet connection via telephone call). He always had a pragmatic intelligence that impressed me.
* We are protecting the identity of the author of this letter so as not to reveal that of her brother, which could harm her right to a fair trial.
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