Chapter 14: Moving to Protective Custody

The guards seemed to have no compassion for individuals who might be innocent and are supposed to be considered innocent until proven guilty.

When I was in my cell I watched guards pass by my cell checking for something. I don't remember them looking inside. I NEVER saw a sense of concern. I would try to get their attention when I needed help with something. 

They didn't care. 

When they walked by my cell, they seemed like inhuman creatures. 

My body was reacting in strange ways to this captivity. I was having panic attacks where I would feel overwhelmed by surges of adrenaline. Thinking I was going to die. Feeling short of breath. I would push the button in my cell as a way to cry out to see a doctor or nurse, but no one cared.

At least no one cared for a good long time until for some reason when I was moved to protective custody. This was a symbolic effort in my mind that someone somewhere cared enough to try to protect me. 

Some people were put in protective custody because they were going to testify against other members of their gang. They remained in their cells whenever others were let out. 

I met someone there who was an older man. He was found to have been printing photographs of young of boys and maybe girls in various stages of undress... perhaps nude. It was a shameful crime... it was hard to feel compassion for this man. What had he done to children? Why? How?

I also met a guy whose intellect was not so great like his insight. He had strangled his wife or girlfriend to death. His parents were very supportive. I thought they would offer me a place to stay when I was released. Who knows if that was a good idea but it never panned out. 

I also discovered new things about my gender and how we think of gender. I met a very effeminate person who went by the name Lulu. She was born male but identified as female.

She was an African American woman who was born a man. I am sure she had male genitalia. I didn't care.

She was very kind and sweet to me. I needed to be close to someone. No, you don't get that much privacy in the Durham County jail... nothing remotely intimate happened. Not physically intimate.

I thought she was attractive though. I only remember noticing her legs and her face.

While I did find some comfort and humanity from Lulu, there was no way to change the reality of what was happening to me. My entire life hung in the balance. I was terrified every moment of every day.

I had reached out to my so-called family from the depths of my pain and desperation. Surely, a mother would be moved by the unjust suffering of her firstborn son. For reasons I will never understand, nor can I forgive, both parents abandoned their own flesh and blood - they abandoned the son who shared the same name as his father - I am Bruce Martin Whealton Jr and his name is Bruce Martin Whealton Sr.

I spent seven months in jail! Seven nightmarish months.

Despite my desperate pleas, my family lacked human compassion and empathy. What little capacity they once had for somewhat normal human emotions had died. My sister also could have done something. They all had the means to rescue me. They knew just how horrifying this was, and yet they did NOTHING!

It would be literally impossible for me to not act to hire a lawyer and free my siblings or a parent, or even a son or daughter if I had one. If this had happened to a child of mine or a brother or sister, it would be impossible for me to go on with life and it would be impossible for me to leave that loved one in jail and with only the support of a public defender. 

They had already seen the failure of public defenders when a few years earlier a public defender failed me... failed to do even the minimal efforts needed to prove my innocence against made up charges.

They didn't even come to visit me! That is an act of evil in the faith in which they raised me. It is a mortal sin!

Their capacity for ignoring the pain of someone they were supposed to love knew no limits or bounds.

I don't know why I expected them to act like real human beings. They had been demonstrating their inhumanity for a long time now - since Lynn got sick in August of 2000.

Years later, my second wife said that you don't treat your enemies that way! That's true. Their actions were evil!

The faith in which I was raised does not allow for us to act this way. Everything about how they acted over these years goes against everything I was taught as a Christian. I have since metaphorically divorced myself from them. They are my ex-family.

I had kept in touch from time to time with my sister. She said she and our parents (my ex-parents) knew I was innocent of everything I was ever accused of doing. That wasn't surprising, actually.

I know that I did not deserve this to happen to me.

My so-called family could not even be bothered to bring me clothes to wear when I was released from jail.

I was released finally, in May, to await the trial.

I moved to Chapel Hill where it was safer. I was staying in the homeless shelter. After my release, I met with my lawyer for thirty minutes, if that. My lawyer had told me that I would sit on the stand and tell my story and that no one in the jury would believe that I was capable of doing what I was accused of doing. That was the plan.

He said he knew I was innocent. He knew that I had described myself as the victim and with details. I had asked him if he could test the bloody clothing that I had been wearing. He said that since I wore it outside of jail after I was released this could not be done to help my case.

He had seven months to do something like this! I had written to him countless times when I was in jail.

Everybody had failed me! My lawyer who was appointed by the court could have secured the bloody clothing. He could have reached out to my family and made sure I had something to wear when I left. 

Instead he let me leave jail in the same bloody clothes I was wearing seven months earlier and since I wore them after being released, they could not be used in my defense.