The Humble Hero

The Humble Hero

 I’m too old for this! I have tried to retire for ten years and you all keep pulling me back to coach or run in these races every time. I knew I couldn’t handle a whole race, please. I will always love you and the races, but I am no spring chicken anymore. I only do it to raise awareness for my charity, (S.H.E). Shelter for Help in an Emergency. I plan to pass the baton to someone else this year, and if you’re interested in winning, you’ve got to put someone faster on the anchor leg. My heyday was twenty years ago. Your new kid flash is over there playing water boy, Dustin. He’s always the first at practice and the last to leave. He lives and breathes for the team and you all have never seen him as any more than a tagalong. I bet none of you have ever seen him run. Don’t let the leg brace fool you. He still can run circles around most of your lazy butts.

 I will guess you don’t even know his story?  Do you even know how he earned that brace? I know he’s a humble hero, never regretting his decision to help the family escape their abusive father. His next-door neighbor uses his wife as a punching bag and the children were pawns in his twisted mind games. Every evening when I came down the block past the brownstone where they lived you could hear yelling from the first unit on the end. The police officers said he would kill them one day if she didn’t stop giving him an alibi. They knew he killed the previous tenant but needed to break his story. His wife swore he was home and the neighbors were all afraid except Dustin.

When the cops finally questioned the whole building, Dustin stepped up to the plate and told the police and reporters about the man who lived in the first unit for five years prior. That man was the super of the brownstone for the first four years that he’d been living there. Then one day the new family was in the unit and the man claimed he was the new owner and super. Things went unfixed and the rent was raised, although this doesn’t prove guilt. Dustin was headed home from work one Saturday evening when he was attacked and the ligament in his right leg was ripped. The attacker kept chanting “run no more Dustin, mouth off and die.”

The missing super used to wear a signet ring with a” W” in the center of a ruby, and Dustin counted how many times that ring slammed into the side of his face during the attack. At the hospital, Dustin insisted that he needed to speak to Detective O’Malley before surgery while the details were fresh. Dustin was known as “the shutterbug” around town. He looked at the world from behind his camera, like no one else. He could capture the world without being noticed. So, during the attack, he realized he had a picture with the missing super wearing the very ring now pounding on him.

 The hospital took pictures of each wound and the “W” was visible in at least two without enhancement. Dustin told the police exactly where in his unit to find the pictures from three weeks before the missing super’s death. Yes, death now, because while waiting for his turn to be patched up, a body was located at the city dump. Rolled up in a rug pictured in a photo from the unit on the end. Dustin saw that rug every month when he paid his rent for four years because the missing super was old school and only accepted cash payments.

Usually, the missing super didn’t open the door for people to pay and for repair requests, you called a number and left the issue and unit number. He would then call you with the two different time slots you have to choose from. You could not be home while he was fixing your problems. He had to accept delivered goods and sign the delivery guy’s book. Dustin is sure that the abusive father was once a fill-in delivery driver two days before the missing super disappeared.

Detective O’Malley met with Dustin before his surgery on Saturday morning 4/1/89. April’s fool day shook up the brownstone, especially the unit on the right lower end. Armed with a no-knock warrant at 4 a.m. arriving silently, four cars deep. Everyone in the first unit on the lower right end was taken away. The abusive father in one car, the battered mother in a car alone, and the children in another. The fourth car had 3 detectives that remained at the brownstone talking to the residents to see if anyone would like to add to the evidence that had been uncovered but folks were afraid to help.

Downtown, the wife was informed that new evidence had been brought to light and that she would not be prosecuted if she helped to clarify the truths. Also, if she continued to provide an alibi for her abusive husband she’d never hold her babies again. She was reluctant to speak against him until I assured her that we could protect them; her and the children. As soon as I explained that we only wanted to find Dustin’s attacker. The only thing I could question her about was the family dynamics. I assured her that the interview was being recorded for accuracy. My title is Social Services Clinician 4, I say this to inform you that I only want to protect your children. I want the very best for the whole family. I also offered a move them to a shelter, so she and the children would be safely away from the abuse. Knowledge of protection from him perked her up and then the words flowed.

I soon found out that we needed to contact social services in Virginia and Florida because the older children were abducted from those states. The woman thought to be the mother to all three was only twenty-two years old and kidnapped by the abuser, also. He has been trying to create a specific kind of family across several states after his wife left him and took their children to live next to her family to escape the abuse. His abusive nature is recorded in three different states against three different families. It’s been an old learned trait in the males of his lineage back four generations. His grandfather killed two wives and so did his father.

We don’t know how many other victims he abducted, or if there are any bodies unaccounted for. Unfortunately, that is an answer we will never know because he took the coward’s way out by suffocation, he stuffed a pillowcase down his throat, his fingers in his nose, and rolled over to sleep.