December 24, 1976, Christmas Day I give my wife all the presents I bought for her, and she opens each one with a look of total indifference. She is not smiling, no joy, only a blank expression. When she finally finishes opening the last one, she tells me that, “She didn’t get me anything. She didn’t think we were going to buy each other gifts this year.” I respond by saying, “It’s OK. I didn’t need anything.”

I am use to strange behavior, after living with someone with manic depression (bipolar disorder) for six years, but by January, there seems to be something else going on. She started taking some extra-curricular college courses a few months before and now has regular phone conversations with a male classmate “about classes.”

 

I finally have to confront her about the new behavior or indifference she is showing toward me, and all the phone calls to this classmate.

She totally crushes me with her response. She admits that she is sleeping with this classmate and professes her love for him, then goes on to confess to sleeping around with other men for several years. I always work days, while she likes working night shift as a nurse at a hospital. Many of the people she sleeps with are co-workers at the hospital.

 

I feel like my heart had been ripped out of my chest. I finally understand the word heartache. I lost twenty-five pounds in two weeks from not eating. Going from 180 pounds down to 155 pounds, I have to buy new clothes. At my job at the bank, I feel like a zombie. I am barely functioning as I try to wrap my head around her confessions and try to take care of my four-year-old son.

My wife makes it clear she does not want to be married or have a child to raise. She wants the freedom of being single. When I could see no alternative, I wanted to end the marriage as quickly as possible.

 

In 1977, a divorce could take a while, cost a lot, and often required proof of infidelity. I heard of couples taking vacations to Santa Domingo in the Dominican Republic and getting quickie divorces before the tax year was over, so they could file as single on their tax return. They would then remarry the next year. This was because of inequities in the tax laws at the time. I call a travel agent and am able to arrange the trip and divorce as a package deal. March 17, 1977, I am divorced and free to move on with my life.

 

By September of that year, I remarried, thinking it would be best for my son. I married a co-worker who lost her husband to a heart attack at the same time as my divorce. It begins by eating lunch together and soon she is taking my son to be zoo and cooking meals for us. She seems to be interested in Aaron and cares about him. I am convinced she will be good to him.

 

There is an old cartoon that shows a man on his wedding night, getting ready for bed with his new wife, and the bride is sitting at a dresser removing a facemask of a beautiful woman, revealing underneath the horrible face of a witch. This is something like my second marriage.

It starts with her making a “honey-do” list of the things she expects me to get done in the condo. She also demands that Aaron immediately begin calling her mother. I want to make things work out. The last thing I want is another divorce.

 

At four and a half years old, Aaron leaves home by himself twice. The first time, I got a call from an off-duty police officer at 6:30 AM asking if I knew where my son was. I answer, “Of course I do. He’s in his bed.” He is not. He has walked off a couple of blocks. Thanks to God’s protection, he ends up on the porch of a police officer. After the second time, the police warned me that they would take him away from me if it happened again.

I took him to three psychiatrists with no results, just frustration.

 

From the time Aaron enters kindergarten and until he leaves school at seventeen, he stays in trouble. I make regular trips to the principal’s office.

 

By the time Aaron is seven, I feel like I have been living in the movie “The Exorcist.” I go to his room at 6:30 AM to wake him, and he is not there. I find him sitting outside in a lotus-like position, naked in the freezing cold. His lips are blue, and he looks like he is in a trance. I am reaching the point that I feel like Doctor Frankenstein when he realizes he has created a monster. I feel so hopeless, I actually think about a murder-suicide.  I turn him over to God.

 

By age thirteen, I was making regular trips to the emergency room. One time, it was from an accidental stab wound while playing with a knife with a friend, and then again for a broken bone in his hand from beating on a kid who was bullying a smaller kid. The next day, I make another trip to the principal’s office.

 

At fourteen, Aaron wants to look like a rock star, so we let him grow his hair to shoulder length and dye it blonde. A twenty-year-old man at the mall calls him a queer, and he breaks his jaw. The police banned him from the mall.

 

I found out that Aaron is going to school drunk, so I poured out all the liquor in the house.

 

Aaron gets arrested for the first time at age fourteen, attempting to steal a car. I am required to get him a lawyer. He gets several months’ probation, and I am out of my house payment. Aaron runs away from home, planning to go to Mexico, and is picked up by the police a mile from the house. God is protecting him from himself.

 

When Aaron is fifteen, I divorce his stepmother. I feel that the constant commotion she is causing in the home is leading to his increasingly bad behavior. I have to remove the negative influences.

 

By sixteen, I can’t raise Aaron by myself and travel with my job. One overnight trip, I trust him and a friend to stay by themselves, with the other boy’s mother checking in on them. When I get home, the house is trashed from a wild party, and Aaron has left a note.

“Dad, I knew when you saw what I did, you would kick my butt. I am going to Mexico.

Love you, Aaron.”

 

I am not sure if I will see Aaron again. Once again, God intervenes. I get a call from a friend of Aaron’s telling me where to find him. I sent Aaron to live with his mother, whom he has not seen in years. She is going to experience hell.

 

At seventeen, Aaron decides he wants to have some fun like the chase scenes in the “Dukes of Hazzard.” At one point, he comes up out of a corn field and jumps his car between two police cars waiting at the top. The police chase him across two counties in Iowa in his Pontiac Trans AM. He serves three months in jail and is diagnosed as an antisocial sociopath.

 

At eighteen, Aaron is on his own and gets a job running cable by climbing poles with nothing but spikes and a belt. He meets a woman twice his age in Andrews, Texas, and moves in with her.

 

By twenty-one, he had moved back to Fort Worth and had met the man for whom he would later be executed for murdering. This same man introduces him to the vice president in Dallas for the Hell’s Angels and the man in charge of the Mexican drug dealers. Aaron becomes the enforcer known as “Conan.”

 

Aaron is repeatedly getting thrown in jails around the DFW area for a day or two. On one occasion, he beats up a guy who is picking on a woman in a bar. Aaron spends two days in jail, and the guy spends two weeks in the hospital. Every time I tell my son, “You need to stay out of bar fights before you get killed,” I hear a new story about how he can’t be killed. He always stops short of saying he killed someone else.

 

For fun, Aaron and a friend buy old Vietnam flak jackets, paint them black, and stencil DEA on the backs. They then dress in black and go to some drug houses. When they get there, they kick the door in and yell DEA. They then proceed to shoot anyone there and rob the place.

 

It isn’t until the age of twenty-three that Aaron confesses to me that his stepmother had abused him until about the age of eleven. She would take advantage of him when I was out of town. With the exception of one time, I never saw any physical marks on him. Aaron said one of the punishments was to make him stand by his bed all night and not sleep.

 

Finally, at twenty-four years old, Aaron decides to try to do something more positive with his life. He joins the Army.

In 

April 1997, he is nine days away from leaving for training when he goes to a friend’s apartment to party. The friend’s girlfriend fights with her boyfriend, and when Aaron says something about her behavior, she attacks him. She jumps on his back, pulling his long hair and leaning over him. She bites into his chest, leaving a full set of teeth impressions in his flesh. He then hit her, and she went to the neighbors to get them to avenge her. After the fighting is over, Aaron is the last person standing and covered in blood. Even though it is self-defense, the police arrest him. With felony charges hanging over him, the Army tells him he will have to get the charges resolved before they can take him.

 

After several weeks of sitting in jail and getting sick, I take pity on my son and bail him out. He has been told it can be a couple of years before his trial. Aaron is left with no job, no Army, and little else since he has prepared to leave town.

 

May 20, 1997, on my 48th birthday, I got a call telling me Aaron had been arrested for murder. On April 17, 1998, Aaron was sentenced to death. June 10, 1998, he refused appeals.

 

April 27, 1999, the last day I saw my son Aaron alive, I asked him how many men he had killed. I suspect that there is more to the many stories he has told me about his invulnerability. He says that he knows definitely that he had killed three people, but he did not normally stay around to see who lived or died. He then tells me the story about raiding drug houses for fun.

 

At the age of twenty-six on April 28, 1999, after spending less than a year on Death Row, Aaron was executed for the crime of capital murder. He is the second youngest and quickest execution in modern Texas history. He refuses all appeals. Aaron said, “It says in the Bible in order to be forgiven, you must be able to forgive. That’s what I’ve done. I’m paying for the life I took with my life. That should be the end of it.”

 

In his Death Row Bible is a quote from Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. “Now this is the Law of the Jungle – as old and as true as the sky. And the wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the wolf that shall break it must die.”

He knows what he is and is ready to die. Also written inside is;

 Romans 6:23 & 10:9-10.

“See you on the flip side.” A.C. Foust

 

The week after his execution, I am driving home from work, wondering what Aaron’s day is like in Heaven. I glance over at a little pickup truck in the lane next to me and see a custom license plate that reads “HEYDAD.” Whenever Aaron came over or called on the phone, his greeting to me was always, “Hey, Dad.” I think at the time, this is a “pretty neat coincidence.” A week later, I am coming home from work and stop behind a car that is waiting to go through a stop sign. I look at the license plate on the car in front of me, and again it is a custom plate, but this time it reads, “LUVUDAD.” My son, as he left or at the end of a phone call, would always say, “Love you, Dad.” I cry.