Narrator / Producer Voice (4:04)
So it was 2019. I was 48 years old, had been in my career for 25 years, had been married to my wonderful wife for 27 years. We had three great kids who were growing up too fast. And my parents were still alive, lived close by together and still in our lives. My life changed in March of that year with a text message. My wife and I had done ancestry DNA several years before this just to kind of find out where we came from. And through that, a woman had reached out to her trying to figure out how the two of us were related. My wife gave her a ton of answers. All of those got shot down after we sent them back to her. And we were kind of at a dead end until this text message came through. And when this text message came, everything was different because she had an answer herself. She said that her sister had a baby boy born in 1970 in Dallas on my birthday and she thought it was me and that my parents just never told me they adopted me. That sounds like a shock. And it was initially, and it really turned into kind of blowing it off and thinking this poor lady is out in left field and we got to help her. So we agreed we're going to do some research, get her back on the right track. I'll look at my birth certificate, we'll figure some things out, and we'll help her out. In less than 24 hours, all I had was more questions than answers. I suddenly realized that my mom had never talked about being pregnant with me. I had never had the mom guilt trip of I was in labor for you for this many hours and this is what you've done or how you treated me. And I had never seen a picture of her pregnant. So I came to the hard conclusion that at 48 years old, I was going to have to ask my parents if I was adopted. I came up with a brilliant plan to call my dad's cell phone because he never answers his cell phone, leave a message and plan a lunch date where we can get together, talk. And eventually I'm going to weave into the conversation. Hey, funny story. This lady says I'm adopted. That's not right, right? For the first time. And as long as I can remember, instead he answered the phone. So after a little small talk, I went to hey, let's go have lunch together. And he's like, oh, yeah, sure. Why Will? Nothing important. I went through all the reasons why you might need to talk to your parents at that age. Everything was fine. And the more I deflected, the more he'd come back to, I want to meet you for lunch. I just want to know what we're going to talk about. So I finally gave up and realized that I'm going to ask my 79 year old dad over the phone if I'm adopted. And that's why I said, dad, this lady's reached out to us saying that her sister had a boy and it's me and the child adopted me, didn't tell me, is that true? And there was nothing but silence on the other end of the phone. I could hear his fingers drumming on what later I learned was his dashboard. He had run an errand that day and that's why he answered his cell phone. And after a long pause, I got, yeah, Bradley, you're adopted. And we've been trying to figure out how to tell you. If that initial 48 year old secret wasn't a big enough shock, it came with two more. My birth mother had died 19 years before I ever found out I was adopted. I was never going to close that part of my story up. The flip side of that was my biological father is very much alive, but he had been in Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana for the last 50 years for murder. So that sent me on a mad research dash to find out everything I could about this man, why he was in prison, who he was, anything I could learn about him. Back in Louisiana in the 70s, they didn't keep a whole lot of court records. Everything I found ended up being through the newspaper. I was able to piece together his crime, his eventual conviction. I actually found a picture of the man he killed wrapped in a sheet laying on the side of the road while I did all this research. I was really okay with the story. It was a weird story to have, but as long as I didn't personalize it for myself, that was fine. It was just a funny story to tell. People, people. All that changed when newscaster Lester Holt decided to do a 48 hour special on Angola State Penitentiary. He spent three nights there, recorded everything, met a bunch of people, recorded everywhere in the prison. And when I watched that, everything suddenly became personal. Where I had made my dad a very or my biological father a concept in my life, all of a sudden he was a real person in a real place that I had now seen and I couldn't stop thinking about it. That led to therapy, and therapy led to a pretty quick conclusion of I have to meet my biological father once to put that part of my story to bed just so I can have it done. Going to Angola gave me a lot of time to think about what it was going to be like to meet him. It's an eight hour drive out there and this is probably a good time to tell you all that successful 25 year career I talked about at the first of the story has been as a police officer. So I already had a vision of who I was going to meet. I'm not saying everybody in prison and jail is like this, but I am saying the majority of the people I've dealt with are not responsible for anything that happened in their lives. If the world was more fair, they wouldn't be there. And at the end of the day, none of this was their fault. Before I became a police officer, I worked in the jail. I learned in the jail that I couldn't ask anybody what they had done. I had to say, what did they say you did? And then you would tell me why you were in jail. Because nobody in jail had done anything. So this was the man I was expecting to find just based on my past experience and after a 48 year cover up, I was not interested in having somebody else that was just going to BS me and tell me more stories. Getting to Angola is different than anywhere else I've ever been before. It's a beautiful tree lined blacktop road. You're in rural Louisiana. It's not a bad drive. Suddenly you round a bend of trees and you find yourself staring at a prison gate that says Louisiana State Penitentiary and a crossbar across the whole road. And you can either turn around and go back where you came from, or you go to prison. There's no other place to go. So I got checked into the prison, ferried back to the camp he was in, and found myself sitting in a visitation room. That visitation room didn't really look like the visitation rooms you see in movies. There wasn't a glass between everybody. It looked more like an old church meeting room. It was white cinder block walls, tan tiles. There's a mural painted on one wall with these white plastic tables and the same plastic chairs I sat in in high school. So I sat down and started wondering if I was going to recognize him when he came in, because I had seen some pictures of him, but none that were super recent. When he walked in the room, I knew immediately who he was. It just clicked. I looked at him, I was like, oh, that's what I look like when I'm 70. Okay, got it. Cool, huh? I stood up, held onto the table to keep myself standing, and watched as he walked towards me and ran through. All the things you do when you meet your father for the first time. Do you hug him? Do you kiss him? Do you shake his hand? Do you just say hello? He didn't know about me until I knew about him. My mom kept her pregnancy secret from him, and my parents kept my biological family secret from me. He walked up, we did the dude handshake and hug thing and both sat down and he started off. Our conversation with, son, it's good to meet you. And I want to start out by being honest. Well, all the alarm bells went off in my head because all these years of work, when you say, I want to be honest with you, that's usually the last thing that's going to happen the rest of the conversation. So all my defenses went up and I thought, okay, here we go. Let's see what this is. And he said, I could tell you that I'm in prison because of drugs and alcohol, because I was doing both of those when I committed my crime. But the truth is, I did a horrible thing that I can never take back or fix, and that's why I'm here today. From the moment he said that, I was hooked because he was suddenly an adult, even though I'm an adult now, being honest with me. And after that, instead of dropping that subject, he continued on about his life prior to prison and his life in prison. That didn't paint him in a better picture. The more he talked, the more I kept thinking, man, you should stop. I would never know this about you, and that's cool. It's good, you should stop telling things. But he kept going and he kept going, and when he finally got done, we tried to catch up. As you can imagine, a man in his 70s and a man in their 40s getting to know each other for the first time as father and son. We talked about my life as a kid, his life as a kid and as an adult before he ended up in prison, and weirdly enough, circled all the way back to my job as a copy in his life of crime before he went to prison, and how cops and criminals had changed from the 60s and 70s to the now 2000s. And we're all very different. At the end of the visit, I left and got out to the prison gate, still a little confused, because this was my planned one and done visit. I didn't intend to do more than one of these. First person I've called, of course, was my wife. She was excited and probably a little bit nervous because I had told her I'd be in there an hour or two. They let me stay for eight hours. So she picked up the phone, she's like, how'd it go? And I was like, I don't know what to tell you, but I genuinely like this man. I don't know what to do with that. So I drove back, settled into the idea that I'm going to go visit him again soon. We'll get to know each other more. I didn't know prison. I knew by then, but I didn't know initially prison had email. You can email people in prison. So we were emailing, calling, and I was already thinking, okay, it's going to be another visit pretty soon. Instead, less than a month later, the dad that had raised me my whole life died. Three weeks after my dad died, that little COVID pandemic started, and there was no prison visitation anymore. The upside to Covid was they suddenly instituted video visitation. So instead of just talking to him on the phone and writing emails, I could see him once a week for 10 minutes at a time as we got to know each other, which kept him a real person in my head because I could see him all the time. The more we got to know each other, the more I found myself liking him more and thinking I couldn't really understand why he was still in prison. I knew he took another man's life. I knew what his sentence was, but it didn't seem to be serving anybody any more purpose. He had rehabilitated. I felt like he was nowhere near the man that he was in 1972 when he walked in. And I started wondering about what would be the possibility of ever getting him out. While I was going through that, the Louisiana state legislator was also working on some bills that would help men like him have the eligibility for parole that they had never had before. While we were getting to know each other, one of the things that happened was he and I kept talking back and forth. I called him Jim. Jim was his name that was safe. That still kept him at a little bit distance, and that made me feel safe. But then I started realizing I liked him and I was lying to myself. Yes, his name was Jim, but he was also my father. But I couldn't call him dad because I had an awesome dad and I wasn't cool with letting anybody else share that title. So we bounced back and forth in conversation. He suggested father one time that reminded me of Star Wars. Like, that's too formal. I'm not doing that. So we settled on Pop. And Pop and I kept getting to know each other, kept talking. Luigi and the legislator kept doing what they were doing. And finally they proposed a bill that would make him ultimately eligible for parole for the first time in his life in 50 years. While we were waiting for that bill to become law and finally happen, Covid visitation restrictions finally lifted and I could go see him. During that visit, we really talked more about what it would be like if he actually got out. There was no guarantee. Only thing that he was guaranteed was a parole hearing at some point, but no guarantee of actually getting out. But we were daydreaming. At the end of that visit, he got up to be escorted out of the visitation room and go be searched and taken back to his dorm. And he stopped at the doorway and with this big vandal's grin, says, hey, I love you, son. And I stood there dumb looking, like I didn't know what to say because I'd been thinking I loved him for a while. I didn't know how to tell him that, didn't know if he wanted to hear that from me. And I finally mumbled like, I love you too, Pop. And just. And then he was gone. So I found myself in November of last year back in Angola State Penitentiary, sitting in a room with him for his first parole hearing in 50 years. The terrifying part about a parole hearing was it was a unanimous vote to be released. If one person didn't like you, out of the three person panel, you were staying in prison for the remainder of your life. The first two votes came pretty quickly. One lady looked like a Kindergarten teacher. She was cool with anything anybody said, nodded the whole time. She was thrilled to be there. And as soon as she could vote, she's like, oh, I think he should have parole. Okay, cool. The second guy had a longer speech, but pretty quickly voted for parole. The third person that was the final vote had looked mad during the entire hearing. Frowned, brow furrowed, arms crossed. It was like we had interrupted his kid's birthday party and made him come to a parole hearing, and it wasn't cool with him. And he started off on a speech about punishment, the need for people that commit horrible crimes to be in prison, why it's important to keep people in prison for an appropriate amount of time. And the more he talked, the more I thought, oh, we're screwed. This is done. I thought we had a shot, but it's going to crush me to watch him not be able to walk out. I should also mention, during this hearing, the family of the victim testified against my father's release. That was a gut punch to me and for my father, too, because we got to hear what the effect of his crime had been long term on a family that he had never known anything about. So as we watched this last man process all of that, he finally paused in the middle of his speech and said, but and but. Came with a conversation about redemption and change and the good things that can happen to people in prison to make them worthy for a second chance. At the end of the speech, he voted yes for parole. And. I jumped up. I hugged my dad, my pop, and just kept telling him, it's over, we're done, you're coming home. And after that hearing, I found myself the next day sitting outside Angola waiting for him to come out instead of me going in. When he walked out, it was probably the third best day in my life. Short of marrying my wife and watching my kids be born, there was nothing cooler I'd ever seen. Since that day, we've gotten to get to know each other in a normal way. If any of y' all are old enough, if you're young, Google it when you get home. Bedknobs and Broomsticks won as the best special effects movie the year he went to prison. Great movie. I got to take him to see Avatar 2. I can't tell you anything that happened in Avatar 2, but I can tell you that watching him was fun because it was nothing he had ever seen before on a big screen like that. On top of all that, he gets to support me in some of my fun endeavors like this one here tonight, because he's here celebrating about six months of release. And to that, I just want to say that I'm proud that you're here with me, and I love you, and I'm glad you're in my life. Thank y'. All.
