A Saint on Death Row Read Free Page A

sexually abused by staff, especially on visitors’ days when no one ever showed up to see him. While other children were receiving visits from family members, Dominique was lying on his bed in a pool of his own blood, which leaked from his torn anus. Pedophiles, always drawn to jobs that entail unsupervised work with children, are also keenly aware of which children lack adult protection. (A series of reports in the
Dallas Morning News
, beginning in February 2007 and picked up by newspapers such as the
New York Times
, has brought to light that the sexual abuse of minors has long been pervasive in Texas's institutions for juvenile correction.)
    In his late twenties, Dominique would look back on his personal experience of sexual abuse in a poem entitled “What does hate create?”:
    I watch him
        cry out        
        stretched out
        turned inside out
and nobody does anything
no one utters a peep
but everyone knows what happened
and feels the tears that pour down his face
understands the pain that dyed his sheets with blood
from hungry erections injecting him with hate.
    Next to this poem, he would one day draw a surrealistic picture of the boy these rapes had made of him, a tense, tearful child out of whose eyes grow thorny stems that end in fantastic flowers—a multivalent image that incarnates the tension between the child's private aspirations and the pain of his reality.
    Just sixteen, Dominique knew his fate was now entirely in his own hands. But he also meant to do whatever he could to protect his brothers, an obligation he took with high seriousness.
    Both Marlon and Hollingsworth remain full of memories of Dominique's protective role in their early lives. Hollings worth, eleven years younger than Dominique, remembers him as “a loving, honest, true friend, a mentor, a leader,” who took him to clothing stores and toy stores and to the amusement park to ride the go-carts and the little trains. He played basketball and football with Hollingsworth and his friends and was always “very gentle.” Marlon recalls being afraid of the dark and Dominique descending from the upper bunk bed to lie next to him till he'd fallen asleep. “He was almost like my second dad. He did a lot of things that a father should do and my mom couldn't do.” Dominique tried to teach Marlon how to withstand Stephanie, how not to give in to her in his mind. “About the time that Mom started getting physical, he was like a human shield almost,” Marlon remembers. “He deflected a lot of stuff that was directed towards us from my mom [and from] a couple of my teachers. He served as a buffer. She told us that she really didn't want us, that she wished she had neverhad us. After that, it was just him and me against the world.” Emmitt himself admitted in an interview in 2003 that Dominique cared more for his brothers than did he and Stephanie.
    How would Dominique at sixteen continue to protect these brothers, at the mercy of mad Stephanie and inconstant Emmitt? Part of the solution would lie in earning sufficient money. He had already had some experience selling drugs; now it became his livelihood. “I chose the drug trade,” Dominique would write later, “because I didn't have the nerve to be a burglar, the heart to be a jacker, the cunning to be a thief, the will to be a pimp, or the hate to be a hired killer. I was just a kid trying to find a way for me and my siblings.”
    Given the household he came from, he was hardly unfamiliar with drugs. He had sold them from the age of eight, once dealers recognized that cute little Dominique could serve as the perfect pusher. When he was nine, his mother began taking half his drug money from him, as if he were working for her. More than once, he had even sold drugs to each of his parents. He had gotten high on pot at thirteen—to find out what the experience was like—but the idea of taking drugs regularly held no allure for him. It was a