Long Blue Line: Based on a True Story (43 page)

The three kids that had escorted Donnie home were in party mode, and they walked down to the liquor store to get more alcohol. I was kind of confused and wondering why they were hanging out over at this drug house on a holiday that most people spent with their families. After Casie told them about the baby, they began to ask me questions every chance that they had. They only asked me when she wasn't around, and I thought it was really weird. They didn't even know who any of us were, but they were asking me detailed questions about who I thought was responsible. I gave them honest answers, and said that I didn't know for sure, but if I had to guess it would be Donnie. I thought that saying this would cause them to want to leave. But they didn't, they just started drinking more and more, and eventually they were dancing like whores in the living room.

All of the guys in the house quietly snuck to the back room and shut the door. When the girls realized that there friend was back in the room with Donnie and Derrick, they freaked out. "Eric! Get out of there, NOW!" The blond girl angrily screamed. I assumed that he was her boyfriend. This is where everything went bad, and it became officially the worst Thanksgiving of my life. The blond girl was trying to force her way through the closed door. It pissed off Donnie. He shoved her back. The brunette retaliated and pushed Donnie who then punched the brunette. The other guy jumped in the middle and tried to calm both of them down. He ended up getting knocked out in the process. Donnie literally grabbed the two girls by their hair and pushed them off of the cement stairway. They landed on the ground in the front yard.

I was just standing to the side definitely not wanting to get in a fight. I thought for sure that after Donnie did this, the kids would be running for the hills. It only intensified their anger and they retaliated even more. They were trying to physically fight Donnie. He took it as a challenge and pretty much beat the crap out of both of them. The young kid was caught in the middle, and I felt bad for him. He was just trying to keep the peace, and I could tell that he was worried about his girlfriend. He approached Donnie calmly and tried to ask him to calm down, and he promised that he would get the girls off of his property. For no good reason at all, like Peter from the Family Guy, Derrick walked up to the kid and punched him in the face, knocking him hard to the ground. He was knocked unconscious. The girls took off down the street yelling that they were going to call the cops. I thought it was probably a good idea that they did that.

Now there were two drunken idiots on one side and a knocked-out kid on the ground. I wasn't going to just leave him there, so I started dragging him into the house so I could get him on the couch and make sure that he woke up okay. He woke up about five minutes later, and I could tell that when he sat up, he was dizzy. Derrick quickly apologized to him, and he apologized about his girlfriend's behavior. It was bizarre how the guys suddenly became friends. The kid was worried about the cops coming because he was on Probation. Donnie didn't want to deal with the cops either. They both ran out back and hid in the shed. Casie somehow disappeared. She was nowhere to be found. I figured that she probably went over to her mom's house. She was already emotional and heartbroken, and I couldn't blame her for wanting to get out of that situation.

Derrick and I sat on the front porch waiting for the cops to come. They showed up and took a report. We explained that we were just the guests for Thanksgiving dinner, and everyone else who had been fighting had disappeared. The cops seemed like they were having a busy night and told us to call them if the same kids showed back up looking for more. Somehow, the fight started all over again after the police left. The girls showed up again looking for Eric, and when we told them that Eric wasn't at the house, they wouldn't take no for an answer. Eric and Donnie must have heard the chaos, as they came running out on their hiding. Everyone was beat up all over again. It was really bad. After the three kids stumbled away threatening to call the police again, I yelled at Donnie and Derrick and told them to get into the truck as I opened the driver side door. We went straight back to our house, and Donnie was dripping blood everywhere. Casie called me to say she was on her way.

Donnie was definitely not sane. He was standing in the doorway smoking and didn’t even noticing his gushing wounds. He wouldn't stop rambling on and on. He began talking about his baby, and that's when he had my attention. "I didn't know that you weren't supposed to do that," he sobbed to himself while looking down at the floor. "My dad beat the shit out of me growing up. I thought that's what you were suppose to do!" he cried. Oh God, I thought. He just confessed to the murder of his son.

Luckily, the cops didn’t show up at my house that night. When I woke up the next day, Donnie and Casie had already left. I had a talk with Derrick who wasn’t very happy with himself and his actions from the night before. I told him what I had heard his brother say. He had a look of disappointment. He knew that something was eventually going to come out from someone, or whoever had any information regarding the death of the baby. “There is just too much bad shit that happens when I hang around my brother,” he said, more to himself. He looked my way and said, “We are never, ever hanging around them again. I’m over it,” wanting to make sure that I agreed. I did. We decided to hang our heads low, and we hoped that the police wouldn’t end up showing up at our house to arrest him.

Within a matter of days after Thanksgiving, Donnie had been arrested for assaulting the girls that night, and a detective was trying to get a hold of Derrick and me by phone. We thought that it was probably a good sign that he was calling us because that meant that he did not have enough evidence to arrest Derrick. At this point, we were smart enough to know to never speak with any detectives about any case that could possibly go against us. We avoided his phone call and did not return his messages. By the next week, he was showing up at our front door. The first time he came, we were at the grocery store. We came home to a card on our front door.

Since Donnie was in jail, we knew that they either had enough evidence from the assault to arrest Derrick or they had been waiting to find any little reason to arrest him. If they had evidence against Derrick, they would have arrested him when they arrested Donnie. Derrick obviously was going to flat-out deny any involvement in the physical altercation, and of course, I was not going to testify against him because we were married. We were both uneasy with the idea of this detective continuing to stop by our home unannounced. I convinced Derrick to call the number on the card, and we would just make it clear that we didn't have any involvement and the detective would be on his way.

Just a few minutes after Derrick made the phone call, the detective was back at our house for an interview. He came inside and he was pretty rude. Derrick told him his side of the story and the detectives practically laughed. "We all know what really happened that night, and the young man that you knocked out, Eric, ended up with two concussions to his head. Now I just came here to see if you would take responsibility for your actions like an adult, and we could work with you. But if you make my job more difficult than it has to be, you're probably going to be in jail for a long time." Derrick and I already knew all about the game that he was playing. He was trying to make threats and scare us into confessing. It wasn't going to work. The detective turned to me, "Now Elizabeth, I know that you were there that night. And I know that you saw exactly what went on. Am I going to have the same problem with you as I do with your husband?" "I'm not exactly sure what that is supposed to mean, but when there is a fight between 10 different people at the same time, it's kind of hard to see exactly what happened with one particular person. I wasn't paying attention to Derrick. I was paying attention to the women because I was worried that they were going to try to involve me in the fight." This wasn't a lie. I was almost positive that there was a law protecting me from having to testify against my husband. I wasn't going to lie to the detective, but I also wasn't going to offer information that would be incriminating to Derrick. The detective was extremely rude, and I thought that he had a lot of guts to be so hostile when he was in our own home. Derrick asked him to leave after a few minutes, and as he walked out the door. "We are going to pin you for this, Derrick. You can either make it easy on yourself, or we can do it the hard way."

About two weeks later, I had my routine visit at the Probation Department. I was assigned to a new Probation Officer, and for the most part, she was pretty nice. After she updated my file, she announced to me that someone wanted to talk to me. I thought that I was going to be arrested or something. She got on her phone and dialed an extension. Probably 30 seconds later, a man walked through the doorway. I was pissed. It was that same rude investigator that stopped by our house. He was using the fact that I was on Probation as leverage to get me to talk. "As with the terms and conditions of your Probation, it's mandatory for you to cooperate with law enforcement," my Probation Officer said, almost as if it were scripted. The detective was acting extra nice. He was too nice and seriously phony. Ms. Jeter, let's go for a quick walk. I followed him down the hallway and through the exit door of the Probation Department, and then across the hallway into the Police Department.

When he led me back to his office, he immediately picked up a small black box and pushed a button. Obviously, I was being recorded. I was so incredibly irritated that they were using this as a method to try to get more information with the threat of violating my Probation if I did not offer what they wanted to hear. I went through the details of the night, step-by-step. I told him that I didn't see Derrick knock anyone out. "I don't know, maybe I saw something out of the corner of my eye, but I can't remember." "Why won't you just tell the truth? That's all we need from you. If you just tell me the truth then I can let you go and you won't end up getting in any trouble over this." “See, this is why I don't talk to people like you. I've been there, done that. You guys lie and say anything that you want if you think it will give you what you want to hear so you can close the case and move onto the next investigation. At one point I trusted you. I trusted higher authority, and I never thought that you would do me wrong. I was completely mistaken. My daughter was hurt and you guys had the nerve and ignorance to actually think I knew what happened. Well, I didn't. And there still hasn't been anyone put away for it. Do you have any idea what this did to my family and so many other people?" I was having flashbacks of sitting in that interrogation room a couple years ago, and I was taking my anger out on this guy. I was extremely upset and crying. I think I shocked him a little bit because he lay off trying to get me to talk. "And why would I get in trouble for this? I have not done anything wrong. It is not my fault that this happened to take place in the same area as myself." "Well, because you put Eric back into the house after he was knocked unconscious, it sounds like you were an accessory to the crime." I was furious. "So you are telling me that because I tried to help this kid, I'm going to go to jail over it?" "I'm not saying anything, it's not going to be up to me. It’s up to the District Attorney's Office." Luckily, I had to take a drug test before the Probation Office closed for the day. They were closing in about 10 minutes, so he knew that I had to go back. For some reason, he felt compelled to escort me back. "Are you going to pass your drug test?" "Yes. That's not going to be a problem,” I dryly said.

From reading a copy of the police report that Casie brought to our house shortly after Donnie was arrested, we all knew that the District Attorney was taking this very seriously. I began wondering if we were both going to be arrested for this. Derrick tried to play it off like there just wasn’t a way for us to get into trouble over it, but I had my doubts. It was early in the next year, 2009, and I only had about six months until I’d be released from Probation for good. This worried me even more. I knew that there would be something that ruined it all and kept me from moving. The best way I could cope was to use drugs. We both used. We regularly hung out with our neighbor who was a closet-tweaker and owned his own small business cleaning hot tubs for expensive vacation homes in the local area. He gave Derrick part-time work, and he would pay him with drugs. After the death of the baby, Derrick had a difficult time showing up at his regular job on time. His boss agreed to let him go and not contest when he filed for unemployment. From Derrick taking his truck on a 4-wheeling drunken ride, he had pretty much totaled it. It was useless, but we were at least able to sell it for parts. Pretty much, we were jobless, carless, on drugs and living in a trailer. Everything turned into complete shit.