Thirteen years ago today, my father was brutally murdered. (warning: possibly upsetting)

[Lyric]

His name was James Allen Heinze, and he was a Vietnam veteran. He suffered PTSD all his life, and growing up, we were dirt poor, West-Virginia-trailer-park poor, the kind of poor that comes of a father who was too caught up in his own nightmares and fears to hold a steady job for long, and a mother who was torn between nearly suicidal despair and working twelve-hour days at a gas station to feed her three kids. Save for Food Stamps a couple of times when paychecks were particularly slim, we didn't get welfare. My parents grew up in proud-but-poor families that would have been appalled at the idea of "drinking the work sweat of the county", as my grandmother used to put it. Of course, this was back when factory and mine jobs were still plentiful, and the only jobless people were the most destitute cases--the disabled, the divorced mother, the restless wanderers.

By the time the Reagan 80's came around and the jobs started disappearing, my Dad's PTSD had become so intense that he was struggling to get enough sleep at night in order to function the next day at his job. He was a carpenter; a man with the brownest hands I've ever seen, a man who could work the miracle of making a home grow out of a pile of lumber, a few boxes of nails, and a pallet of shingles. I remember watching him with a hammer in his hand, his mouth full of nails, and a pack of Lucky Strikes rolled into the sleeve of his white t-shirt. He was like a god to me when I was six. I couldn't imagine anything more beautiful or more important to with your life than creating the homes that families live in. When he got home at night, six small feet would be scrambling to be the first to untie his big, steel-toed boots--and for good reason. The kid who got to take off Dad's boots also got first dibs at the treats he always brought home in his "dinner bucket." Zero, Payday, and Chunky candy bars were the most frequent goodies. Sometimes he'd have long Charleston Chew bars hidden in his jacket sleeve, ready to put in the freezer so he could break them into manageable pieces with his Scotti recoilless hammer.

I still carry that image of him in my heart, but it's not the whole story. The candy-bearing carpenter gave way, in the end, to the bedraggled alcoholic Veteran who used beer to sleep at night...and then to get through the humiliation of being jobless during the day. Still, I loved him. Even at his drunkest, even at his most irrational, he was never cruel. He never hit. He never drove while drunk. He never hurt anyone, save for himself.

He lived for his kids. I was the oldest, and I remember clearly the games Dad used to play with me. He'd gotten an unabridged dictionary from a library giveaway, an enormous tome of a book that was too heavy for anyone but him to handle with ease. He kept it on the living room table beside "his" chair, and every day when I'd walk in the door after school, he'd have a handful of new words to quiz me on. "Ah, Brandy Leigh," he'd say, "I've been waiting for you. Got some good ones today." He'd rattle off impossibly huge words, and I, being the naturally competitive person that I am, would take it as a personal challenge to "beat" him by correctly spelling and defining each word. I became somewhat obsessed with reading the dictionary in the evenings. In 8th grade I made it to the state finals of the national spelling bee competition, but when there were only seven competitors left out of 200, I missed on the word "piteous." I was brokenhearted. I thought he'd be upset with my loss, but he bought me a Dilly Bar at Dairy Queen on the way home, and told me to make sure I remembered that word forever. And I do. Piteous--arousing pity or compassion. I didn't see the deeper meaning behind those words at the time, for the same reason that people in Saigon can't see Vietnam.

During the 90's, we didn't have a car because we couldn't afford one. It was hard enough to pay for rent, electricity, and food on minimum wage. Car insurance and title/registration fees were more than our meager budget could handle. Dad used to like taking the bus downtown so he could walk by the river, and maybe stop at the VFW bar on the way home, where some other grizzled old war dog would recognize the haunted look in his eyes, and buy him a few beers. Occasionally, Dad would get offered a lift--he was never afraid of riding with strangers. He was from an era where picking up a walker on the side of the road was a perfectly normal, even expected, kindess. But it wasn't kindness that found him that day.

On June 8th, 1995, Dad was walking down to the bus stop that stood about two miles from our trailer park. A man named Rodney Doman pulled up beside him and offered him a ride. Rodney had been drinking with his buddy Robert McCabe, who was also in the car. They offered Dad a beer from their cooler, and didn't stop at the bus stop, the riverfront park, or the VFW bar. At some point they picked up Dad's fellow alcoholic friend, Jeff Blosser. Doman and McCabe plied them with beer and whiskey all day long, occasionally stopping to drag him out of the car and beat him. This went on for hours--fifteen, sixteen, nobody's really sure. Once they dragged Dad into a local bar, propped him up, bloody and beaten, and carried on until they were thrown out. Dad was far too drunk and dazed from the beatings to ask for help. Nobody called the police.

At some point during the early part of the night, Doman stopped to purchase illegal drugs, too drunk to remember that my Dad was still in the car. When he returned to the car with the drugs, Doman decided that since Dad had seen where he'd bought the drugs, and Doman was still on probation, Dad had to be "gotten rid of". McCabe came to his senses when Doman stopped somewhere for a moment, and told Jeff Blosser to run if he wanted to live. Jeff ran for help--but not fast enough. Sometime around 3:00 am on June 9th, 1995, they drove Dad to the top of a local wooded hill, dragged him out of the car, and threw him to the ground. Then Rodney Doman beat his head in with the metal bar from the upright tire jack in the trunk of their car, threw him over a hill into the woods, and left him to bleed to death. Dad's body was found later that day, when Doman was stupid enough to bring his girlfriend up to the top of that hill and brag that he'd "killed a man here last night", then threatened to kill her if she told anyone. The girlfriend called the police as soon as Doman dropped her back off at home. We got the call at about 9:00 pm. I was almost sixteen years old.

The trial took almost two years, and McCabe wound up getting a light sentence for agreeing to testify against Doman. Doman got life in prison without mercy (no parole), but a few years ago the "no mercy" part was thrown out due to a technical error at his trial. Still, he has to serve 25 years at a minimum, and the prosecuting attorney has assured us that the crime was violent enough to ensure that the parole board doesn't look kindly on Rodney Doman until he's a very, very old man. We all intend on testifying at his parole hearings to make sure of it. There is no death penalty in West Virginia.

That last sentence is what I want to focus on right now. People who defend the death penalty often cite the "victim's family" as a reason for it; supposedly, the execution of a murderer will make us feel like justice has been served. I *am* a victim's family member. But I oppose the death penalty with every ounce of my being, and so do my siblings and my mother. Rodney Doman's execution would do absolutely nothing to bring back my father--it would be just another death to add to the whole horrific story. I don't want revenge--I want my eight-year-old son to have the joy of building a birdhouse with Grandpa. I want my Dad at my college graduation in a few years, when I become the first and only member of my family to earn a college degree. I want my Dad at my side when I sign the first copy of my first book of poetry. Rodney Doman's death doesn't do a damned thing to make any of that happen. Doman will rot in prison until he's too old and too frail to be of serious danger to anyone else, and then perhaps he'll die a lonely old man whose children are too ashamed of him to visit often.

I'm content with knowing that he's lost his youth, family, and life to prison. Rodney Doman has children too, children who are grown now. Let them have their father, through bulletproof glass during "visiting weekend." I'd give my right arm to have my father back, even in such a way as that. I know how it feels to lose your father, and I don't want anyone using *my* family as justification for taking someone else's father away.

But the most important reason I oppose the death penalty, the most heartbreaking reason of all, is really the simplest. My Dad was a devoted liberal Democrat until the day he died. He opposed the death penalty--he opposed ALL institutionalized killing, war included. He firmly believed that when governments have the power to kill, it is inevitable that innocent people will die, and "justice" becomes a farce and a stage show. I could not live with myself if I violated one of his most intense beliefs about right and wrong, solely for the sake of a little personal vengeance.

So today...I am writing this post because Dad deserves to be honored--for his service, for his value as a father, and for the legacy of compassion and true justice that he left to his children. His is not the only story, nor the only point of view--but it's one worth taking into consideration when we elect the leaders who decide whether or not the government has a right to kill people--not in self-defense--but for the sake of punishment, "justice", and "spreading democracy."

Thanks for reading this. Please remember James Allen Heinze today. A prayer or a thought toward we, his family, who will mourn him for the rest of our lives, and work to make sure that his life is never forgotten.

Edit: for those who might think that there's something fabricated about this story--a link to a WV Supreme Court file about one of Doman's appeals.

http://www.state.wv.us/wvsca/DOCS/Fall98/24793.htm