Criminal - The Mothers

Episode Date: January 26, 2018

There is a group in Durham, NC called "Parents of Murdered Children." This week, we meet three of its members. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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at our house in Cary and that I needed to come home right away. And I, of course, started asking questions and he said he couldn't answer anything that they needed to talk with me in person. And I had a gut feeling that it was one of my boys. I didn't know which one, but I felt that it was. And I remember everything about going down the escalator. I remember who stopped me and spoke to me on the way out. I didn't say anything to them

because I just didn't want to make it real that something was really wrong. And I remember the whole drive home. Did you talk to anyone on that drive or you just alone on that drive? I was alone on the drive and I did not talk to anybody or call anybody. And what happened when you showed up? The detective was there and my husband was there, and they were in the living room. And I had a purse, a large purse, that my son Stephen had given me on my arm.

And he said that he hated to tell me, but that my son Stephen had passed away. And I remember dropping my purse. I remember it made a loud noise, and I had to sit down. I sat down on the couch, and then the detective came and sat down with me and started telling me how sorry he was. He was murdered on January the 26th, 2012, and he was murdered at 6 o'clock in the morning. He was in a hotel room, and the lady that came to clean the room found him around 11.

I didn't know until we did the medical examiners, but he had been shot twice. I only knew from the death certificate that he'd been shot once in the shoulder. It was a robbery, and he resisted it, and the fight broke out, and he was shot. And then on the way out, they shot him again in the back. So we believe he died at the scene fairly quickly. How old was he? 24. It was a life changer.

I'm not the same person that I was then. Stephen Curtis Hoyle is buried in the cemetery at Enon Baptist Church in Oxford, North Carolina. This is his mother, Freda MacDonald. Today on the show, we're speaking with three mothers who are part of a group called Parents of Murdered Children here in Durham, North Carolina. Durham is a small town with a high homicide rate. We followed this group, Parents of Murder murdered children, for a long time,

hoping that they would speak with us one day. As you might imagine, this is a private group of people, and they felt mistreated by reporters in the past who knock on their doors with cameras, looking for a soundbite. As we got to know them, they explained that it's not that they aren't willing to talk about their kids. It's that people don't really listen. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. He was a nerd. Really, he was a nerd.

And he was so smart that his teacher wanted to put him up a grade. This is Jocelyn Sims. She raised four boys on her own as a single mother, and she's telling us about her oldest son, Ray. But Ray, like other kids, I hate to say it, got older. You know, he got him a job, got two jobs, and then, and both of them was way out, not on the bus line, so he bought him a car, went to sleep coming home off one of the jobs, and towed the car, and couldn't get another job. He had no way to get that work.

And by then, he had two kids by then of his own. So he started selling drugs. Do you remember when you found that out? Were you disappointed? Yes, I was and everything. But he said, Mama, I got to take care of my kids. And I have to admit, he wasn't these kinds that, you know, you go out there and they're buying these fancy cars and all this jewelry.

He helped me with my bills, took care of his kids, took care of his girlfriend. Were you scared for him? Were you nervous? No, honestly, I never was. He would be on, like, this be his block, and somebody else have that block right across from him. He didn't care.

Everybody I talked to in the area where he did his stuff, even the old people, said he was so respectful. So if they saw him, if he saw them for a bag or something, he'd try to help them take the stuff to the house. And so he wouldn't argue with nobody, you know, on the other corner and stuff. He did his thing when home, took care of his kids, made sure they did their homework, played games, wiffled and stuff like that. Jocelyn says Ray was at her house constantly, bringing over food or just spending time with her.

And because she was the only parent, Ray would wish her a happy Mother's Day and a happy Father's Day. Every Father's Day, he'd call me and say, Happy Father's Day, Mom, I love you. You're the best. And he used to tell me, Mom, no matter what we do as grown-ups, you raised us the best you could to raise four sons by yourself. On May 21, 2005, Jocelyn got a phone call from Ray's girlfriend

who told her that Ray was hurt and she needed to get to the emergency room. So I get to the emergency room, and I go to the desk and I tell the lady, I say, hello, I just got a call about my son, Ray Sims. So she said, just take a seat right there, I'll be right back. She went through the two, you know, they had glass doors then. She went through the doors and came back and sat down at the desk and said nothing to me. Something like that, you know, just waiting for somebody to tell me something. I happened to look, and I saw these policemen through the doors, and still nobody saying nothing. I'm like, what's going on, you know?

They finally opened the door, and they let me in. And the doctor's standing there looking at me, policemen looking at me, and I'm like, where's my son at? And they're still not opening them up. They're just looking at me like, you know, and I said, where's my son? And a nurse came down, and she knew Ray. We all used to live in the same area. And she turned me around and said, Miss Sims, I'm so sorry. She said, Ray's dead.

This is what happened. Earlier that evening, Ray was driving. He was talking to a friend on the phone when someone drove into him. Police believe that it was on purpose. And he told the girl on the phone, he said, hold up a minute. He was at a stop sign. He said, hold up a minute. Somebody just ran into the back of me.

And he still had the phone in his hand when he got out. And she said she heard him say, hey, man, y'all hit my car. And they said, no, you hit me. And he said, well, how can I hit y'all when I'm at a stop sign and y'all behind me? And then all of a sudden she heard him say, oh, shit. And he must have tried to get back in the car and dropped his phone in the car and it went off. And they shot him.

And then he was able to go. He made a turn and he was able to drive. It made about two and a half blocks and his car crashed. What was the funeral like? Full. He was popular. Yes, it was. He had more women in there than me. Because he had so many women that loved him.

Because even after he died, a friend of his had a child and named her child after him and stuff. But yes, I mean, it was full, you know, family and friends. So we had to cook out and celebrate his life. And we had black balloons. And one balloon, we released the balloons. one got caught in the tree and stayed there until it was over. And everybody started leaving. All of a sudden, that balloon just moved and went on. And it made me feel like he was saying that, I'm still here, Mom, you know.

Jocelyn had so many people around her who loved her and wanted to help. But she says it didn't matter. She still felt alone. She found herself retreating, stopped going out, stopped seeing friends. All I wanted to do was talk about my son, and then I felt like they didn't want to hear that every time I came over, so I just stopped coming. You weren't branching out.

Yeah, I wasn't branching out. And they would call me sometimes and say, Come on, let's go out to dinner. We haven't seen each other for a while. And I said, okay. And the day that we supposed to go out to dinner, I found myself calling and saying, no, I can't, I don't want to go. Like I said, if something like that happened, your whole life changed and people look at you and they say, well, you got other kids, you'll be all right. They don't understand. It don't matter how many children you have. I have four sons, and I tell people now, I only got three-fourths of a heart because my other fourth is gone. And no matter how many kids I got, that can't be refilled. Okay, my name is Carrie Watkins. So when I had daughters, I said, I'm going to name a daughter after me.

So I had four girls, so I named Carrie after me. And she was funny. She loved music. She loved music. She always liked to put her hand on the hip, you know. She loved taking pictures. So Carrie was very funny, you know. Carrie Watkins was murdered on Friday, July 18, 2008.

She was 23. She was shot in the chest in a drive-by shooting. She was shot in the chest, but it hit her heart. So, like I said, I had to go down, go to the hospital, identify her body. But when I went in there, first time, you know, I passed out. Then they got me back up. Then I lay with her in the bed,

and I, you know, and she had a little boat, and I took it off of her head, and I still got that boat, you know. But that's the worst thing that happened in my life. You can pretty much expect every other week for someone in a little town of Durham, North Carolina, to be killed. This is Marsha Owen. She's organized vigils and prayer meetings for victims of homicide, and over the years has become close with Frida, Carrie, and Jocelyn. Parents of Murdered Children has chapters all over the

country. It was started in 1978 by a couple who'd lost their 19-year-old daughter. Two months after their daughter's murder, the mother contacted a priest who put her in touch with three other parents whose children had been killed. The couple invited the other parents to come to their house. So it started with five parents in a house in Cincinnati and spread around the country. It's a reality that should not be on every single level, from every angle you can look at it, it doesn't, it should not exist. It's a reality that should never exist. It's so unreasonable.

I'm interested in when you meet a new mother, a mother who's recently lost a son to violence. Well, the first thing we do when she comes to the meeting, we sit there by her close by. Somebody's going to be there beside her so they can hold their hand, you know. And we tell her, you know, if you don't want to say anything, you don't have to say anything, you know, but if you want to, we're here for you anytime. You know, we may talk about something else, and then they may, you know, she may feel like she's ready to talk, and then we get quiet, and we let them, that's their moment. We don't say, well, honey, you need to feel this. We don't tell, don't tell nobody how you need to feel, what you need to say, what you need to do. It's up to them to say what they want to say, when they want to say it, and how they want

to say it. Because I may say something that somebody else who had a child murdered disagree with. And because I had someone that say something that I disagree with, I'm not going to try and say, oh, you had no right to say that because I don't agree. What is it like talking to other mothers who've experienced violence like this? Are there common things that all of you... Yeah, there's common stuff. Like I said, we all lost a child through violence, but it may affect us different because we all are different ourselves. But the one connection we

do have is that our child was murdered. So that gives us the connection so that we can talk to each other. And like we said, we're there for each other. I got one right now that when I'm down, I call her just like that. She calls me and we talk on the phone just about every day. There's another one that we go check on and stuff. And that's what we're there for. We let each other know, say, look, I don't care if it's 2, 3, or 4 o'clock in the morning.

You need to call me. You want to cry on the phone, you call and you cry on the phone and stuff. That's it, because I can cry right along with you, or I can just hold the phone while you cry, whatever you want to do. And that's what we do for each other. We need that, because nobody else can. No matter how much, like I could be married, no matter how much I love my husband, my kids, or whoever,

that connection is not there. They want us the way we were. That's what they're comfortable with. They love us, they want us to be okay, and they want us to be as we always were. The people that we've met and have been so happy to get to know because they understand us, they accept us for who we are now. There are so many things that most of us will never understand about losing a child to murder. First off, for many of these mothers, it's not just burying their child that they have to deal with.

They also have to deal with police and courtrooms and finding out who was responsible, which can take years. Jocelyn and Carrie have never found out who shot their children. Jocelyn McCaffrey, Somebody can just be looking at you or looking that way and it looks like they're looking at you and you're thinking, why are they looking at me? Are you the one that killed my son? Or do you know who killed my son? And that's what I go through, you know, every time somebody even look at me or whatever, or if I'm going in the store somewhere and I be looking, I be saying, I wonder, did he kill him?

And then I also think about how many more people have he killed. I wanted to address the court when it was the one that he knew. Frida does know who killed her son. I wanted to say something to him, and I wasn't really sure what on earth I could say, but I just winged it. I didn't write anything down. I just stood up and addressed the court,

and I remember it very well, and I would tell anybody, if you have an impact statement please put it together and please present it because you can't go back and do that so it's important if you feel at all like you want to that you go ahead and do it and I do remember saying that I wish that heaven had visited in ours, that the thought of never being able to visit him again was overwhelming. And I wanted to leave the courtroom with something positive. That just seemed really important to me at the time. And my son had written a really very short poem that I had found after he died when I was going through his clothes.

And so I recited that to the offender. And I've always been glad that I did. Can I say that poem? Please. What's done is done. What's here is now. So make the best out of the worst and strive to make the best better. Love, Stephen Curtis Hoyle.

That must have been quite a striking thing for the courtroom to hear. The judge walked out. He had to take a minute. Did you look at the man in the eyes as you were... I did. Did he look back at you? He cried. Have you written to him since or had any contact?

No. He wrote me once. I haven't been able to write back. I've never been ready to do that, and it's been six years. So it's very complicated. Yeah, absolutely. It's very complicated. And I think homicide opens the door to a lot of these kinds of struggles, because I can't tell you how many times I've been asked, have you forgiven him? And so it becomes about me making another decision in my heart and my mind. And that's complicated, very complicated.

Over the course of our conversations with Frida, Carrie, and Jocelyn, there were certain things that came up again and again that they all deal with all the time and that they're sick of. For one, we're all saying really dumb things. Well, you got other kids, or God meant for that to happen, or God knew what was best, you know, he wanted your son with him. And we even have a preacher tell us, God don't make mistakes. He needed your son for something else.

I'm like, what? Or even, you know, they turn around and say, well, he must have did something. I mean, for him, you know, for them to shoot him, you know, was he arguing with them? I mean, just stupid him, you know, for them to shoot him, you know, was he arguing with them? I mean, just stupid stuff, you know? I think the idea that a lot of people start looking at the victim themselves and saying something about, well, what was he doing in that hotel room, trying to find a way for it not to be something that could happen in their back door. And then the main thing they want to do, like you said, the first thing they do when somebody's

murdered, oh, he had a record, and make it seem like the victim asked for it because of the lifestyle. Like I tell people, yeah, my son was a drug dealer. He wasn't a killer. And so, but I mean, you got people a drug dealer. He wasn't a killer. And so, but I mean, you got people who rob banks. Just because you rob a bank, that means you're going to be bad the rest of your life. You know, and stuff.

I said, don't judge somebody by their record. I wonder, when you meet new people and they ask if you have children, I'm always surprised that everyone asks, oh, do you have children? Yes. What do you say? They're in heaven. Yeah.

I always say, you know, sometimes I say I got four girls. I still say I got four girls. You include Carrie in that. I say I got four girls, and then when somebody say, Carrie, I say she in heaven. And I always wear their names, and I have their pictures in a locket. And so I say, well, this is Stephen and Michael. And so I try to take out the uncomfortable part of it because I always recognize that I make the other person uncomfortable.

A burden that you don't want to put on anyone else. No, absolutely don't. It makes them very uncomfortable. What do you want us to know, those who might be scared to meet someone who lost a child? How do you wish we spoke about it or handled it? Remember them. Saying their name, it's always in our mind. We're always thinking about them. If it's their birthday, if it's the anniversary of their death, if it's when they would have just

turned 30, it doesn't matter what the situation is to see that person and not acknowledge that person that was with them for, in my case, 24 years, that impacted their life. The best gift I ever had was my children. And not to say, you know, I think about you, and I remember the time that you and Stephen and I went down to the lake, to not talk about that anymore, it's like stripping you of the most precious thing, which is your memories. I can see Ray sometime. Somebody can be dressed just like him at a distance, and I still will come out and yell out, Ray.

And the only shoes he did wear was Timberlands. I don't care what kind of year, how hot it was. He didn't put nothing on his feet but Timberlands. He did not wear sneakers or any other kind of shoes. Even at his brother's wedding, he wanted to wear Timberlands. And I had to force him, no, you're going to wear some regular shoes

for your brother's wedding. But my brother said I can wear them, I can get some black ones. He ain't getting no black Timberlands, he's going to wear regular shoes and stuff. And I was just glad that he lived to be in his brother's wedding, you know, because his baby brother had gotten married.

And he was so proud of him and stuff, you know. Kara was funny and she'd always get in the mirror when she put on her clothes, you know, because she was a pretty girl and she would put on her clothes and she would put her hand on her hip.

I said, you got it, girl. You know, so I got a lot of men around me that said, well, she was funny. You know, you could be sad or what going through. She'll make you laugh. Stephen was, he was very compassionate. He really loved his friends. He loved me. I don't loved his friends. He loved me. I don't know that anybody has ever loved me the way Stephen has.

Criminal is produced by Lauren Spohr, Nadia Wilson, and me. Audio mix by Rob Byers. Our intern is Mathilde Erfolino. Julian Alexander makes original illustrations for each episode of Criminal. You can see them at thisiscriminal.com. Special thanks to documentary photographer Justin Cook. We've got his photographs of Jocelyn, Carrie, and Frida on our website. Criminal is recorded in the studios of North Carolina Public Radio, WUNC.

We're a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collection of the best podcasts around. Shows like The Truth. I'm thinking of telling you a story. The Truth. It's a short story, and it's funny. But it's also a dangerous story.

In the half-light from my computer, I could see his eyes were closed. Tom? He was talking in his sleep. Can you give me something? Like a sign or a miracle? It is done. Check beneath your seat. Ew. A used Band-Aid? Hello.

What the hell? Good afternoon. Nice to meet you. A talking Band-Aid? It's a miracle. I'm not a creep. I'm not a creep. I'm not. I'm really not. I value privacy. I voted for Edward Snowden. I love your writing. I love your whole jumpsuit vibe. I love your like awkward but on purpose hair. Oh, that's on accident. Do you ever wonder why we're here?

It's hard for us to decide. Yeah, you're right. Go listen. Special thanks to AdCirc for providing their ad-serving platform to Radiotopia. I'm Phoebe Dredge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. The number one selling product of its kind with over 20 years of research and innovation.

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