After being abducted at the age of 3 and held for 6 years by a man she considered family, Mercedes life changed forever. Now at the age of 23, she'd finally gotten her life on track and started to enjoy the good things in life. The success, the mone...
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Life was something that was meant to be enjoyable. Life was something that everyone got a chance to live once and it was up to you to make the right decisions. One bad decision you made or someone else made for you could change your whole life and leave you sitting in a jail cell for years. For Kevin, the decisions his father had forced him to made was what had him laying on his back on a hard twin sized bed in a orange jumpsuit staring up at the ceiling blankly.
For almost 15 years, this had been his new reality. Waking up everyday to eat disgusting food, working out daily to keep himself fit, sitting outside to feel the sunlight every now and then and then coming back to his cell to sleep his life away. For years Kevin cried himself to sleep every night but eventually he got use to the idea that his life was over and had came to the conclusion that life wasn't worth living anymore.
In his mind he always wished he could've went back to the 8 year old boy he was when his father first kidnapped Mercedes. He wish at the time he would've been old enough to know that what his father had been doing to her was wrong. It wasn't until he grew older that he learned that hiding a young girl in a basement was a crime after doing some research at a library. By then, it was already too late. His father had already started forcing him to put his hands on Mercedes and watch while he raped her continuously. The damage to her had already been done but he knew that once he figured out what his father had been doing to the poor girl, he needed to help her so that's what he did.
Growing up, Kevin was always a sheltered and reserved kid. His father never allowed him to do anything except go to school and come home. He didn't allow Kevin to hang out with others or for him to converse with anyone that wasn't him. James was all Kevin knew his whole life so whatever his father said was what he did.
Everyday in his mind, him getting arrested played over and over in his head. He remembered how blood stained the white shirt he was wearing, how tears streamed down his face from him crying so much and how snot leaked from his nose. He remembered sitting there in a pool of blood with his head in his hands once police arrived. He remembered telling Mercedes to run as fast as she could down the street and not to look back.
All his life he'd been controlled. From a young age, he remembered being abused by his father so bad that he always ended up with a busted lip, a shut eye, or bruised ribs. It was all normal to him. What wasn't normal was him being forced to watch the torture his father put Mercedes through. Along with the image of him being arrested, the images of what his father did to Mercedes and him flooded his mind everyday. The images had gotten so bad over the years that it had him wanting to kill himself to end it all.
Over the years, once he'd found her address to her shop, Kevin found himself writing Mercedes repeatedly hoping one day she would decide to answer. Each time he wrote her, he found himself crying and having to start over because his teardrops would drench the paper. He wanted to die for playing a part in ruining her life. He wanted to take himself out but he knew that from reading the Bible secretly when he was young that killing himself wasn't the way to go. Kevin just wished that God would call him home because although he was getting out soon, he had nothing and no one. Who would want to put up with a felon who spent 15 years incarcerated for being an accessory to a kidnapping and an accessory to a sexual assault?
