by Damon West
The phone rang. It was the officer I reported to about the ankle monitor. He wanted to know if I was home. Immediately, I recognized the absurdity of this, since he had my monitor on a computer screen showing him where I was. I pointed this out to him. He said they were having technical issues and had lost my monitor briefly. Looking at the monitor across the living room, sitting on the end table, I thought to myself, If you only knew. I assured him I was home. He told me to stay there, that he was coming by for a home visit. I agreed and hung up. Today was the day then.
I realized I was starving, so I went into Wendy’s room to get her car keys. She gave them to me and I took off for Quiznos. When I returned, the apartment looked undisturbed. Good sign. About an hour after I finished eating, Tex arrived with my dope. I paid him and offered the pipe to show my hospitality. Looking spooked, he declined. He began telling me about some strange cars in front of my place.
I told Tex the end was very near for me, and that I thought the cops were going to get me soon. “Like, today, soon. It’s gonna be the officer that I report to for that ankle monitor.” I pointed to it, sitting on the monitor box across the room. “He’s coming for a home visit sometime today.”
I passed the pipe to Tex. He took it and inhaled the drug into his lungs. About that time, the living room window to my right shattered. Tumbling across my floor, I saw a canister, unmistakably a flash-bang grenade. In seemingly slow motion, I got up off the couch to look at it, recognition filling my brain about what would happen next.
Bam! It blew up in my face. I was blinded by the brightest light I had ever seen and deafened by what felt like a sonic boom in my ratty little living room. The impact knocked me back onto the couch where Tex and I were previously getting high. Discombobulated, I could not hear or see a thing. Having heard a SWAT takedown was a terrorizing experience, I could now verify those stories. When I regained my sight and hearing, an officer in full SWAT gear had his boot on my chest and the barrel of his machine gun digging into my eye socket. The barrel was cold against my eyeball.
“Don’t move! Don’t move!” he was screaming at me.
I blinked my eyelid against the barrel and said, “Don’t worry. Don’t worry.”
I could see his finger hovering over the trigger and thought it would only take a twitch and I would be dead. I was terrified.
As cops filled the living room, one of them screamed, “We got him! We got the Uptown burglar!” His excitement was palpable.
At around 1:30 p.m. on the day I was arrested, or as I like to think more positively, the day I was rescued, the Uptown burglaries came to an end. Indeed, they had their man.
They zip-tied me and perp-walked me out of my apartment. I looked down the street in both directions and saw the streets were blocked off by police cars parked perpendicular across the lanes. This was no small takedown. It was no wonder that the officer had called me. He needed me to be home for this. Wendy was handcuffed in the yard across from the apartment. I could tell she had been crying. We shared one last sad look, a look that said, “I’ll miss you.” Once they shoved me in the back of the police cruiser, we were off. Straining to twist my body around, I tried to get a clear view down the street, to the second apartment with all the stolen stuff piled in it, but I couldn’t see it. Surely they were there as well.
With dozens of cars in escort, they took me to Dallas County Jail. Processing was unlike any of the other recent trips I had made to county jail. This time I was on the express train. It moved so quickly that no one ever truly patted me down. When asked to empty my pockets, I removed everything but the keys to the Safe House and about a gram of meth in a little dope baggie. Once past the initial booking desk, I went into one of the toilets, flushed the keys and ate the meth. Watching the baggie being sucked into the toilet made me want to cry, as it represented the last of my meth.
They fingerprinted me, took my mugshot, the works. The mugshot, a moment in time captured forever, showed the battle going on inside my head and well portrayed the animal they’d just captured. When they finished processing me, they threw me into a cold holding cell with nothing but my thoughts to keep me company. My head, a dangerous place to be on most days when I was in my addiction, was like a battlefield for that twenty-four hours. I wish I could tell you my thoughts were on all the wrong I had done, all the victims I created, my family, or the extreme trouble I was in. But the only clear and consistent thoughts going through my head were, How the hell am I going to get high in here? Where will I get my dope from now?
This is the mind of an addict who, although removed from the addiction initially, still has not hit rock bottom.
After that initial holdover period, the guards took me to my new home, a jail cell known as the Bird Cage. This place looked like someone took a giant bird cage and put it over a huge cement room, with bunk beds all grouped in the middle, a few metal tables, a TV, and some toilets with no stalls for privacy. This place was as loud as an airport runway, but the volume dropped significantly when they walked up with me. All the men stopped what they were doing to check out the newest resident. One guy shouted, “Hey, that’s the guy from TV, the one they arrested for all those burglaries! Hey, guys, we got us a celebrity.” The laughter resembled the roar of that runway sound, as there was nothing but cement and metal to absorb sound. Pointing and laughing ensued. Even the guards were laughing.
Within twenty-four hours I was in my first fight. Over a breakfast tray. Once the guy put his hand on my tray, I knew it was not going to end well. I fought the best I could, but he easily beat me. Neither of us got the tray, though. To say I was scared would be an understatement. The other times I had been in jail had never been this bad. This was an entirely different part of Dallas County Jail.
Reverting to a childlike state, I realized I wanted to speak to my mother and father, the two people who loved me more than anyone else on the planet. The opportunity to do so presented itself in the form of the blue phones in the day room. I had used the phones to contact Wendy, but I hadn’t called home. Not even sure if my parents knew of my predicament, I dialed their number.
The first call was a disaster, as I spent most of the time talking, telling them how I was innocent and that they had the wrong guy. Lies. All lies.
The next call was different, full of reality and emotions.
Never in my life have I seen my father cry. He’s from an older generation of men who do not display their emotions so freely. That call was the first time I had ever heard him cry. The pain and devastation in his voice said it all. I had destroyed my father. My hero was not bulletproof, after all.
“Damon!” he cried, screaming into the phone. “How did we go so wrong with you? How did we mess up so badly? What could we have done different?”
Of all the questions he fired off, the last one cut the deepest. Through his pain and tears he was still trying to assume responsibility for my actions. My God, what had I done? Even under the harsh effects of detoxing from meth, I could still feel pain that acute. Tears flowed out of my eyes, and I replied to him with more lies. “Dad, I didn’t do it. I’m innocent of all this.”
What did I care about the truth and morals? I was a junkie thinking I could talk my way out of this trouble. Still.
As a registered nurse, my mother was used to dealing with traumatic situations. She snatched the phone out of my father’s hand and said my father couldn’t speak now. That she had never in their forty years of marriage seen him in that kind of shape. She told me I had hurt both of them very badly, but that we need to discuss some things.
“First, you need to know we love you unconditionally. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, you could ever do to make us not love you. That was the agreement we made with God when he loaned you to us,” she said calmly.
She asked if I understood what she was saying, if I understood that she and my father loved me unconditionally.
Through tears, I t
old my mother I understood.
“Good,” she said, matter-of-factly, “because we just gave you back to God. You’re in a place where only He can help you now.”
Then she said the words I’ll never forget. “You’re now a captive audience to God. You better start listening to Him.”
After letting those words sink in, she asked if I remembered the prayer plaque she had on my bedroom wall where I grew up.
Thinking back, my mother had prayer plaques and crucifixes in just about every room in our house. The Lord’s Prayer in the living room, Grace Before Meals in the kitchen. You couldn’t escape God in her home; He was everywhere. I could remember a plaque above my bed for my first eighteen years, but I could not, through the haze of years of meth abuse, recall what prayer was on it.
Through tears, I told her that I didn’t remember the prayer plaque.
“Damon, it was Footprints in the Sand. Do you remember the story of Footprints in the Sand?”
Thinking that sounded familiar, but not registering anything more than the title, I admitted I did not remember the story.
My wonderful mother, patiently and lovingly, retold me the story from the prayer plaque on my wall growing up, the story of a guy walking on the beach with God, watching a video play out of his life. The guy noticed the good times in his life were always accompanied by two sets of footprints in the sand. However, during the bad times, where there was pain, hurt, suffering and loss, the guy noticed there were only one set of footprints. With anger in his voice, the man told God he could see, by the evidence of footprints, that he was abandoned during the difficult times in life.
“That’s when God said, ‘Damon, you fool. Every time you saw one set of footprints, I didn’t abandon you. I carried you!’” my mom yelled at me through the phone.
With all the passion, anger, and love still in her voice, she pleaded with me to, “Look down in that jail cell, Damon. Look where you are standing. There is only one set of footprints, and they are not yours. Get on God’s back. I don’t want to lose my son.”
Sufficiently broken down by the pain in my father’s voice and the pleas of my spiritual mother, I sobbed on the phone like a child. She assured me I was loved and could call anytime I wanted to. After exchanging “I love yous,” I hung up. At my bunk that night, I got on my knees and began praying to a God I had pushed out of my life long ago. The incredible warmth I felt from that simple act covered me like a blanket. God’s love was there waiting for me to receive. Exhausted by both the withdrawals from meth and the emotionally draining phone call, I slept soundly that night.
Do not make the mistake of thinking this was some kind of “Road to Damascus” moment for me. There was no overnight conversion in which I became a humble and good person, ready to serve others. No, I was still an addict in denial. I was still a liar, a manipulator, and a selfish, detestable human being.
The blue day room phones would be used by me to commit even more crimes and continue to try and make movements on the street to get me out. I would do an interview with a TV station, WFAA, where I boldly lied to the camera and said I was innocent of these crimes. I told anyone who would listen that I was innocent. Actually asking for sympathy, I was ripe to be stricken down, and easy to hate.
I began praying again. However, during the ten months before trial, my prayers to God were about what you would expect from an addict who had no concept of all the pain he’d caused so many. A selfish daily request, this is what it consisted of:
“Dear Lord, please get me out of this trouble I’m in.
And if you do, God, I swear I will go back out there,
get a job, be a normal guy again, and I’ll just smoke
meth on the weekends. Please give me probation. Amen.”
When dissecting this awful demand to God, it is impossible to miss two things. One was my absurd belief I could negotiate and bargain with God. As if He wrung His hands every morning, waiting for me, thinking, “Boy, I sure wish Damon would get up soon, so we can run this universe together.” That is the ego and hubris of a prideful addict.
The other obvious absurdity of this daily request is that I asked God’s help to get out of trouble so I could be free to use meth once again, but only on the weekends. Despite the severity of the trouble I was in, and the pain I had caused so many, I still believed I was not only entitled to another chance, but that God would help me get there. On my terms. Working on my addiction never crossed my mind in county jail. Back then, I never even admitted I had a problem.
Those months in county jail were filled with me slowly acclimating to life behind bars. Eventually, as a result of my phone calls during which I spoke of crimes, the authorities listening in hit me with more than a dozen indictments. In one day. The purpose of this exercise was never to try me on all those charges; rather, it was to secure a bond so steep it could never be reached. With a bond attached to each felony indictment, the price for my freedom went from a high, but certainly achievable, 250,000 to over one million dollars. Most murderers in Dallas County Jail did not have a million dollars in bond. Dallas had sent me a very clear message: “Damon West, you are not going anywhere, and we are taking you to a very public trial.”
Early on in the process I lost my original attorney, Randall Cory. His departure came after a late August 2008 bond reduction hearing in which he went after Judge Snipes for signing such an obviously flawed warrant to search my apartment. Cory laid into the prosecution for building a case on such shoddy ground (the basis for my brief, later in prison). He told me the pressure for him to get off my side was growing. You see, the dope dealer who was at my apartment when the SWAT raid went down, Tex, not only worked for Cory as a handyman, but also lived at Cory’s residence. Cory was his lawyer in other past legal matters as well. Although it was not unheard of for attorneys to allow clients to pay off their legal fees in trade, this arrangement brought Cory into a potential pressure cooker, and the DA’s office had control of the heat. He pleaded with me to release him from representation of me. I agreed and never saw him again.
In the Dallas County criminal justice complex, everything is operated with a system of tunnels. The courthouse sits in the middle of several jails, which are towers labeled with whatever cardinal direction they are from the courthouse. I was housed in the South, West, and North Towers, respectively, during my stay there. This setup prevented any contact with the public while being transported, eliminating the opportunity for escape, which I never considered. It also eliminated any opportunity to see the sun, as the towers were not equipped with an outside recreation yard with a sunroof.
The worst part about being in county jail were the days I had an appearance at the courthouse. These were the longest days of my entire life. A guard would come around to each pod, usually around 4 a.m., and call the names of those of us who needed to get ready for court, without giving any further information about what the visit involved. By 5 a.m., you would be escorted from your general population cell on your tower to a holding cell for court transfers on your tower. This was the first of up to five or six holding cells you would be transferred into before being placed in the holding cell outside your respective courtroom. These holding cells were absolute torture.
In a holding cell, you could expect three things. First, it was going to be freezing cold. I’m not talking about a little cool where you could comfortably warm up if you put your arms inside the short sleeves of your black and white striped jail uniform, although I did that. No, this was a painful, intentional type of cold. So cold you could never get comfortable because your teeth were chattering.
Second, the holding cells were absolutely guaranteed to be loud. Like, runway of an aircraft carrier loud. The cells would fill up with a collection of the biggest know-it-all jailhouse lawyers in the system, thugs and gangsters. Imagine the sound of about twenty men having several competing conversations in a concrete 15-by-10-foot room. Now multiply that by ten, w
hich was about the number of holding cells on an average hallway. The mindless conversations grated on me like fingernails down a chalkboard.
The third thing you could always expect was violence. When you put that many people from different neighborhoods, races, and gangs into one room, you get trouble. For this reason, I realized why God made it so difficult sleep in there. Witnessing assaults was commonplace, usually inflicted on someone sleeping or unaffiliated. Because I was riding solo, I found myself in a few scuffles in there. Only once was I jumped because I was the only white guy. It was both scary and annoying, as you could forget about any meaningful intervention from the guards. It was an imperative to be vigilant and alert.
By my estimate, I was taken to the holding cells over twenty times during my stay in county. Some of the time, and this drove me absolutely crazy, I was called out just to be told at the courtroom that they didn’t need me. To add insult to injury, the bailiff would throw out something like, “Hell, I don’t even know why they called you out,” for good measure. A few times, I was called out to meet briefly with my new attorney, Ed Sigel, who refused to visit me in the jail because, in his words, “It’s too difficult to get in and out of the jail to visit a client.”
My family hired Ed at the recommendation of a family friend. Ed was in his 70s and had an air of annoyance and conceitedness every time I spoke to him. He bragged about working in Robert Kennedy’s Justice Department in the 1960s and claimed to be a legal genius. He reminded me more of Columbo (when he put on the bumbling detective shtick) than of Matlock. This was the guy standing between me and prison.
As we got closer to trial, concerns grew about Ed’s health and ability to adequately defend me. Even the prosecution shared this concern. The remedy, my family decided, was to hire a co-counsel named Karen Lambert. Ed resented this. I don’t want to say that Ed was a chauvinist from a different era, but he certainly made comments that would have made Archie Bunker proud. Sticking with the TV-show analogies, if Ed was like the goofy Columbo, then Karen was more like the intelligent and witty Jessica Fletcher from Murder, She Wrote. The addition of Karen gave me a little reassurance. The problem, however, was that Ed was lead counsel, and therefore called all the shots. He ran the pre-trial and trial his way, which confused everyone.