My Husband Punched A White Man And Nearly Spent 20 Years In Prison

The day started like any other. When it ended, my boyfriend was in jail with a felony charge and a broken hand.

The back story is long and messy, but the events of that fateful day unfolded in a crisp, rapid succession. My boyfriend, who would soon become my husband, was having a drink at the neighborhood bar. It was about 5 p.m. He had spent the morning sleeping after a 24-hour paramedic shift and was enjoying a rare day off.

Then his phone rang. It was his son’s mother. Let’s just say they were not on good terms; they hadn’t been on good terms for several years. We were preparing to move from Rhode Island to Washington DC, in part because it was proving impossible for my boyfriend to see his son without getting screamed at. Often in public. Better, we reasoned, for us to get sustained, quality time over summers and school breaks than to continue to put him in the middle of constant fighting.

We wanted to get custody, but we were bluntly advised that the chances of a Black father getting custody over a white mother were slim to none. No matter that she had broken into his house and cut up all his clothes. No matter that she had climbed up a fire escape and through a window into my apartment, while her son watched from the car.

We found out later that she’d gotten into a fight with her boyfriend on that sticky summer day back in 2007, which prompted her to make the phone call. We were, after all, her punching bags. She was a deeply unhappy person, and the story she told herself and anyone who would listen was that it was all our fault.

She called my boyfriend and told him, in no uncertain terms, that once he left Rhode Island, he would never see his son again.

Here are the seven things that happened next:

My boyfriend came home and said he was going over to her house to talk things through.
I said: “I don’t think that’s a good idea.”
He said: “We just need to sort things out.”
I said: “I have a bad feeling about this.”
He said: “It’s OK, don’t worry.”
He left. I called a friend. I told her I was very worried.
After what seemed like hours, but was probably no more than 45 minutes, my boyfriend called. The police might be after me, he said, and I think I broke my hand.

When he first arrived at his ex’s house, no one was home.

Her sister, who lived next door, said they’d gone out to get ice cream. The thought of his ex telling him he’d never see his son again and then going out to get ice cream, of all things, only further enraged him.

Soon enough, they came home and a loud argument ensued on the front lawn. This was nothing new. Loud arguments nearly always ensued when my boyfriend and his ex were within shouting range of one another. Their son licked his ice cream cone while he watched from the living room window.

Eventually, his ex admitted that she hadn’t been serious, she’d just had a bad day. She was in another fight with another man and she needed someone to yell at. She went inside. My boyfriend made his way back to his car.

If it had all ended there, we’d be $11,000 richer today. But it didn’t, because that’s when his ex’s three neighbors got involved.

Suddenly they were on the front lawn, threatening to kick his “Black a**” and yelling at him to leave her alone. This, considering that she was inside and he was walking in the other direction, was clearly what he was in the process of doing. The problem was, they were blocking the way to his car. Three of them, closing in on him.

“Get out of here,” one of them, the biggest one, snarled. My boyfriend could feel his breath, soured by beer, warm and moist across his face. “Get your Black a** out of here.”

Growing up, my boyfriend was often the only Black student in his school. He was used to being targeted and bullied, and he’d learned how to fight. Use your words, his mother told him. Involve an adult if you can. But if all else fails, take out the biggest guy first.

My boyfriend could see they were already beyond words, and technically speaking, they were all adults. So he followed his mother’s advice and punched the biggest one in the face. My boyfriend has a heck of a punch. The man, who must have weighed at least 300 pounds, collapsed on the ground. The other two suddenly weren’t acting so tough anymore. They let my boyfriend continue toward his car.

As he drove down the street, he passed the cops coming up it, sirens blazing. He kept driving and came to meet me, cradling his injured hand.

“There’s probably a warrant out there for my arrest,” he said. “Assault, domestic disturbance, who knows what else they came up with.”

We decided to drive back to Cranston, the town bordering Providence, Rhode Island, where my boyfriend’s ex lived. Better to be pre-emptive, we reasoned, to call the police ourselves and report an attempted assault. Otherwise, my boyfriend looked guilty.

He said, “They might arrest me on the spot.”

I said, “But can’t we file charges against them first? It was three against one. They were threatening to assault you.”

He said, “We’ll see.”

“What about your hand?” I asked.

“If the cops arrest me,” he said, “they’ll have to take me to a hospital.”

We drove to Cranston and parked outside a Lowe’s. We made the call. We sat in silence in the car. We waited.

We didn’t have to wait long.

Within minutes, two cop cars had pulled up behind us, sirens blaring, lights flashing. “STEP OUT OF THE VEHICLE WITH YOUR HANDS ON YOUR HEAD.”

My boyfriend turned to me. “This might be ugly,” he said. I’d been mentally preparing for his arrest, but still, I hadn’t realized it was going to be like this. I thought the police would pull up, and we’d all have a little chat. Get a chance to tell his side of the story.

Instead, we emerged from the car, hands on our heads. Within seconds, my boyfriend was in handcuffs and whisked off to one of the police cars. Before I had time to process what was going on, the car drove away.

That was it: He was gone.

Now it was just me, and one of the remaining officers. I stood there, dumbly, my hands still on my head. “You can relax,” he told me.

Relax?! I almost laughed despite myself. I sat down on the curb, not sure what else to do.

For some reason, the cop was inspecting the car. He was circling it, squinting at it, taking pictures, and jotting down notes. He examined a smudge on the passenger-side window. “Excuse me,” I said. “Why are you taking pictures of the car?”

I was told that my boyfriend had been charged with domestic disturbance and assault with a deadly weapon. A deadly weapon?! I said. Yes, the cop explained, for trying to run a man over with his vehicle. It’s a felony charge, he added unhelpfully.

I asked when my boyfriend would be able to file charges against the three men who had surrounded him, threatened assault, and used racial slurs.

“He can’t,” the cop said matter-of-factly. “The investigation is closed.”

When I managed to get through to my boyfriend later that evening, I was on my couch sipping a vodka tonic.

“I’m freezing,” he said. “The cell is 50 degrees and all I have is a tank top.”

He told me that an officer had taken him to the hospital, where they confirmed he had a broken hand. He had pleaded with the officer to take him to a different hospital, a hospital where he didn’t routinely pick up and drop off patients during his paramedic shifts. He was terrified of running into someone he knew. The officer was unsympathetic.

My boyfriend said that if he couldn’t be taken to a different hospital, he didn’t want medical care. The officer was unsympathetic.

Trying to keep his head down as he was led through the hospital hallways in handcuffs he passed another officer. “Sir,” he said. “I’m being taken here against my will.”

The officer said, “You think I give an eff about you?!!” He kept walking.

My boyfriend got a splint, the kind you can buy at Walgreens for $29.99. Even though he worked in healthcare, he couldn’t afford health insurance, and we later got a bill in the mail for $2,500.

I told my boyfriend what the cop had said about the felony charge. It was news to him. No one had bothered to share this pertinent and devastating tidbit of information.

There was a long silence. Then a hard, bitter laugh. “This is BS, man,” he said.

While he shivered on a wooden bench, I took two Advil PMs and crawled under my down comforter until my alarm insisted upon my awakening.

I wore a knee-length skirt and high heels to the courthouse the next morning, thinking it might help if I looked respectable.

It was raining, and the light that filtered through the floor-to-ceiling windows was hard and gray.

I wandered around, not even knowing what to look for. Finally, I found a desk with someone sitting at it. Someone directed me to another someone at another desk, who directed me to courtroom 1-A.

The judge called the room to order, and various people pled their cases. There were a few DUIs, a bar fight, and a violation of a restraining order. I was sitting in the back, my heart pounding. I kept envisioning my boyfriend in a courtroom down the hall, about to be hauled away, while I stupidly sat here. But about 30 minutes in, there he was, getting herded in by a cop, behind a short guy in a red baseball cap. The two men were chained together. To see him in handcuffs yesterday had been bad enough but in chains?

My boyfriend was a proud man, and his loss of dignity was shocking. He looked haggard and helpless, with his hair matted on one side and a white splint gleaming off his arm.

I’d had a bad feeling about my boyfriend going to his ex’s yesterday to “talk things through.” But even still, I never could have predicted this outcome. Maybe I knew it was theoretically possible. I knew that Black men had been killed for lesser crimes. But there was nothing theoretical about finding myself at the back of a crowded, slightly musty courtroom at 9:30 in the morning, wondering if I had enough money in my meager bank account to get my boyfriend out of those chains.

The judge rattled on. All I heard was a mention of $2,000, and then my boyfriend and the red baseball cap guy were herded back out. Was that the bail? I thought, feeling the panic set in. Two-thousand dollars?

I slipped out of the courtroom to figure out who to ask. A police officer told me to go downstairs, to the basement, but when I went downstairs, all I found were endless hallways that led to locked doors. My feet were screaming in my pointless heels. What I was wearing, I realized, didn’t matter. All that mattered was my bail money.

Which, I soon found out, was not $2,000 as I had feared, but 10 percent. When I finally located the correct window, I was told I needed cash. I had three dollars in my wallet and a few coins jingling at the bottom of my purse. There was no ATM in the courthouse; my flip phone was unable to direct me to the nearest bank. I recited the directions I was given in my head over and over, my hands trembling against the wheel.

I knew that this was all taking too long, that my boyfriend was somewhere in the bowels of the courthouse, shivering in a cell, waiting for me, counting on me. I found the ATM and checked my balance. I had $233 in my bank account. Two hundred and thirty-three dollars to my name. I withdrew $200.

“Oh honey,” the woman at the window said when I breathlessly returned. “Let me call down and make sure they haven’t taken him away already. Wait here just a minute.”

Away? Where? And why did I have no idea what was going on? Turns out, my boyfriend had been in line to be taken to state prison when they called his name. Who knows what would have happened then, or how hard it would have been to get him out?

As he approached me, I succumbed to the sobs that had been poised at the back of my throat all morning, but he looked elated. A broad smile split his face. He hadn’t been allowed to look around the courtroom when he’d shuffled through in chains, wasn’t sure if I was even there. He’d been mere seconds away from prison, and one second later, he was free.

At least for now.

We moved to Washington DC, where I had a fancy job waiting for me and my very own office that looked out over a courtyard.

It was a rocky transition, to say the least. My boyfriend had to help me move all our things to our second-floor walk-up with a broken hand. He couldn’t work until his hand healed, which took a couple of months. He hung out in our 500-square-foot apartment with nothing to do and no one to talk to, missing his son.

As the weeks fell away, things got better. His hand healed and he found work. We wondered about that felony charge from time to time, but we didn’t hear any more about it. We assumed the prosecutor had mercifully dropped the case, seeing the flimsy and fabricated charge for what it was.

Unfortunately, as we should have known when you’re Black in America, our justice system rarely offers mercy.

About a year after our move to DC, my boyfriend called me while I was at work. The charge hadn’t been dropped, he said, and the case was set to go to trial. He was facing up to 20 years in prison.

As I processed the news, I became acutely aware of my office’s glass door, through which anyone who wandered by could see me. So I hid under my desk. I didn’t know what else to do.

It was mind-boggling to me that I could take a single phone call and suddenly find my life transformed. Once your fate is at the mercy of the law, and the law is not on your side, the illusion that you maintain any semblance of control over your future or present circumstances cruelly disintegrates, like cotton candy left in the rain.

My boyfriend’s public defender did not believe his story. “You’re telling me they charged you with a felony and all you did was give someone a fat lip?” she asked, her voice dripping with sarcasm. It was not my boyfriend’s first experience with a distant and downright nasty public defender. On more than one occasion, I dreamt about punching her in the face and was always disappointed to wake up.

After a year in DC, I had managed to recoup the $200 in my savings and then some, enough to afford a lawyer who would at least pretend to operate on the premise that their client was innocent.

I longed to go to trial so my boyfriend could win. But we couldn’t afford the price tag or the risk. A trial would cost us an additional $1,500 a day, and it was likely to last several days. Plus, my boyfriend would inevitably be making his case to a majority-white jury, and who knows what they would decide. There was too much on the line.

So we settled. On top of the five grand we paid the lawyer, we had to give the man who made references to his Black a** $1,000 for his fat lip. Meanwhile, we were still paying off the $2,500 hospital bill, and that’s not even to mention the other $2,500 in lost wages for the months he’d been out of work.

All told, the whole ordeal cost us $11,000. It just may have been the world’s most expensive punch.

In the 14 years since that fateful summer day, my boyfriend has become my husband, graduated from college, and received a doctorate.

With his firsthand experience of how difficult life was without the use of his hand, he pursued a career in hand therapy.

In an alternate reality, a reality in which we didn’t have $6,000 on hand, there is a frighteningly reasonable chance that my husband would have spent the last 14 years languishing in prison.

It’s important to acknowledge police brutality — my husband has suffered that, too — but the injustice of our so-called “justice system” extends far beyond brutality. Cops, prosecutors, public defenders, and judges can shatter lives without inflicting physical harm. If, by your skin color, the law is not on your side, once you’re in its clutches, it’s exceedingly difficult to claw your way out. It’s nearly impossible if you don’t have expendable income.

If you’ve never had to bail a loved one out of jail, place your loved one’s future in the hands of a disillusioned public defender, or spend your life savings fighting fabricated felony charges, it’s difficult to fully grasp the depths of the havoc that the hands of the law can wreak. Innocence is incidental.

The world we have spun over the last 14 years still feels fragile sometimes. Our sense of control has a shimmering quality to it, a mirage that could easily slip through our grasp. If my husband is even just a few minutes late coming home from work, I immediately see lights flashing in my head and hear the crunching of boots as a police officer approaches his car.

I know how swiftly, how catastrophically, it could all come crashing down.