Lindsey Hanks – Part IV

Although Preston was free of this life’s pain, the pain of his death suffocated the family he left behind; Lindsey worst of all.

Kim recounted to me in tears what the days after Preston’s death looked like for Lindsey.

“The day after we put him in the ground, Lindsey snuck out from home. She told me she was fine, but I knew she wasn’t. I couldn’t focus on that though, because I wasn’t fine… I loved him… so much” Kim choked. I had known Kim loved Preston by the way she talked about him, even still; an indisputable fact confirmed by both Lindsey’s and Dustin’s accounts. 

When it came time for Lindsey to come home, she wasn’t where she’d said she’d be. Lindsey’s friends finally disclosed her location, but had already called an ambulance as she was quickly approaching death; so drunk she was choking on her own vomit. She had to be rushed to the hospital where they pumped her stomach for alcohol poisoning. 

Kim took a moment to steel herself before continuing, “It was horrible, the worst night of my life. All Lindsey could say, talking unconsciously, was ‘I want my daddy, please bring back daddy. Daddy don’t go.’” She sobbed these words out like arrows piercing through the drunkenness. 

Nevertheless, not to disprove the city’s ‘laid-back’ reputation, CPS deemed no counseling services or further checks were necessary for the welfare of a 12-year old child that narrowly survived alcohol poisoning. The State of Texas decided that no counseling services should be offered to Kim, no mental health evaluation or job retention programs are setup for such situations. 

I had only known Lindsey for 3 months by this time. We attended Cedar Valley Middle School, she was in the 7^th grade. Although we didn’t share any classes, we spent our time with friends groups that seemed to intersect everywhere outside school. When Lindsey and co. would run off to the woods behind the football field to smoke weed, my friends and I would run into them, hiking through the woods as a shortcut to grab some Jack in the Box 99-cent tacos or breakfast jacks. Both groups would be skipping school. 

After I spoke with her mom about the alcohol poisoning, I later asked her “How many times did you overdose growing up?”

“Shit, so many times I can’t even remember,” she volleyed back. “I remember the first time I ever did REAL drugs I was 12 years old. The guy I was with introduced himself as Satan. I’m pretty sure it was a nickname, but I never saw him after that day. I met him at Lakeline mall and he drove me to his house in Lago Vista. After he groped me in the car, he got super excited when I pushed back and told him I was a virgin. He tried to convince me to do some coke and to have sex. He finally convinced me to try some. I will never forget what I said after that first line: ‘If this is what being high is like, I want to be high for the rest of my life’ and I pretty much was.”

She would later concede that there were brief respites, some of which we’ll recount.

Now that you understand the background, social context and individual genetics that accompanied Lindsey up to this point, it behooves me to ask: What do you think happened to her after such trauma?

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to make an educated guess: Lindsey lost her mind. As her life crumbled around her, she reached inside and turned her soul to stone, masking her vulnerability and hurt with an irradiated veneer of bad attitude. Her hate ran deep. Her emotions went unacknowledged, useless to the person she would become. Her very existence became pain. 

She started betraying her friends, robbing and threatening us. What may have been an absence here and there turned into blatant truancy. Although it was a regular occurrence to venture together to our friends’ siblings apartments in the Mansions, Lindsey started making a habit of it on a regular basis, spending her time around 18-30 year old drug dealers when she was just 12 and 13. Inevitably, she developed a cocaine habit as a preteen; a coping mechanism for her trauma. 

With her newfound drug addiction masking this mountain of hurt, Lindsey was drowning. Drugs and the addict lifestyle were killing the girl she was, slowly with each and every compromise. Her priorities had to change to accommodate her newfound master. With such a demon to feed and no means to earn money to feed it, it wasn’t long before she was selling her body. She was 12 the first time a 19-year old named Bob Vance (REAL NAME REDACTED) offered her to give him head in exchange for cocaine. “No joke I was shivering and thought I was going to die the first time I was withdrawing.” I know how that feels. It feels like death because your body’s central nervous system reacts similarly to withdrawals as it does to extreme threats or dangers. It was the beginning of a long, miserable line of such activity.

TRIGGER WARNING:

Later she would meet Dan Johnson, (REAL NAME REDACTED)– an older sibling of a classmate. In his late teens/early 20s he began to exchange sex for drugs with her- not just cocaine. He’d also make her sleep with his dealer if he didn’t have any himself. The first time she hopped in his car to go score some drugs he asked her “Are you a virgin?” When she told him no, he reached across the center console and under her skirt, sticking a finger in her to check. “OK good”, he smiled and drove on. Although by 13 Lindsey was fully addicted to coke she frequently experimented with air duster, ecstasy, methamphetamine, mushrooms, weed and pills. Her mother was often too intoxicated and buried in work to notice. 

I’d see her whenever I was loitering around the Mansions or buying drugs from the same dealers. One time I asked her what she was doing all day there, why she wasn’t at school, wondering if she had found an excuse to avoid it that I could use. She smiled and rolled her glazed eyes. 

She started skipping entire weeks of school and lost contact with all of her classmates. She dressed in accordance with how she viewed herself and how the rapists treated her: as an object whose worth was solely based on how men viewed her body.

Later, I asked her why she ever started hanging around those guys. “Because they had drugs. I needed drugs to run away from my life. I hated everyone. I hated my dad, my mom, myself. This is how deep it went. I couldn’t stop hating and so drugs distracted me from it. That and I wanted those guys to think I was cool, that I was down. I had crushes on them since they were older and wanted them to like me too.”

Although being a blonde-haired green-eyed girl had its perks, it wasn’t as forgiving as being a football player. After nearly a semester of unexcused absences, she was charged with truancy. 

Even still, that wouldn’t be enough to call adults to action. The warrant was outstanding for months before police started looking for her; and by then it was due to a separate warrant: burglary of habitation. 

Her friend had snitched on her for having weed at school. Once she figured out who it was, Lindsey broke into the traitor’s house and threatened to assaultthem before running out the Mansions complex, onto O’Connor Drive, all the way down to Great Oaks which she took to Hairy Man Road.

Whiling away at her innards, the anxiety consumed her. Lindsey was 12, on the run from the cops, her friends, her family, herself. Her friend had just betrayed her. She felt she had no one. As someone who understands the traumatic effects that isolation and ostracization can have on a child, I can definitively say: Death would have been nicer. Walking down Hairy Man Road, she sobbed with every step. Every movement was a crescendo, a new plateau, a buffet of strain. Contrasting this, the decrescendo of her humanity would begin here, on this walk. As she struggled to move her body forward, a Hispanic man appearing in his 40s pulled his truck over to the side of the road.

“You need a ride home?” he asked. 

“Yes, please” Lindsey bawled. She wasn’t thinking about safety, hell she wasn’t thinking at all. 

TRIGGER WARNING:

When she entered the car, the man pulled out his penis and offered her $80. She started crying. He upped his offer, “$120 and you get to go home safely.” With no way to escape, no one to call, and the implied threat understood, Lindsey agreed. He was turned on because she was a minor. Lindsey would remain silent, with tears running down her cheeks; in shock, throughout the event. Five minutes later and Lindsey was at home, $120 richer.

That’s when I realized how easy it was to make money if you just closed your eyes and let men use you.” Lindsey admitted.

Certainly, she was in denial- she might still be. No 13 year old handles rape well, coming out of it with a thrill, unless the shock and denial overwhelms them.  

“What did you end up doing with the money?” I asked her. 

“I went back to the Mansions and tried to score some drugs from M (FULL NAME REDACTED).” M (FULL NAME REDACTED) was Dan Johnson’s (REAL NAME REDACTED) drug dealer. “Then, when I was there I saw that the cops were looking for me. I tried to run, but they caught up and tackled me.” 

Shortly after Lindsey faced these legal troubles at Cedar Valley, Kim shipped her off to a boarding school in North Carolina; a school turned prison for those who ‘struggled’ to fit into the regular schools.

It was Kim’s desperate attempt to save her daughter. Lindsey would go to Harbor Oaks, in Mars Hill, NC. Although the school painted itself as a therapeutic center, with a PhD-qualified psychologist on staff, it would later be exposed as not ever having been registered with the state as a mental health facility. What’s worse, the Doctor’s PhD was not from an accredited institution. If one were to Google Harbor Oaks today, the first link would lead to a multi-site report consolidating findings from a multiyear investigation. There’s parental letters admonishing the school owners and administrators, excerpts of charges and lawsuits filed against them, terrible reviews, etc. 

Lindsey once confided in me, “Those people were worse than prison guards.” They would isolate her in a ‘box’ (think Cool Hand Luke) for days at a time, force feeding her partially rancid pork; a meat she cannot tolerate to this day as a result.  It was depressing to hear how she was thrust into an even worse situation than the one she left in Austin. Depressing isn’t the right word, it was pointblank horrific.

Over the years she was in North Carolina, I lost touch with Lindsey. Her mom moved to Colorado and life went on. It wasn’t until around 2009 when she added me on Facebook that I even remembered her. We shared a couple messages back and forth, nothing substantial. At the time, neither of us were capable of any substance unless it was the kind that could be put into our veins. 

Once, when meandering 6^th street near Christmas time in 2009, I saw her. She was cold, underdressed for the winter; seemingly transparent she was so skinny. Any light that had been in her eyes was long lost, just an animalistic expression left. She hurried between blocks, surfing through traffic on her way into a bar. “Lindsey!” I screamed out to her. She turned, like a feral cat cornered, “Fuck you, you don’t know me!” she growled out, before darting into her destination. I thought about going after her and explaining who I was, but I knew that look. She wasn’t human anymore. Any explanation from me was a waste of her time unless I had money to give her or trade her for sex. And she was right, I didn’t know her now; definitely not this version of her.

I found out later what happened in between those years we lost contact. After rejoining her mom in Colorado, Lindsey tried for sobriety again. She was a minor, dating 20+ year olds, but at least she was sober. 

A part of this sobriety was her attendance at the Cornerstone program, a substance abuse therapy group for youth. The youths there were more of the same: violent addicts who would take Lindsey down that same path of addiction. After experiencing an attempted sexual assault from a group peer she trusted to walk her home, Lindsey gave up all care of being sober. Relating this to me she said, “I swore I would never be sober again. Like if this is what I get for trying, fuck that why even try?”

“Whatever came of that?” I asked, wondering if she had reported it. 

“We had a mutual friend that he asked to call me to apologize on his behalf. I told him I forgave him and moved on.”

Returning to Texas, Lindsey and Kim lived with Lindsey’s aunt. They shared a studio apartment in one of Austin’s projects between 3 people. It was the most squalid of conditions. With Kim living out her addiction full time, no parental bonding and no government intervention, Lindsey stopped going to school altogether.

“How could I go back to school and relate to anyone?” Lindsey shared with me her outlook at the time. “I tried to go back a couple times, but it’s like these girls were talking crushes and here I was working the streets for money, carrying more money in my bra than the teachers made in a month. You couldn’t make me to go school. I thought school was for losers. I wish I had just known then.” Her crying would be broken up by the need to return to her cell and be counted. Later, she’d tell me “I just wish I could go back to that scared little girl and let her know it’s going to be alright” she started crying, “that she was so much more than she knew. That she could be anything.”

Forgiving our previous selves is a tough beast to tackle, for anyone. It’s even more difficult when your previous self pushed you into a 35 year sentence, like Lindsey’s has. Yet, that’s the life Lindsey lives today. I can say with 100% certainty that if I had lived through as much trauma as she has experienced, I wouldn’t be alive today. How many of you can say the same?