Texted Lies, Whispered Truths: Jason Collier's Story by Terri Browning (books for students to read .txt) 📕

When I married M, she talked me into going to Trinity Fellowship with her, where Jimmy Evans was and still is the pastor. He and his wife, Karen, started MarriageToday, which now reaches 680 million households across 200 countries through their television program.

The first time I went, everything about the way they worshiped, compared to what I was used to at the Lutheran church, scared me. I’d never been to a church where they raised their hands as they sang or prayed. I told M I didn’t want to go back. Respectfully, she didn’t force the issue. But a few months later, I had this urge to give it another chance and decided to return. That Sunday, Pastor Evans’s sermon was titled, “Why People Raise Their Hands During Worship,” and it all just clicked for me.

After that, I got more and more into the church, but when we started having problems within our marriage, I found myself drifting further and further away from God.

O was raised Catholic, though she hadn’t ever really embraced religion. But after a little while of going to Trinity Fellowship with me, she loved it. After we were married, we even started attending the Blended Family group. We enjoyed it so much that we began taking over the Blended Family group, ministering to other families with children from previous relationships.

When I was offered a job in Memphis, Texas, as a sergeant, O didn’t hesitate to move, even though it was a three-hour round trip to work for her. We bought a house in Memphis that we wanted to renovate together, a project we hoped would bring us even closer.

But we didn’t anticipate how much time we would spend at work or on the house. I was so busy; there were days I was lucky to get an hour of sleep before I had to go back to the station. And with O traveling so much, it felt like we never saw each other.

Our relationship had seemed perfect, but cracks were starting to form. At first, I didn’t really pay attention to them, but the larger they became, the harder they were to ignore. And then suddenly, the biggest stressor in our relationship was glaring right back at me in the form of my stepson.

O’s son had become too much for her when he was seven. She’d had to make the difficult decision to send him to live with his father because she could no longer control him. It was possibly one of the hardest things she had ever had to do, because she knew how abusive her first husband was, but she felt she had no other choice. Her guilt ate at her.

Her son was having issues at home with his father. He didn’t get along with his stepmother, was struggling in school, and he told O that he was frequently being beaten by his dad. I am still unsure if that was the real reason or if his dad and stepmom couldn’t handle him any longer and simply kicked him out.

Knowing what I know now, I am more confident they did, in fact, make him leave.

We decided to move to Borger, Texas, in November 2017 to be closer to O’s work again and to have her son move in with us. As days turned into weeks, I saw his anger issues up close. Of course, he had been around an allegedly abusive father all of his life and shared DNA with the man. Nature and nurture were both working against this boy, but then again, it is the same story for a lot of people.

That is no excuse for the things this…little shit…has done.

O let him get away with anything at home. Drugs, having a fake ID, and skipping school to the point a truancy officer was getting involved, were only a few of his infractions, and she didn’t make him face any consequences. He was constantly dropping my name and my position within the community to get himself out of trouble, and I was catching hell for it at work.

Then one night, we got a call from the night shift sergeant. My stepson had a girlfriend in Stinnett, and while drunk at a party, he decided he wanted to visit her. He stole another boy’s truck while under the influence, and he proceeded to take out several power poles, completely totaling the vehicle.

He didn’t have a driver’s license.

As expected, he was charged with DUI as a minor.

O paid all his fines. When the parents of the boy whose truck was stolen came forward, O then found a way to come up with $16,000 to keep them silent.

I didn’t agree with how she was handling things, but he was her kid. And as she liked to remind me, I was living in her house. Something that she mentioned whenever we argued. She owned everything we had as a couple. I didn’t feel like I had the right to say anything, even though I was his stepfather, because O continually made me feel like it wasn’t my place.

I should have put my foot down then and kicked him out that same night.

Maybe then I would have saved my baby girl from the nightmare that came next.

9

I caught heat at work over my stepson’s behavior. The boy was uncontrollable, and his drug use—which had started as just marijuana but had progressed into cocaine—was an embarrassment I was getting tired of having to deal with.

O wasn’t prepared to make him face the consequences of his actions. She would ground him, but she never enforced it. He would regularly curse at her, get in her face and scream at her. In all honesty, I think she was scared of him, and that fear, on top of her agonizing guilt over not being there for him when he was growing up, made her think she had to hand him everything.

As I was getting off night shift one morning, M called me and said she needed to speak