What do you do if a crime was committed, and you know who did it?
Here’s an example, think about this.
You’re on your lunch break at work, but you’re at your desk. You’re just scrolling through Facebook, and you see that the local police are searching for someone who recently committed an armed robbery.
When you read the details, you can see the name of the person they’re looking for – and it’s one of your co-workers. You look at the picture in the police bulletin, and yes – they are trying to find this person who works at the same place you do – in fact you can look up from your phone and see him sitting at his desk, just 30 feet away.
This person is your friend. You’ve worked together for years. Your kids have played together. But you have a decision to make. Do you call the police, and tell them exactly where they can find this person? Would you consider that a betrayal of your friendship?
My guest today is Justine. She found herself in a situation kind of like that. She knew what this person did, she knew police were looking for him, and she knew exactly where they could find him.
Except in her case, the crime that was committed was murder. And the person being hunted by police was her brother.
Content warning – this episodes includes descriptions of murder and graphic sexual violence.
You can follow Justine on Instagram
Full show notes and pictures for this episode are here:
https://WhatWasThatLike.com/185
Graphics for this episode by Bob Bretz. Transcription was done by James Lai.
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Episode transcript (download transcript PDF):
What do you do if a crime was committed, and you know who did it?
Here’s an example, think about this.
You’re on your lunch break at work, but you’re at your desk. You’re just scrolling through Facebook, and you see that the local police are searching for someone who recently committed an armed robbery.
When you read the details, you can see the name of the person they’re looking for – and it’s one of your co-workers. You look at the picture in the police bulletin, and yes – they are trying to find this person who works at the same place you do – in fact you can look up from your phone and see him sitting at his desk, just 30 feet away.
This person is your friend. You’ve worked together for years. Your kids have played together. But you have a decision to make. Do you call the police, and tell them exactly where they can find this person? Would you consider that a betrayal of your friendship?
My guest today is Justine. She found herself in a situation kind of like that. She knew what this person did, she knew police were looking for him, and she knew exactly where they could find him.
Except in her case, the crime that was committed was murder. And the person being hunted by police was her brother.
Scott
You were one of four children. Who was in your family?
Justine
There’s Josh, who’s my older brother, me, and Jasmine who is after me and Josh. Jason is the youngest.
Scott
All right. So Jasmine and Jason were younger than you.
Justine
Yes.
Scott
And were you all being raised by a single mother?
Justine
Yes. Initially, we lived with our mom until I was 8 years old. Josh was 10. Jasmine and Jason were 4 and 5.
Scott
And when you were 8, there was some excitement in your house. What happened then?
Justine
So from 3 to 8, I lived in Baltimore City. The house I remember was on Rose Street. When I was 8 years old, our house was raided because our house had essentially turned into a drug palace. You could buy drugs there. There were guys making drugs there, selling them there. So our house was raided.
Scott
Who were these people? Were these your family members selling drugs? Who was there?
Justine
Well, the only person I remember– his name was Shy, which was a nickname. Weirdly enough, I actually had a conversation with him maybe two years ago after Josh had passed away. I had a conversation with him and I asked him if he remembered us and if he remembered being in the house. One time, I remember he shot a shotgun at me because I had messed up a gift that he had bought for his girlfriend. It was this big white teddy bear he had in the corner and I somehow had gotten it dirty and I remember running down the street. He shot a shotgun at me and that’s where I lost my two front teeth and I have this large scar on my knee that I had to get stitches for. I asked him if he remembered that. He said he kind of remembered. He remembered chasing me out the house but he said he didn’t remember the shotgun. But these weren’t people that we had grown up with. They were actually guys that my mom had met on the street. They had asked her if they could count their money inside of her house and she said, “Yes.” And she said, “They came in and they just never left. They took over the house.”
Scott
It’s fascinating to me that this guy could have such a wild life that he fired a gun at someone and doesn’t even remember that. Was he high at the time?
Justine
No, he never did drugs. He was one of the guys who manufactured and sold them. So he was one of the high ranking guys of the seven men that ultimately came to stay in our home. Seven men were a part of his crew, I guess, and he was like the ringleader.
Scott
So firing a gun at a little girl was just–
Justine
A normal day.
Scott
That’s unbelievable.
Justine
And Baltimore city was a wild place during the nineties.
Scott
So the police raided the home. What happened to your family?
Justine
What I remember is me standing in my living room and the adults watching TV. At the same time that O. J. Simpson was on the TV doing his, like, high-speed chase, our door came busting down. Police officers came in. My brother Josh, who was older, told me to run upstairs and pretend that I was asleep. So, I ran upstairs, got in the bed, and pretended that I was asleep. They arrested all the adults in the home and they actually left us there. I heard my mom say, “My friend will come and get them. My friend will come and get them.” I watched her out the window being arrested because, of course, this is her home. She was a drug user as well and they arrested her and all the adults.
After the police had left, I remember my brother telling us to run down the alleyway to my mom’s friend’s house, who we called Aunt Nunu but she wasn’t really our aunt, and we stayed with her. I think she got fed up with Josh’s antics because he was a rebellious kid but he was an awesome brother. He was a great brother. He was a great brother to have for a young kid. He made sure I went to school. He walked me to school and things like that. He was awesome.
My mom said she called the Department of Social Services a day before she was released from prison to get us and then we were placed in foster care. Jasmine and I were placed together. Josh and Jason were placed separately. Jason went to a single guy who had one other son, a biological son. Jason said that he was abused in that home as he was 4 years old when he was first placed in foster care, Jasmine was 5, Joshua was 10 and he was placed in a group home, but Joshua ran away so much that, eventually, I guess the system lost track of him and he stayed with my mom. So she’s the only kid that she fully raised.
Scott
And the rest of you just kind of went from one foster home to another.
Justine
Yes.
Scott
That’s the background to this. Your younger brother, Jason, his first big crime was in the summer of 2013. He was 22. What did he do at that time?
Justine
Yeah. One evening, he was walking down the street of my mom’s neighborhood – she lived on Harlem Avenue in Baltimore City – and he saw this woman sitting on the side of the steps crying, so he approached her as the good guy saying, “What’s wrong? Can I help you?” They struck up a conversation and then they decided to go into my cousin’s house who lived next door to my mom. My cousin Janelle had two little kids of her own but she wasn’t home that day, so the door was locked. So Jason pushed the woman – her name was Anna – through the window so she could come and unlock the front door. So she got in the window, unlocked the front door, sat, and had a conversation, I believe. Then, Jason became pretty aggressive with her in an attempt to rape her. Luckily for her, she was smart and she did not want to be raped. She said to him, “I have hepatitis.” So he did not rape her but he forced her to perform oral sex on him and stole money from her wallet.
That day, she of course went to the police and reported him that he had raped her. They didn’t arrest him that day. I think they were, I guess, gathering evidence and everything like that because, a few days after, of course, she had reported it to the police and then reported it to her boyfriend, who was actually a gang member who was an associate of my older brother, Joshua, and she had reported it to him about what happened. These guys, who were in a gang, ran to confront Jason. As he was coming around the street, they came up the streets looking for him. So they confronted him, and he pulled off his shirt. “I don’t have any scratches or anything like that. You can look at my body. Look at my back. I didn’t rape her.” He was trying to prove to him that he did not rape her.
Scott
And he really didn’t, right?
Justine
He really didn’t, yes. There was no intercourse, but there was–
Scott
It was a sexual attack, yeah. Okay.
Justine
Because the police were able to get semen from her clothes or her neckline or something like that, there was evidence. The gang members were upset that nothing was being done so they ran into my cousin’s house and took her TVs off the wall, her kids, gaming systems, all these things, I guess, in retaliation. But my older brother, Josh, was also a member of this gang. So, he had told them, “Put the stuff back. I’ll take care. I’ll talk to Jason. I’ll figure out what’s going on.” And they did bring everything back but they wanted him to handle Jason. I don’t know if they meant handle as in beat him up or kill him.
I remember being mad at Josh because I was like, “This is your brother. I don’t care about this gang shit. This is your biological brother. They call you brother but this is a brother that you grew up with. You protect him at all costs.” This is me thinking this because, this whole time, Jason had been saying, “I didn’t rape her. I didn’t do anything to that woman. I don’t even know her. She’s a prostitute. She’s just mad I didn’t pay her.” She was into sex work during that time. It was a difficult time in her life. She was into sex work, doing what she needs to do to get by, but that doesn’t give you the right to attack her or take anything from her.
Scott
So the gang was forcing Josh to either be loyal to them or be loyal to his brother.
Justine
Exactly. This happened on a Thursday night, actually, and I just happened to be there to see my little sister. As I was coming down the street, I saw Josh and Jason arguing. Brothers argue, but Josh is a very silent guy. He’s silent but he’s a serious guy and Jason’s very loving and goofy like the annoying little brother. So I saw them argue and I was like, “There’s no way in the world you’re going to do anything to your brother. This is your brother, your kid brother.” And he was like, “Okay, well then fine. I’ll just send him with you. Go with your sister. Spend a night at her house.” He wanted to let things die down.
So I took Jason home with me. Jason and I had one daughter at the time, Jada, and I took them home with me. But what’s so odd is that I remember myself being upset at Josh because I was like, “This is your brother.” Josh was being annoying. He always did, like, annoying things to me – poke me or something like that – and I said to him, “Don’t fucking touch me.” And he said, “I can touch you. You’re my sister.” Those are my last words to him as well as my last time seeing him alive. I watched him walk up the street and I never saw him alive again.
The next morning, I felt it in the air, I felt something was off. I got up really early for work. My daughter– I didn’t have to drop her off at daycare cause. Jason was home, so I figured she could stay home with him. I got up really early. I got to work at 6 30 AM. I only get to work around 7.38. I got to work. I was sitting at my desk. I was listening to music, so I was not paying attention to my phone. But my sister was calling me and texting me and I was like, “Jasmine, what’s going on?”
She said, “Have you talked to mommy?”
And I was like, “No, I’m just at work. I’m sitting here.”
And she’s like, “Well, Josh got shot this morning and he’s in shock trauma, and she said he may not make it.”
And I let out, like, this little giggle. “What? I just saw him yesterday. What do you mean he was shot?” So I giggled because it’s like this nervous thing that I have and I was like, “No way, I’m going to leave work now and I’m on my way.” So I tell one of my coworkers, “I have to leave, I think my brother’s been shot.” So I was racing from my job to my home to pick up Jason and Jada and then we were on our way to Baltimore. I was driving on the side of the road. I was trying to run lights because this is my big brother. I just saw him yesterday. Even though I had said some mean things to him, this is my brother. It never occurred to me that anything would happen to him because he survived so many crazy things that he did as a youth. One time, a cherry bomb exploded in his hand. This is how crazy he was. He was just fearless, I would say.
When I had gotten to shock trauma– I parked my car outside of the hospital. I ran upstairs. I had no shoes on. I ran upstairs and I was like, “I need to see my brother. They said he was here. Something happened to him.” And the lady at the front desk said, “I’m sorry. He’s been pronounced dead and the coroner’s on his way to pick him up.” I said to her, “Please just let me see.” Cause I didn’t believe it. “Please just let me see. Just let me see. I saw him yesterday. Let me see him, please. I just saw him. There’s no way.” The lady was like, “I’m sorry but we can’t.”
I was sitting there in the waiting room and I just let out this scream because this is my big brother. He was always a protector. Even though I was an annoying kid who followed him everywhere he went, he was still my brother. He was my big brother. I never imagined anything would happen to him because he had lived in Baltimore all his life. He had been around these guys all this time. Nothing ever happened. But then, it was because of Jason’s actions, because Jason had assaulted this woman and the gang wanted some payback, Josh was killed.
On the night of his death, he had been at home with my mom. Someone knocked on the door and said that there was a fight. So Josh, being the person that he was, a fighter– he would fight any type of situation. He was a fighter. Some guys came to the house to get him. So he left the house. It’s about 3 o’clock in the morning. He went to an apartment building that’s near where my mom lives because they’re saying, “Okay, there’s a fight.” So Josh went there. He broke out whatever fight there was and then Josh and two other guys walked to the store on Bennett Place. He was in the store. He bought some things. He left. It’s 5.20 in the morning. He was walking up Bennett Place. A guy came around a corner – and there’s Josh and two guys – and killed Josh. He was shot over seven times – once in his hand. His hand was up by his face, so his bullet wound went into his hand and went into his head and seven other times on his torso, and he was killed there in the scene. So at 6.22 AM, it was pronounced that he had passed.
Scott
And Jason was there at the hospital.
Justine
Jason was there with me because he had been at my house the previous night because Josh had told him to come with me to let things cool down.
Scott
Did Jason know the reason Josh was shot was because of his action, his attack on the girl?
Justine
He didn’t say anything initially but when we had gotten back– we all went back to my mom’s house. Jason was in Josh’s room and he was laying on his bed and he was crying. Jason was saying, “I had nothing to do with this. It’s not my fault. I had nothing to do with this.” I was outside with my little sister so I didn’t hear this, but my little sister went inside and she just sat down and she was just listening to Jason talk. Jason was saying, “It’s not because of me. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t have anything to do with this.”
The funeral went off without a hitch. It’s just so odd to me that the people he was with that day and the person who they say shot him all came to his funeral. I had no clue that I had hugged the guy who had shot my brother. I didn’t know until afterward when they said, “That’s the guy right there” who was later arrested but he was released, but then he was killed a week later.
The day of Josh’s funeral, me, my sister, my daughter, and I want to say one of my aunts were walking out of my mom’s house and walking to the store, which is around the corner from my mom. We’re walking to the store. An unmarked car pulls up in front of us. It was a blue Toyota. Two guys got out. They were dressed in regular clothing. They had a badge around his neck and he had a gun on his hip. He came up to Jason. He whispered something in his ear, and then I heard him say, “Just relax. You know what this is about, right?” Jason nodded his head. At this time, I was screaming, “This is my little brother. You can’t take him! We’ve been through so much. I just buried my brother. You can’t take him.” Like I was damn near ready to fight the police officer because I was like, “You can’t do this to us. Not today. Come back maybe tomorrow and get him. If something happened or whatever the case may be, you can’t do this today.”
My little sister just broke down. I’d never seen her cry that way. In movies, when someone just breaks out in tears, you think it’s fake, but hers was genuine. She just broke down and she’s like, “I can’t believe this.” While I was screaming and yelling at the police officers, Jason was completely calm. He said, “It’s okay, sis.” He always called me sis. “It’s okay, sis. I’m going to be okay. I’ll be back later. He got into the police car. They pulled off.
I had a friend who was a police officer at the time, so I called him and I asked him, “Is there a warrant or anything out for Jason? Could you please check?” He said, “Okay, give me a minute.” He called me back. He’s like, “There’s no warrant or anything. I don’t know what’s going on.” So I said, “Okay, fine. I’m just going to leave it alone. We’ll figure out what’s happening.”
The next day, I think we were allowed to go visit him. This is my first time ever being inside of a jail or anything like that. So me seeing him behind this cage– basically, it looks like a cage you would put your dog in. Me seeing him behind those gates and the glass and everything like that broke something in me. I just cried and I was sitting there crying. My mom was there. She was asking him, “Are you okay? what’s going on?” Because she doesn’t know that he’s arrested for the sexual assault of Anna, but she knew that it had happened. She knew that there had been some type of thing, some type of assault, that Jason had done something, so she wasn’t blind to it, but I was because I didn’t know.
Ultimately, he was convicted. They didn’t call it rape. They call it sexual assault, theft, because he stole $53 out of her wallet and maybe some other minor things and was ultimately given 30 years, all suspended except 16. So he was arrested in June of July of 2013 and he was released in October of 2022 after serving 9-plus years. He got something they call good behavior or good time.
Scott
So a 30 year sentence and really some of it was suspended. So it really was 16 years.
Justine
Yes.
Scott
And he served nine of that.
Justine
Correct.
Scott
Okay. And he was released on parole at that time.
Justine
Yes. He had an ankle monitor and he had to have an address on file where they would monitor him from. He had to be indoors from 7 PM to 7 AM. He was free during the day to work, attend therapy, work out, and do things like that.
Scott
So this is 9 years after his first big crime happened. Did he seem to be on the right track? I mean, what did you think of him at that time?
Justine
During his whole prison sentence, he kept saying, “All I want to do is get out, get a job, go to work, and work out.” That’s it. This whole nine years, he was preaching this whole thing to me. So I was thinking, “Okay, he’s back on his medication.” Because Jason was diagnosed with bipolar as well as depression, anxiety, and all these other things. He was on a medication called Depakote to help with his issues. He said throughout this whole time that he was going straight and narrow. He came home. He was living with his girlfriend who he was registered at the ankle monitor. He was registered at her house. He was living there. He had gotten a job working in construction first. He had his apartment. There were no issues. He was living day-to-day life. He was checking in with his parole officer. He had registered as a sex offender because that was one of the terms of his release. Life was going on.
In September, he was working at this time, he was working as a maintenance man for a guy who owned a few houses in Baltimore City. He had done work at this home previously. I guess, on this day, under the guise of, I think he said there’s a leak– he knocked on the room and house of this apartment building. He knocked on the door. There was a young lady living there by the name of April. He knocked on the door. She opened. Of course, she knew him as maintenance. Instead of just walking to the house saying there’s an issue, he brandishes a gun and forces her back into her apartment. She was at home with her boyfriend. He tied them up. He tied the boyfriend up. Well, he raped her in the most vicious way. He raped her while taunting her boyfriend who was there, making her do all these things that he wanted, like taunting her boyfriend, saying, “Look at her. Shake her ass.
Look how she’s doing this for me.” He made her drink. She had alcohol already at her home, so he had drank some of it. She drank some of it under his direction, telling her to drink, or whatever.
Then, she said that he had actually left the apartment but she was handcuffed as well. So she’s handcuffed and the boyfriend’s handcuffed. I think Jason went there intentionally to see someone else because she said that he was knocking on another door, trying to get another female’s attention that lived in that building, but he also came back to her apartment, continued to rape her, put the boyfriend inside of a closet. Then, I guess once he was over, he felt like he had to get rid of the evidence. Based on what he had done previously, he knew that there was evidence present. So, he came there with a whole kit and he had a backpack on. Inside of the backpack, he had duct tape, he had a gun, he had zip ties, he had some type of liquid and the liquid was bleach. He poured bleach on April and her boyfriend.
Before he had set them on fire, he tried to kill her. First, he tried to strangle her with his hands, but that didn’t work. He tried to strangle her with a cord, but that didn’t work. Then, ultimately, he slit her throat a few times. At this point, she pretended to be dead. So she laid there, letting her body go limp. Of course, she was losing blood as well but she made her body go limp and then he set them on fire and ran out.
Scott
It must seem so foreign to you to describe that set of events and it was your brother doing that.
Justine
It is, yes. And it makes me ill. It also makes me confused because what is your reasoning? You had no reason to do this. Jason is a handsome guy. He’s 6’4. He’s very tall. He has perfect teeth. There are a lot of women who are interested in him. So it’s if it’s about sex, there are women out there who are giving away their bodies, but it had to be something else because what other reasons do you have for assaulting this young lady – someone who, on a random Tuesday, you decide to do this.
Scott
Did those two people survive?
Justine
Thankfully, yes. There was a male neighbor who was outside, who saw the smoke and he broke a window and was able to pull her out, but she kept saying there’s somebody else inside because Jason had locked the boyfriend in the closet. She kept trying to go back inside. There’s somebody inside. She’s completely naked. There’s liquid on her. There’s blood running down her neck. She’s saying there’s somebody inside, so she’s trying to go back inside to save her boyfriend. Ultimately, the guy who was outside who saw the smoke was able to get in there and let the boyfriend out. April was sitting outside completely naked, throat slit, sitting on the steps wondering what has become of her life in this split second because all it takes is one second to fuck up your life. One second is all it takes. When Jason knocked on that door, that was that one second. He was all in.
I remember, once, the detectives came to my house and showed me pictures to make sure that it was him. When he left their home, he left through the back. He came in there fully clothed. He left out of there with just black shorts on. He left his bag. He had no shirt on, no shoes, no socks on. Something happened, Jason.
Scott
And obviously, they knew who he was because he was the maintenance guy, right? So they could easily identify him.
Justine
And that’s the thing. They never released it to the public that they are looking for this guy. Police ultimately said that they were tracking him because he had stolen the guy’s cell phone, and he had an Apple phone. You know Apple. You can locate my device – it was like a GPS. The police were tracking him. Police also said they were maybe 800 feet from where Jason was at the time and he had tossed the phone, so they lost the trace.
Scott
So now there’s a big hunt by the police looking for Jason. In the meantime, what happened then?
Justine
On a Friday evening, Jason was sitting outside of his apartment complex, sitting on the steps. A young lady was walking home from an event. Jason said that they said hello to each other and then they strike up a conversation. He told me that she was drunk and she had said to him, “Can you buy me a drink?” And Jason said, “I don’t have any money on me right now.” They started talking and walking back to her apartment. She went into her apartment building. She was sitting in the lobby of her building, on her phone, just sitting out there hanging out. Minutes later, Jason knocked on the glass door of her apartment building and gestured for her to come in and lock the door. She came in and locked the door. They entered a lobby together and entered an elevator together. After that, it’s a mystery.
Jason winds up killing this young woman with his bare hands on the roof of her apartment building. The way her apartment building is set up, I don’t know if he threatened her to walk somewhere private or to walk to the roof of her building but Jason told me that they walked up there voluntarily together. They’re sitting outside. It’s a nice warm day. She has spread her arms out in a gesture to look at the city cause it’s all lit up at night. It’s very beautiful. She said, “Look at this. Look how beautiful that is.” Then, he said she had made a smart comment like, “Too bad you can’t afford it” and it kind of pissed him off, so he said he attacked her. So he beat her with his hands and with some bricks that were on the roof of her building and beat her to death. Then he left her there on the roof of a building, ran out of her apartment complex, and left.
This happened on a Friday evening. She was not discovered until Monday when her coworkers because this woman– her name is Pava LaPere. She was a 26-year-old CEO of a tech company who was in the prime of her life. She had just been named one of Forbes Under 30. She’s just living her life as a young woman in the city and he took it from her, took everything from her brother, from her parents, killed her, left her there on the roof of a building like trash. When she didn’t show up for work, one of her co-workers said there needs to be some wellness check because she’s not the type to not answer phone calls or texts. They have been trying to reach her all weekend. They hadn’t gotten any response from her. So there was a wellness visit and that’s when police found her on the roof of her building. He did not enter her own personal space. They went from the lobby to the roof, so he didn’t sexually assault her or anything like that but he did beat her to death.
Scott
How did they determine that it was him? I mean, they were already looking for him.
Justine
They were already looking for him. They have video evidence of him approaching her apartment, knocking on the glass, as well as him leaving. To me, he said that they met on the street, walked up to her apartment building, were talking and they wanted to continue talking for the rest of the evening. But what the police say is that he tracked her from her walking past him, sitting on the steps, walking into her home, walking to the lobby of her home, waiting outside for a little bit, and trying to stay in the shadows so she doesn’t see him, that he knocked on the door. Her being a nice young woman, your first instinct isn’t, “Oh, I don’t know this person or anything.” You might think they lost their key or whatever. So she opened the door for him and then they entered the elevators together. You could see them interact with each other. It could have been just a simple, “How are you doing this evening?” They got on the elevator. So police believe that she was just a random woman walking down the street and he stalked her on an appointment and saw an opportunity to do something to her.
Scott
At this point, once she was discovered, it was on the news.
News Anchor
This morning, the urgent manhunt in Baltimore for a murder suspect accused of killing a celebrated young tech entrepreneur. Authorities warning he is believed to be armed and dangerous.
Baltimore Acting Police Commissioner
This individual will kill and he will rape. He will do anything he can to cause harm.
News Anchor
26-year-old executive Pava LaPere found dead by blunt force trauma in her apartment. US Marshals joining Baltimore police in the search for 32-year-old Jason Dean Billingsley wanted for first degree murder, assault, and reckless endangerment.
Mayor
We are working with every law enforcement partner to make sure that we bring this individual – who quite frankly shouldn’t have been out on the streets in the first place – into custody.
Scott
How did you find out that he was a suspect in this widely publicized case?
Justine
When she was discovered that morning. Monday evening, I was at home. I was making dinner with my daughters in the kitchen and I got a phone call from my cousin. My brother and my cousin were very close with each other and she had called me. She was screaming and crying, saying, “Why did he mess up his life like this? What’s going on? I can’t believe he would do something so fucking stupid.” And I was thinking, “You got to calm down. You got to tell me what’s going on. Is there something wrong with your son or something like that?” Because she has young kids of her own. Did something happen to them? Did somebody hurt one of them? Did something happen to my niece who was my oldest brother’s daughter?
I was asking her, “Please calm down. Tell me what’s going on.” She said, “It’s your brother. It’s your brother. He killed someone.” And I was like, “No way.” I had this blank moment. It’s like, “You can’t be serious. Don’t play these types of games with me. I’m trying to make dinner with my kids. You’re lying.” And she’s like, “No, I’m serious, cuz” Cause she always calls me “cuz” and she’s like, “I’m serious. He did this. I don’t know what’s going on.” She’s hysterical.
I was like, “Please hold on. Let me figure out what’s going on.” Cause I don’t get Baltimore’s news, so I didn’t see him on the news. I had no clue any of this was going on. Once I Googled his name and it’s a mugshot of him and him wanted for the suspected murder of Pava LaPere, my first thing was, “This is no way. It’s no way possible that this was intentional. Maybe there had been some type of freak accident. Maybe there was a car accident. I don’t know. Maybe he somehow shot her or something like that, not intentionally hunting down a woman and you beat her with your hands.”
I was in disbelief. I called my little sister. I was trying to reach her. She lived in Georgia and I was trying to reach her because I was like, “What do I do? This can’t be. It didn’t seem real because he just did 9-plus years in jail and, this whole time, he had told me that he just wanted to come home, work, work out, be on the straight and narrow, and that’s it – all he wanted to do.
Once I got that call from Janelle and I was trying to figure out what was going on, I called my sister and she was like, “Okay, we have to call our mom to see if she knows.” I called my mom. She just came from a doctor’s appointment, so she had caught maybe the tail end of a news story. I was saying to her, “Have you talked to him? When was the last time you saw him?”
She said she saw him the previous evening when he came over to her house.”
I asked, “Did he seem different? Did anything seem weird or odd?”
And she said, “No, he seemed like his regular self.”
He was trying to actually get rid of a gun that he had taken from his girlfriend who he lived with, who was a security guard. She had a registered firearm and he had used that as intimidation in committing his crimes. So she said that she just knew that he was trying to get rid of a gun but he was trying to sell it, and that’s all she knew. She hadn’t spoken to him that day.
She said she had been calling him but he hadn’t answered his phone. So I was like, “Okay, let me try to call him.” So I tried to call him and it went straight to voicemail, and I kept calling. Later on, that night, as we’re still trying to get in contact with Jason, I told my mom – because I know he’ll call her because he is a mama’s boy – that he’ll call her at some point. So, I said to her, “If he calls you, can you please tell him to call me? Because I just want to make sure that he’s okay.”
Jason and I had an argument about something about him. The argument was because I said to him, “Stop letting these women ruin your life” because he had gotten kicked out of one girl’s home and he was living with another. So I had texted him, “Stop letting these women ruin your life. You’re free now. Women aren’t everything. Just try to live your life.” And he had said to me, “You don’t know what the fuck you talking about. Mind your fucking business.” I was like, “Jason, you just spent almost 10 years in prison. Just leave women alone just for a little bit. Get your mind right. Get yourself together.” So we hadn’t been speaking. I had blocked him on my phone, so I don’t know if he had tried to call me or not. I unblocked him, and tried to call him. I was calling. It would ring and then go to voicemail.
Finally, he did call me that evening and I was like, “Jason, what is going on?” And he was like, “I don’t know, sis.” First thing I said was, “Are you okay? Are you safe?” He said, “Yeah, I’m okay.”
And then I said, “Is it true?”
And he said, “Yeah.”
And I said, “What happened?”
He said, “I don’t know, sis. I just crashed out.”
I said, “Did you know her?”
He said, “No, I didn’t.” And then he said he had to go, that he would call me back, so we hung up. My little sister was on the other line, so I switched back over to her. I sat down on my couch and I just sat there because you just told me that you killed this woman. You didn’t go into details or anything like that, but he said, “Yeah, it’s true.” So then I called my mom back and I was like, “Okay, I talked to him. He just called me.”
And she said, “What did he say? Did he say that he did it?”
I said, “Yes, he did.”
She said, “Okay, then I’m done.” Like, she’s done trying to protect him or whatever. But that’s her son. She’s not done protecting him or anything, which I understand because that is your child. But what he did froze my life at that moment because this is the kid who, when we were younger, was so affectionate, so cuddly, and so just sweet. He was never aggressive towards me or anyone. He was this chubby kid who used to stutter, who always tried to be attached to someone or hang out with someone, so I saw him as this person I needed to protect. Even though he was bigger than me, taller than me, heavier than me, I still saw him as my little brother who I needed to protect. So this is Monday night.
I went to bed with such a sense of fear. I have never felt fear like that. Even though he didn’t know where I lived, I felt fearful that he would turn up at my house or something and maybe hurt me or hurt my girls because he had been upset with me previously. So, I barely slept that night. So on Tuesday, I was going about my day. My cousin called me because there had been more things released in the news.
When they had released that they had been looking at him for the first crime – sexual assault on April and burning her house with her inside. They had been looking for him for that but had never released it to the public. So of course, there’s this public outcry about, first of all, why was he on the street when he should have been– there was already a violent sexual assault that he had committed against another woman because he was released early and then there’s this. Why didn’t you notify the public that you were after this guy? Just like a person watching the news, seeing this, my first reaction to any crime like this is, “This person needs to be arrested. I think women and children are off-limits. You don’t hurt women. You don’t hurt children.” If I see somebody hurt this, my first thing is, oh, put them on death row immediately because you harmed this woman. Then, this is my brother. What do I do? I can’t. First of all, I can’t get involved. That was my first mindset. I can’t get involved.
Tuesday, he kept calling and he would just update me on where he was. I tried to keep things light, not wanting to piss him off or anything like that because I didn’t know the circumstances surrounding him attacking these women. So I kept everything surface level. I never asked him where he was because I was scared. Once he told me where he was, then I would become a part of it. So Tuesday, he had just called throughout the day saying that he was okay, that it was okay for him to call me because the police didn’t have me linked to him in any type of way. But unbeknownst to me, the police did know about me because I previously visited him in jail or phone calls, things like that. So, they had some type of link to me, but no police officer had ever called.
On Tuesday, once I finally got in my mind that, “Okay, he did do this. Something did happen,” I called the police myself and I said to them, “I saw on the news that you guys were looking for my brother and I’m confused because this is my kid brother,” and they’re asking like, “Okay, well, do you know where he is?” And I was like, “No, I genuinely didn’t know where he was. Well, maybe my mom would know.” They asked for her number. I gave them a number. They called her and she said she didn’t know where he was. I don’t think he was telling anyone where he was on that Tuesday.
On Wednesday, he made his way to a train station not too far from me, just like a regular subway station. He said that he had called me from there and he said he was at New Carlton subway station. So I said, “Okay, what’s your plan? Because this isn’t sustainable. What’s your plan?” He said he didn’t know. He just needs to get out of the state for a while to get his mind right. He said that he was going to the campus of Bowie State. Once he got there, he called me and he said, “Sis, I wanted to know if you would meet me and give me a hug and some money.” I thought about it and I said, “Jason, I’ll meet you if you tell me what happened, but tell me the complete and honest truth.” And he said, “Sis, if you want to know, I’ll tell you.”
Scott
You wanted him to tell you that story face to face.
Justine
Yes. I’m one of the people where I need to– like, you don’t have to sugarcoat it. Let me figure it out. Let me put it in my mind. So I also want to see his hands, which is odd. I want to see his hands because he had beaten her to death and I want to see if there was something there that would show me why or show me the reasoning or what your hand showed me, like what story it would tell. I was so in disbelief that I just wanted to see him in person, give him his hug, just go in there, talk to him, or whatever.
So I said, “Okay, I’ll stop at an ATM. I’ll grab some money.” The thing about me is I keep $100 in my wallet in case of emergencies or anything like that but this was my emergency. I wasn’t going to use my emergency fund to give it to him. So I kept my money and I decided to stop at a 7-Eleven to get some money. I went there. The ATM was down for the night. To me, it seemed like, “Okay, I’m not supposed to help him in this way. I’m not supposed to give him money.” He had been on the run at this point for three days, so I figured he was hungry and thirsty. I grabbed some water, some snacks, and some hot food that they had and they only offered cash back, but the highest amount you would get was $10. I said, “Okay, I’ll take the $10.”
I drove to Bowie State. The gas station / 7 Eleven is down the street from the school. So I drove to Bowie State. I parked at the entrance under bright lights just in case anything happened. I was walking down the street and he called out my name, and I was like, “Jason?” And he’s like, “Yeah sis, it’s me.” He looked totally different than I had seen him. He had on a hoodie, a coat, a backpack. He had on a balaclava, so only his eyes were visible. And I said, “Jason, hi.”
I gave him the stuff. I gave him a hug and I said, “Jason, what’s going on?” He said, “I don’t know, sis. I just snapped.” So I said, “Jason, tell me what happened from the beginning. Tell me what happened.” He said, “I never went to anybody’s house and set anybody on fire. I never did that. He said he had been in a fight with someone and that they had been in a house and that he had set that house on fire, but there was a man and it had nothing to do with a woman, nothing to do with rape or anything like that.” So I said, “Okay. Tell me what happened with Pava.” He said that she had approached him on the street, asking him to buy her a drink. They walked to her apartment building. They walked up there together. They walked to the roof and she said, “Okay, look at the city at the outline of Baltimore. Too bad you can’t afford it.” He said something in him snapped because he had already been taunted by his other girlfriend and hearing someone else saying things that he can’t have triggered something in him and that he beat her to death.
“Jason, put your hands out for me, please.” He put his hands out and I just looked at them and I said, “Okay. You’re not going to hurt me. Are you?” He said, “No, I will never hurt you. Why would you think that?” He got offended. “I’m just asking, Jason.”
I asked him, “What’s your plan? What are you going to do?” He was saying, “I don’t know. I just need to get my mind right.” Jason should have been on medication. He had been on medication since he was an adolescent. Since he had gotten out of prison, he hadn’t taken any medication. Stopped. Cold turkey the day that he left and hadn’t taken any medication.
While we’re standing out there talking, I asked him, “Are you on your medication? He’s “No, I’m supposed to be on all these types of medications.” He started naming at least five of them. And I was like, “Why aren’t you taking your medication?” He said he just didn’t do it. He thought he was doing better. So I said, “Okay, Jason, I only had $10.” It’s not enough to get him anywhere. He was looking up the MARC station schedule, which is connected to Bowie State. There’s a stop there. He was saying that he just needed enough money to get to the end of the line which was the last line running that night. I think the last stop was in Boston. So he was saying he would take the train there, clear his head for a few days, and then he would turn himself in. I said, “I went to the ATM but the ATM was broken. I can go to another ATM and get more money for you.” He said, “Okay.” So I said, “Okay, stay here. I’ll go to the ATM.”
During this time, he had been approaching different people to ask for their phone to call me or call whomever to update on where he was. So I said, “Okay, give me 20 minutes. I’ll go to the ATM. I’ll be back.” My mom was scared that he would be shot and killed before he had the time to turn himself in and she didn’t want to lose another kid. So I said, “Okay, Jason, you want to record a video for mommy that I can send to her to just let her know that you’re okay and see your face.” He said okay. So I recorded a short video of him, just directed at my mom that I was going to send to her afterward that I had never shown to anyone. I didn’t even tell my little sister.
Scott
That video was pretty short. Let’s listen to that video right now.
Jason
Hey ma, I’m good. I’m okay. I love you. I’ll see you soon. I’m going to be okay. I’m not going to do anything stupid. I’m going to just go lay low for a minute and when I’m ready to turn myself in, I’m going to call you and Justine so y’all could take me down there and turn myself in. I love you, mom.”
Scott
So he made that video and you left under the pretense of going to get him more money.
Justine
Yes, of coming back. As I was walking back to my car, it hit me. I’ve involved myself or he’s involved me and I have to turn him in. It’s the only right thing to do. Because I was thinking, after I looked at his hands and looked at his face, he looked totally different to me. He didn’t look like the Jason I knew. So I thought about my kids. If someone did something to him, to one of them, how would I feel? It would crush me. So I walked back to my car and I was so scared of him running up and attacking me or something that I kept looking back and looking back, and I twisted myself up so bad that I walked to this dead-end street that’s by the building. I was like, “Oh my God, he cornered me here.” So I jumped over this, like, bushes to get back to my car, to my safety, and I sat in that car and I said, “I have to call 911.”
So I called 911. I asked, “Could I speak to Baltimore city police department, the homicide division? I need to speak with them urgently.” So they put me in contact with a detective. As I was talking to him, I told him, “You guys are looking for my brother. I know where he is. He wants me to meet him to bring him some money. What should I do?” So the police officer was asking, “Okay, where do you want me to meet you? I can come there in Baltimore. I’m in PG County, Maryland. We have to get some guys together and I will give you my personal phone number. I’m going to call you from there and we’ll figure out what to do.
So he called me from his phone and I asked him, which was so odd, “Should I go to the ATM and get money?” I don’t know why I thought, “Okay, I’ll be able to hand him money.” Like, where was he going to go? Or what was he going to do? The goal was to capture him. He said, “No, you don’t have to go to an ATM, but did he request a certain amount?” I said, “No, because he hadn’t said anything.” So I thought maybe I would go and maybe get $200 to give him because what I was thinking was I could have easily went to the ATM, gave him the money, made sure he got on the bus, maybe got him money to get a hotel room or anything like that, but then, what if on the way, he harmed someone else or what if when he got to his destination, he harmed someone else? Then that’s on me. That’s completely on me because I put him on the train, I gave him the money, I gave him the means to be able to escape, and I couldn’t have that on me.
By this time, I was driving home. I was on the phone with the detective and he was driving towards my home. I got home and I was on the phone with my sister because I need some type of guidance. The first thing she said to me was, “Don’t lie. Tell them everything they need to know and we’ll get through it.” One detective came to my home from the Fugitive Task Force team. He came to my house while the other detectives were going to Bowie State. They shut Bowie down because they wanted to establish a perimeter. They kept asking me, “Jason would call and tell where he was. He was getting agitated. So he was like, “Sis, come on, this is serious.” I even have a voicemail of him leaving a message because I was so scared. Like, the calls were getting so intense that I was scared to answer them.
Scott
And this is one of those brief voicemails.
Jason
Justine, what are you doing? What’s going on? What are you doing?
Justine
But the detective was sitting beside me in my home and he was telling me what to say – just remain calm, that you’re already on the campus, that you’re speaking to someone. I went to Bowie State, so I pretty much know how the campus is laid out. So I was telling Jason, “I’m by the science center. Can you walk over here?” Just trying to buy them some more time. Because once they got on campus, the detective that was with me got a little upset because he was telling you where he was and they were trying to set up surveillance. They’re trying to get to the security office to look at the video of where he may be, just to make sure he’s not around anyone, so that they can apprehend him safely. He was sitting on the bench at the MARC train station. No one else was around him.
But while he was calling me and I was directing him to go to different places, trying to buy them more time, I was getting nervous because I can’t keep lying. I don’t know what to say. The detective at my home, he just remained calm. “Okay, don’t answer. Then he asked, “What does he have on? Can you ask him to describe what he had on?” But because I had already seen him that evening, I knew what he had on. So I said to the detective and he relayed it to the people on the phone that he has on a blue jacket, he has on a backpack, he has on a black balaclava. He didn’t have his glasses on but he had his hood pulled up, and he’s tall. Jason is 6’4. I was telling all this to him and he asked, “Did he tell you that?” And I’m like, “Sure, yeah. He told me this is what he has on.”
Because they’re thinking it’s the first time that I’m supposed to go out there and meet him, I never even told them that I’d already met him previously that evening. So once they established where he was on the campus, Jason said he saw police officers driving around, that he knew kind of that the end was coming, that he knew he was going to be arrested.
So they found him, approached him at this MARC station, and told him to put his hands up. He didn’t have the gun on him anymore. He just said he was tired and that he knew that things were coming to an end. He was arrested without incident. They put him in a car. He asked if he could call my mom. He called her, told her that he had been arrested, and that he was so angry at this point that he didn’t want anyone giving him phone calls, writing him letters, didn’t want anybody to visit him, didn’t want anybody to come to the trial, any of it. He just wanted to go where he needed to go and that was it. He wanted us to forget about him.
So he had called her and said these things to her. So I was asking the police officer, “Did he say anything? What did he say?” He just told me that he wanted to speak to my mom and that he was tired, that he knew that everything was over.
Scott
Yeah, when someone’s on the run like that for a while, getting caught is almost a relief.
Justine
That’s what I think too.
Scott
Does that make sense?
Justine
It does. Because you have to look over your shoulder so much.
Scott
At that point, he didn’t necessarily know that it was you that turned him in.
Justine
No, he didn’t. I recently talked to him. Well, my cousin and my mom had been saying that I set him up, that I put him in a situation that he was in, which is odd because I didn’t hurt anyone. I didn’t tell him to meet me anywhere. He asked me to meet him and I agreed. I met him and I did the things that he asked, which was to give him a hug and give him some money. I tried my best, but he didn’t know because he said, “Sis, I know it wasn’t you because if you would have been there, you would have made sure you protected me, that no one did anything, that I wasn’t shot or anything like that.” Because he said he thought in his mind that he would pretend to reach for something so that they could kill him. At that point, he didn’t care anymore. He said he wanted to die. When he was arrested that night, he actually tried to kill himself. I recently talked to him on a video call and he has all these slash marks on his arm where he tried to kill himself.
He’s in jail now but he’s in the mental health section, which is where he should be. But you could tell that he wasn’t the person that I knew. He was off his medication. He was high on opioids. He wasn’t the Jason that I knew. What’s odd to me is that he had asked me once, did I love him? I thought about it and I said, like, “Love isn’t something you can turn off and on.” But I also told him, “Love liberates. It doesn’t bind. I can’t hold on to my love that I had for you when you were younger and think that’s the same love that I have now.” I love him as my brother but it’s so hard for me to even say at the end of our calls that we had. He said, “I love you, sis.” And I was like, “Okay, have a good day” because it’s so hard for me to say “I love you too” because it still makes me think of the things that he did and he told me that he did them. He described it as not like it was like a freak accident. No, it was intentional.
Scott
You have to have so much conflict that he’s your brother, but yet you had to do the right thing.
Justine
Even driving back home from Bowie State, I felt like shit. But once I got home and I realized that I was in the thick of it now with the police officer, it’s too late for me to turn back. I have no way of contacting him to run. I can’t do that or anything like that. So once everything had subsided and the police officer had gone.
Jason had been arrested. I was sitting in my room on my bed. I was thinking about the events of the day and then my mouth started to water and I just got violently ill. I had thrown up like that the whole night until the next morning. I’ve thrown up everything that was in me. I couldn’t even swallow a drink of water. I was so weak, so dehydrated. I had to go to the hospital and they kept me for a while just to get my fluids back up because it just all came out of me. I don’t know if it was the guilt of me turning him in, the realization of what he had done, or the combination of the two, but it made me so sick that I was so wrecked with grief. Even thinking about it now makes me kind of queasy because there’s no reason to harm this woman or either one of these people. There was no reason to do any of that. That’s why it’s very hard for me to even have basic conversations with him because he’ll always say things like, “Oh, when I was home, when I was this, or you remember this.” And I was like, “These are all memories. Your life stopped. You have no more new memories of me, of your nieces. There will be no more and I don’t want to have to keep rehashing the same conversations.” He calls me constantly and I was telling my sister, “It’s messing with my mental health because I don’t want to talk to a killer.”
I studied psychology. I have a degree in psychology. So I thought one of my things was, like, I wanted to interview a serial killer to see why they do what they did but then it dawned on me. I don’t want that. I don’t want to know. I don’t want to know because I could ask Jason, but he says he doesn’t remember. Recently, he said he doesn’t even remember the night. So I asked him to walk me through it, walk me through what happened that day. He said he doesn’t even remember.
Scott
So he’s currently being held at Baltimore Central Booking & Intake Center. Do you think him saying he doesn’t remember is part of his defense? Because he hasn’t gone to trial for that yet.
Justine
I think it may be, but I also see he was crying and maybe I’m still in sister mode, like I’m still a sucker for it. It touches me because I think he knows what he did was wrong, but then what kind of made me mad was he said once he goes to trial, he’s going to a preliminary trial to have things dismissed and things like that. He said that there’s no evidence of him hurting April and her boyfriend. He said there’s no evidence of what happened with Pava. But he said to me, “I left her on the roof” just as casually as if I let the dog outside. He said he left her on the roof of her building. In the news, there were reports that maybe she had made it back inside of her apartment building and maybe that’s where they had found her – in a doorway of her building. And he said to me, “Oh, I’m glad she made it back inside of her building, but I left her on the roof.” He said that to me just casually and I was just like, “You don’t realize the impact that you had on this young lady and her family.”
Scott
Do you have any plans to visit him in jail?
Justine
I’m terrified. I’m actually very afraid and I don’t know if it’s afraid of just seeing him, being in the same space with him, or maybe the possibility that he could harm me, but it makes me nervous to think about it. He had asked if I would visit him. His visiting days are on Thursdays. He asked if I would visit him in person. My mom visited him and I was just like– I don’t know. I don’t even know how to say to him that I need space, I need to not talk to him for a while because it brings me back to that and just thinking about what he did. I don’t want to say that to him and then he harms himself and then that’s on me as well. So I try to get through it.
I try to, like, have a quick conversation with him sometimes. I spoke with him last night. I wrote him a letter, letting him know that I needed some space because it was the best way I could get it out. I needed just some time to digest what was happening, but he did ask me to come to his trial. I think I would do that because I want to know what happened. I would like to know what happened and why. But I do think that his mental health and memory problems are part of his defense.
Scott
And at this point, he must be aware that you’re the one who led police to him.
Justine
I think he knows now. He hasn’t outright said it to me, but I think he knows. His best friend had asked me for some money, and I was like, “Okay, fine.” I’ve been sending him money for a few months now. There was a reward offered for his arrest but I didn’t know about the reward until the police officer was on his way out of the house. This officer said, “I guess you probably don’t even care, but there’s a reward offer that you’re entitled to.” And I said, “Oh, wow. Okay.” This whole time, I was on the phone with my sister and she was saying, “Take the reward.” So I said, “Okay, what do I do with it?” Because I still actually still have the money but I haven’t spent it. So when he asked me for money, I sent him money from that. So I was thinking, “Am I rewarding him? Am I supposed to do that? What do I do?” It was $6,000. I think both the police officer and my sister were saying that, as the days went on, it would have been higher, but I didn’t do it for that.
Scott
How did your mother feel about you turning him in?
Justine
She was upset and she blames me. My mom is very protective of her boys, Josh and Jason. Josh was her heart. I know that when he died. I know it killed something in her because he had been with her throughout everything. That had been going on for the last 20 years of their lives. They had been together. So they had a bond. My mom and I don’t have that same type of bond. I stopped by my mom when I was 8 and I think she came back into my life when I was around, like, 12 or 13 and I would go visit her. She would constantly say to me specifically because I was a mommy’s girl– she was my heart. Like, everywhere she went, I wanted to be. As we were growing up in foster care, she would always say, “I’m going to get you guys back. I’m getting a house. I’m going to get you guys back.” So I held on to that.
When I had my first daughter, I would look at her and I would cry because I would think about all the things that this life could do to her and my only fear was that someone would hurt her and I wouldn’t be there to protect her. She’s 15 now. I’ve been here every single day of her life and I try to tell her, “My life is different from yours. I’m here every day. I didn’t have a mom or anybody I could rely on when I went to school and things like that. I will always have to say, “Oh, that’s my aunt or a cousin or someone picking me up.” It was never, “Oh, that’s my mom. That’s my dad.” So I think my resentment of her comes from her never saying, “I apologize. I messed up. You guys should have had a different life.” So I think it’s easy for her to say, “Oh, Justine is the one who did it” and be upset with me. I recently wrote her a letter saying, “You’re upset with me, but you’re missing the point that he killed someone. I don’t care if I walked him hand in hand to the police station. He killed someone. That’s the focus here.”
Scott
Does Jason know about you telling this story publicly?
Justine
No, he doesn’t, but I’m going to tell him because I want him to know and I’m going to also just let him know, for sure, that it was me, that I told the police where you were.
Scott
At least if he listens to this, then he’ll know your side of it and why you felt you had to, which is important. Is there any part of this that we haven’t talked about that you want to talk about?
Justine
When we were younger and we were in foster care, Josh – who I looked at as my big brother, as my protector – would always say, like, when we got separated, look at the moon at night and he would be looking at the moon at night and I’ll be able to see him, and I still do that to this day, just hoping to one day to see him again because he was everything to me. He was my older brother. If I ever got in trouble with a guy or a guy was mistreating me or anything, I would call my brother or anything. I don’t have that anymore. When I turned 30, I was like, “I want to go have a drink with my brother” and that’s the hardest part of it all. It wasn’t after he died because we were still– I hadn’t even grieved or anything like that. It was like wanting to pick up the phone and call him. I wanted to say, like, anything stupid to him but I didn’t have the opportunity. I had that when Josh died.
I had this old Android phone. My mom had taken pictures of Josh at the funeral home and, I guess, cask and everything like that. The day after his funeral, it stopped working. I can’t turn it on, so I couldn’t see the picture in that. I still have the phone because I’m hoping, one day, it’ll come back on just so I can see it again. But It doesn’t work anymore and it happened to stop working the day after his funeral.
One day, I would just like to just have a dream of him just to see him again, just to see if he’s okay. I don’t know what happens after this life or if I’ll see him again or anything like that, but I hope I will be able to just let him know one more time that I love him and what he meant to me because it’s hard losing a sibling when life had already been so shitty for us. We were in foster care and then our mom was drug addicted and things like that. So I thought we had more time.
I thought that life had a balance. You have some bad days or you may suffer a little bit, but there’s also a point in time in life where the good comes and the good outweighs the bad. You get to experience some of the great things in life like having children. It made me see things differently. When my 3-year-old sees a deer outside, she’s so excited. To me, I’ve seen a deer. It’s nothing. But to her, it’s the first time and it’s big and it has a fluffy tail. It’s like you get to experience things again and Josh won’t get that. He has a granddaughter now he’ll never get to meet. He would have been such a great, great granddad, but he’s gone.
Jason asked me yesterday, “Was it raining outside?” Then it dawned on me, “You don’t get to just go outside when you want to. You don’t get to just see the sun, like just feel it on your face. These simple things in life that you don’t get to experience, to touch grass or to smell a flower. You don’t get simple everyday things that everybody should have access to that you don’t. And you won’t ever again.” To me, that’s not enough. 10 years wasn’t enough for you to realize this isn’t something you ever want to experience again.”
Scott
The good news is that you’re now a mother. You’ve ended that cycle of dysfunction and all that went on in your childhood.
Justine
I’m trying my best.
Scott
Thanks for sharing your story.
Justine
Thank you for having me. I’m going to go have a nice cry now.
Scott
Jason is still in jail awaiting his trial. If you’d like to see some pictures of Justine’s brothers, Jason and Joshua, as well as Justine with her daughters, check out the episode notes at WhatWasThatLike.com/185. You can also get a full transcript of this episode there.
Hearing this story from Justine really got me thinking. How does a family typically handle it, when one of their own goes to prison? Do you have a relative serving time? Did you just completely disconnect from them, or do you stay in touch? Do you actually visit them in prison? I’d like to hear about it. If you want to take a minute and make a quick phone call, you can leave a message on the podcast Voice Mail line – 727-386-9468. Just let me know how you’re handling that situation, and I’ll play it in a future episode. You can dial that number anytime night or day, and it’s always voice mail. You can record up to 3 minutes. The number again is 727-386-9468.
We’ve had a lot of new people joining the podcast Facebook group recently – currently around 8000 people. If you’re not in there, you’re really missing out! We talk about the podcast episodes, but there are also discussions about almost anything else – except politics. None of that nonsense. So come on over and join us! You’ll be in a big group of wonderful people, right where you belong. WhatWasThatLike.com/facebook.
Graphics for this episode were created by Bob Bretz. Full episode transcription was created by James Lai.
And it’s time for the Listener Story. If you want, you can call in your story on the podcast Voice Mail line, like I mentioned a minute ago. But what most people do is just record the story on your phone and email it to me at Scott@WhatWasThatLike.com. That way you can record up to about 5-10 minutes, instead of having to squeeze it into a 3-minute voice mail.
This week’s Listener Story is about getting caught – years later.
Stay safe, and I’ll see you next time.
(Listener story)
When I was 41 years old in 2001, I took a new job working in the public schools. They said they had to run a background check for the job but I didn’t have a problem with that at all. I started at the school and about a week later I was called into the superintendent’s office. Back in those days, it took a week or so for background check results to come back. These days, you get results in less than five minutes. The superintendent showed me a copy of the results of my background check and it stated that, in 1981, I was arrested for carrying mace, marijuana, and cocaine. I was in shock. I think my jaw was on the floor, as they say. Meanwhile, my heart was racing, my face was red, and now I had an upset stomach.
I told him that there was something wrong with the report because that had never happened to me. He said they checked it against my social security number and he believed it to be accurate but he felt it would be okay because the arrest was back in 1981, over 20 years ago, and I was young then. Since there were no subsequent arrests, they felt comfortable with me staying employed at the school. I said I was still uncomfortable with showing these things because I knew that was not something that ever happened to me, but I would have to look into it and see what I could figure out, and that I would report back to him when I found anything out, and I left his office.
As I’m walking to the parking lot at work, because this had happened just before I was heading to go to lunch and I was certainly still heading to go to lunch because I couldn’t have gone back to my desk. I was a wreck. Then I started to get mad because I suddenly remembered something that happened in 1981. I was in college then but living at home. My sister was one year younger than me and told me that, one morning, when I woke up, she stole my license the night before because back then you could drink at 18. She had gone out for the night drinking with an older brother of ours and they got pulled over by the police. Of course, back then, she told me nothing had happened and she put my license back. But the reason she had told me was, in case I got a call from anyone about the arrest, but then said I didn’t need to worry about it because nothing was going to happen.
I was pissed and I told her not to touch my license again. I was positive that my record had to be from her back then, so I called her and I told her what happened at work and she confessed. But of course, she said the mace, marijuana, and cocaine were our brother’s and she stuffed it down her pants to hide it and the police found it anyway. So I tell her we’re going to go back to court and we’re going to fix this because I don’t want anything on my record. She tells me her husband knows someone who can get it expunged for me and I say, “Absolutely not. I want my record cleaned.”
So I find out what court, I get a court date, I make her go with me and I explain the situation to the judge. The judge asked my sister if she had used my license and if these were her charges, and she said she did use my license, but no, the charges were supposed to be our brother’s. The judge then said, “It’s either your charges or it stays on your sister’s record because your brother’s not here for us to ask any questions to.” My sister says, “Well, I don’t want it on my record.” And the judge dismisses us. We walked out of the courtroom and I am more angry than ever. We barely talk on the way home.
The next day I explained it to someone at work and they said, “If my sister admitted to the judge in the courtroom that she was the one that used my license, then the judge should have moved the charges to my sister and let her clean up her own record.” I’m like, “Yes, I think you’re right.” I called the courthouse and I asked for a transcription of our court session. Then, I got another court date. As I walked in, the bailiff recognized me. He said, “Hey, weren’t you just here a few weeks ago, the girl who came in with the sister, blah, blah, blah?” I said, “Yes, but the judge didn’t remove charges from my record, even though my sister admitted in court that she had taken my license.” He went, “Don’t worry, we’ll work it out.”
Once my case gets called, the bailiff speaks up to the judge. I should mention it’s not the same judge I had the first time and the bailiff explained that he was in the courtroom the last time I came and explained to her that my sister confessed, she took my license, and the rest of the story. The judge asked me if this was all true and I said yes. The judge then said the courts would update my record, showing that my sister used my information as an alias, and they would put all the charges on her record. I thanked everyone, especially the bailiff, and left.
Later, I called my sister to tell her what happened and she was not happy about it, but I didn’t really care. When I got to work the next day, I asked them if I could fill out a new form to have my background check rerun. They said they would give it a month because the courts don’t work that quickly. It eventually gets run again and I am cleared. And by the way, my sister never did anything about her record so I doubt her story was true and my brother actually told me it wasn’t true. I went on to work in the school system for 21 years and retired a little over a year ago.