Helping Hand

; Darrell was a happy child. He was always the first out of three children to come to your aide if there was ever anything you needed; and his family was most important to him. Darrell had ADHD so school was a struggle, but he was a smart kid. At 14 though, he and his siblings did not get a long very well. So he spent a lot of time with his little cousin, two years his junior.

Darrell met his first girlfriend in January of 2018 and that's when things in his life started to change. Valentines day of that year we got to meet her parents. There was something off from the moment her mother started talking. Over the course of the next couple weeks, we found out through Darrell's girlfriend that they were methamphetamine addicts.

After a month or two of dating this girl, Darrell started to change. He started smoking pot, one day he was up and cleaning everything he could, the next he would wake up long enough to eat, then back to sleep. My personal views on pot are that its a natural herb that grows from the Earth, so I don't particularly have any issues with Marijuana, but even if I did, he was 14 and going to do what he wanted one way or another. He was smoking with his girlfriend and her family a lot. He lost a lot of weight and his eyes were no longer the twinkle of a happy child. They were just brown and almost lifeless; like that of a Great White Shark.

We had our suspicions that he had begun to partake in more than just smoking pot, but we never had any proof. Ariel, his girlfriend, had a cousin that Darrell started spending a lot of time with. This was a kid you could look at and tell he was trouble. Darrell went to his brothers apartment one day with his friend, Dean, and a gun of his brothers friend came up missing. There had never been a problem like that before, but again there was no proof as to who and why it was taken.

Darrell also spent a lot of time at his grandparents home. He would help mow their lawn, take out the trash, anything they needed before his personality started to change. Now he just sat on his Xbox listening to Rap music that talked about drugs and guns.

In July of 2018, Darrell and his 12 year old cousin, Alex, stole a gun my Dad kept locked in a toolbox in his garage. The two boys were playing with it, pointing it at each other, talking about how cool it was. Alex handed the gun back to Darrell but let go of it before he had a hold of it and it fired, hitting Alex in the back, off towards his side. Luckily it went straight through and missed all of the vital organs.

My sister and her husband paint Alex with an Angel complex. They talk about all the things he does wrong, how he treats them, but where everyone else is concerned, Alex is a perfect child and anything that happens is someone else's fault. Alex was smoking, watching porn with his buddies. My sister kept secrets about the things he did from his Dad and vice versa. Needless to say, Darrell took the whole hit from the shooting. Alex lied, and said he didn't touch the gun except to hand it back to Darrell because he asked him too. Alex, according to his mother and father, "knows better than to mess with guns, so he wouldn't have been messing with it".

Darrell got house arrest, probation, a suspended sentence for Juvenile Detention, and had a counselor coming out every week. All the while my sister and her husband were pushing for Darrell to be locked away. The prosecutor tried to make an example out of him. The two boys conspired together to take the gun, each taking turns pointing it at the other, but it was Darrell that took all of the punishment. Not that he didn't deserve the punishment he was given, but he should not have faced it alone.

In October, a couple of weeks before Darrell's sentencing, our family was rocked once again. The patriarch of our family, the glue that held everything together, my Dad, passed away unexpectedly. While everyone else was understandably upset and grieving, Darrell held it together to be strong for everyone else, Until the funeral. That night he let it all go. He held in his fears about the shooting, court, and his Grandfathers death, until he just couldn't anymore. That's a lot of weight for a 14 year old to carry.

After all of that, I started to see MY son again. After a few months, the twinkle was back in his eyes and he was taking part in family events again, no longer sleeping his life away. He and his counselor talked about his future, and the counselor really helped to get him to open up and deal with his fears instead of just holding them in. He has been thinking long and hard about the military or auto mechanics when he finishes school.

December 2020, At about One am, Darrell emerges from his room and asked me if I heard the same loud noise, like a big pop, that he did. We both stepped out onto the front porch and looked around. A couple of houses down from ours, the sky was lit up in gorgeous shades of yellow and orange. It almost reminded you of a Summer sunset. The house was on fire.

Darrell took off, running right towards the house and flames, without pausing or thinking for a second. He helped the neighbors get out of the home safely. The residents of the home didn't have time to grab jackets, clothing, or anything. The young mother was outside in the freezing cold in her underwear, and two small children in diapers. As soon as everyone was out of the home and a safe distance away, Darrell ran back to our house, grabbing jackets and clothes, running back towards the burning home and the crowd that had now gathered to see what was going on, put the clothes and jackets on the children, and made sure they were going to be warm. Darrell stayed until the fire Department arrived, and we came home. This family was saved without any loss of life, including their dogs, by a teen boy, that just a year ago was facing time in a Detention Center.

Darrell put all of his fears and troubles aside to save people he didn't even know. It's people like him, even if they do have a troubled past, people that risk their own lives to help a stranger, that make this world a better place. That is one of the best acts of human decency I can think of. The world is a much better, kinder, and safer place with people like Darrell in it.