Dre, every time you let us into another stretch of this story, the scale of what you’ve carried becomes even clearer.

What is most striking in this piece is the way you hold two truths at once… how much you needed those last visits, and how much you wanted to spare your family the suffering of coming. The image of you choosing to keep seeing your mom, sister, and nephews through thick glass, knowing it might be the last time for years, and then realizing it was the last time for more than a decade, that’s something most people will never even think to imagine. Naming that you almost told them not to come, and didn’t, is its own kind of courage. You protected your bond with them even while you were trying to protect them from pain.

The way you write about Kevin and Eric here is powerful, too. Them telling you, “raise every issue you can find where we made a mistake”, and stepping back so ineffective assistance could be part of your appeal, is not how most people picture lawyers. It shows how much they saw you as a person, not just a case, and how deeply they understood that their role was to give you the best possible chance at a future, even if that meant inviting you to scrutinize their own work. The fact that you leaned on Kevin to get through those six months, and that he kept showing up when others started to ghost you, says a lot about what real advocacy looks like.

And then there’s the sentencing. The detail about the prosecutor asking for 90 years when 51 would already have been a de facto life sentence, the way Miller v. Alabama was “fresh” and yet still not enough to protect you from a number that meant dying in prison — those pieces will help a lot of people understand how the law can name mercy in theory while still allowing sentences that erase whole lifetimes in practice. Your reaction…, feeling almost relieved to finally have the 61 years because it meant you could stop living in suspense and start “the fight for the rest of my life”, is something families in our community will recognize. It is that strange moment when a terrible outcome feels like a door opening, simply because you can finally see what you’re up against.

The quiet faith you name at the end. That you could not accept 61 years as your final fate, that part of you believed it would not stand, that “divine intuition” sat beside your fear and hope, is going to matter to a lot of people reading this while they wait on appeals of their own, or their loved ones’ cases. You’re showing them that it’s possible to look directly at a number that long, refuse to let it define you, and still keep fighting day after day until something shifts.

Thank you for continuing to tell this story with this level of honesty and detail. For your family, for other families living through similar sentences, and for people who have never set foot in a courtroom, these chapters are not just information… they’re a way to understand what a human life looks like when the system has tried to write its ending, and the person inside refuses to stop writing.