Life After Death: The Shocking True Story of a Innocent Man on Death Row

wearing a Mötley Crüe T-shirt, and judging by the paper on his desk he’d been drawing and doodling to kill time. There was a backpack propped next to his feet that turned out not to contain a single book. Instead it held a large collection of cassette tapes—Metallica, Anthrax, Iron Maiden, Slayer, and every other hair band a young hoodlum could desire. He often brought a small Walkman with him and would pass me one of the earpieces during study hall or, months later, on the bus so we both could listen. I’d see him eating lunch every day in the cafeteria and would nod in greeting as I was walking out. I never did ask how he got the black eye.
    Jason usually had the latest
Metal Edge
and
Heavy Metal
magazines, and I would look at them while he examined my
Thrasher
collection. All of our interactions took place during school, because I still lived in the shack far outside city limits and my mom drove my sister and me to school in a blue pickup truck. The only class we had together was study hall, so there was little or no talking. Most of our communication was through gestures—finger pointing, eyebrow raising, head shaking, and so on. This didn’t change until the day Nanny nearly died.
    Nanny had already suffered one heart attack, so she knew the symptoms well. Luckily she had time to call 911 and then to call my mom when the second one hit her. It was late in the evening when my mother began to shout that we had to go. We moved as quickly as we could, but the ambulance still got there before we did. We arrived in Lakeshore to see the paramedics bringing my grandmother out on a stretcher.
    It was surreal because it was late enough that the sun was down, but it wasn’t completely dark yet. The sky was a beautiful mix of dark blue and purple. There was a special, magickal feel in the air that I’ve felt only a few times in my life. It touches something in you and it’s so damned beautiful that you think you’ll die because it’s too much to take. A time like that isn’t part of any season. It’s not spring, summer, winter, or fall. It’s a day that stands alone, like a world unto itself.
    There was something about the way the red ambulance lights flashed through the entire world without making a sound that hurt my mind. No loud siren, just that red light flashing. I knew my grandmother would be okay. Everyone is okay on an evening like that.
    My mother jumped from the truck and explained who she was. They let her into the ambulance to ride with my grandmother, who was barely conscious. We followed behind. At the hospital she was quickly rushed to surgery, where her heart doctor was already waiting.
    We sat in the waiting room flipping through magazines without seeing what was on the pages, pacing the halls, and staring blankly at the television screen perched high in the corner. When the doctor finally came out, after what seemed an eternity, he pulled my mother to the side and explained that he had done what he could, but that my grandmother wasn’t expected to live through the night. We slept in the waiting room, expecting to hear the worst every time a doctor passed through. The news didn’t come that night, or the next day, either.
    That afternoon the doctor came to talk to my mother again. He said my grandmother was still alive, though in critical condition. The new problem was that she had developed blood clots in her leg, and it was going to have to be amputated. He had doubts about her making it through the surgery, but she would surely die without it.
    We all lived in that hospital waiting room for nearly two weeks. I didn’t mind; it was more comfortable than home. The air was nice and cool, everything was spotlessly clean, and there was even cable television. Jack brought sandwiches from home to eat or, when he scraped up enough money, hamburgers from a fast-food place. We ate in the cafeteria only once, because the food was so expensive. Every so often I’d sneak down to grab a few handfuls of crackers or breadsticks from the salad bar when no one was watching. I loved the hospital food. I thought it was delicious.
    When I was allowed to go in and see my grandmother, she was so high on morphine that she didn’t know what was going on around her. She weakly raised one hand to point at a mirror on the wall and asked me to change the channel. She called me a “little shit” and told a story about how we would become vampire hunters, because you could get a huge reward for bringing in a