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Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit son in jail

Posted by Aaron - 07/02/11 at 05:02:01 am

Following Gail, and on some Thursdays, walking right beside, was a trying experience. She’s no one we’re to feel sorry for — a husband in prison for dealing meth, a son in prison for waving a gun at someone. She’s an alcoholic who hasn’t quite gotten her life straightened out with a mentally handicapped son that needs constant care.

She beat cancer, was homeless and has sacrificed a lot for her sons. But she’s made plenty of mistakes, plenty of bad decisions, and cannot be absolved from responsibility for her her son’s life of crime. He’s basically a grade-A screw up.

Gail showed me, and I hoped to show readers, two things. Her story is one of the struggles mothers, fathers, husbands, wives, boyfriends, girlfriends, brothers, sisters, sons and daughters go through when a loved one is locked up. It’s a story we don’t often tell.

Adrian Nicole LeBlanc’s Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the Bronx certainly haunted me while writing this.

Once someone goes to jail or prison, they disappear, for most of us, resurfacing rarely for court or parole hearings. But for others, and for more than we probably care to recognize, those behind bars are still family, they are loved ones and burdens at the same time. Gail let me peek into that.

Her story is also one of a mother’s love for her sons. In the piece, I wrote this:

It is impossible to measure a mother’s love and devotion to her children, but consider this.

The walk from Gail’s Joy Avenue home to the Wesley Street jail is about 2 miles — 2 miles there and 2 miles back. Rarely accepting rides or taking the bus, she has made the trek about 20 times to see her son.

Gail Hammett, 55, walked 80 miles to talk to her son. Fifteen minutes, Gail said, is not enough.

“It’s just enough to make you cry. It hurts.”

Mothers, most likely, will always love their sons. But what does that mean? How does that hold up in extremes? Who could love a young man with eight felonies and headed back to prison for a fourth time? Gail answered those questions and showed the depths that love can reach.

No, I don’t think we have to feel sorry for Gail, but we need to know about Gail. We need to read and understand that this, this story, is a consequence of crime.

I met Gail in December a few weeks before Christmas. I had gone to the Wesley Street jail myself  to see a man about a horse. I wrote a story over the summer about a man who saved a horse from starvation. The horse is fine. The man is in jail. I went to check on both.

While waiting at the jail, I heard women around me talking about Gail. She was late that day. They worried about her. I kept my mouth shut, told no one I was journalist and listened. Gail finally showed.

She sat across from in the waiting area. She asked me who I was there to see. “A friend,” I said. I asked her. She told me about her son. I asked about her walking. She told me about that too, as if walking 2 miles in the winter to visit a son in jail was no big deal.

It hit me later that maybe there is a story with Gail. I tracked her down, found her apartment. Katie and I showed up a week later, knocked on her door and introduced ourselves. She recognized me from jail. I told her I was a journalist. She seemed flattered we wanted to do a story on her.

Keeping up with Gail was tough. She canceled on Katie and me a lot. I knew my best shot at finding her was around noon on Thursdays when she would leave her apartment to start walking. But even then, she would leave early, decide to take the bus or somehow, disappear.

I waited an hour for Gail the morning of her son’s sentencing. She never showed. About a half hour after the hearing, she called and left a message. She was hysterical. She begged us not to run the article. She asked us to leave her alone, to let her be.

A few hours later, I went looking for her. She wasn’t at her apartment. I called her. She answered, started crying, and asked what her son’s sentence was. I told her, and she hung up. I waited five minutes and called her back. She answered, still crying, and told me she was wandering around downtown near the homeless shelter. We arranged to meet there.

Gail was talking to her son on a cell phone when we met. She handed the phone to me. Her son thanked me and told me not to write anything bad about his mom. I said I thought what she was doing for him and his brother was amazing and handed the phone back to Gail.

The time on her son’s phone card ran out. For about about the last 30 seconds, Gail said “I love you” as many times as she could, probably for 10 seconds after the call disconnected. We talked for a bit. She told me to print whatever I wanted. She just needed someone to scream at that morning.

I was glad Gail let me tell her story. It needs to be told.

Enjoy.

Walking with Gail: A mother walks to visit her son in jail

Two miles. Fifteen minutes. Two miles.

For six months, this has been Gail Hammett’s weekly routine. Almost every Thursday, she walks nearly 2 miles from her Joy Avenue house to the Jackson County Jail on W. Wesley Street.

She waits, is led up a staircase by a Jackson County Sheriff’s deputy and files into a narrow room. She holds a telephone to her ear and talks to her son — dressed in the orange jumpsuit and sitting behind Plexiglas — for 15 minutes.

She walks down the stairs, outside the jail and another 2 miles home.

“He’s my son,” she said. “I think that any mother would.”

She pauses.

“Maybe I’m not just any mother. I’m his mother.”

Gail Hammett, 55, walked to jail almost every week to visit her 27-year-old son, James Hammett. On Thursday, he was sentenced to 19 to 40 years in prison. He pleaded guilty to first-degree home invasion, felonious assault and two felony weapons violations, his fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth felony convictions. It will be his fourth trip to prison.

But Gail has not turned her back on her son. (read more)

Not important crime story told on Facebook

Posted by Aaron - 07/02/11 at 04:02:05 am

You could have easily missed this small step in a journalism revolution. About an hour after the Super Bowl ended, an entertaining call came over the scanner.

A disgruntled Steelers fan was taking some of his frustration out on neighborhood mailboxes and letting his neighbors know how he felt about the game.

I covered the incident, sitting in my chair and reporting what the scanner chirped (not recommended ever), on Facebook.

Yes, the tomorrow of journalism has dawned.

The blizzard

Posted by Aaron - 05/02/11 at 03:02:23 am

The night before the blizzard, I went to shopping.

I bought two cans of whole tomatoes, an economy size bottle of shampoo and a twin pack of deodorant.

“Stocking up for the blizzard?” the lady at the register asked me.

“At least I’ll be clean,” I said.

That was Monday night. The snow hadn’t started falling, but it was coming. Two feet, they said, high winds, ready to sock Michigan Tuesday night. The National Weather Service wasn’t fooling around. They started issuing warnings and advisories on Sunday.

I already had plans for chili.

The night before the blizzard, I chopped an onion, a green pepper and a few spicy peppers. I minced a few cloves of garlic. I opened the cans of tomatoes, drained them, and chopped them too. It all went into a crock-pot — one given to me by my parents, of course. On the stove simmered a pot of beans, kidney and pinto. They had been soaking for days.

I added a can of diced tomatoes, a can of Mexican tomato sauce and a can of Mexico jalapeño sauce. I’m not sure what the jalapeño sauce is, but it comes in a green can, is sort of a greenish red and balances the spice and smoky taste of the peppers nicely.

In the back of the freezer, I found a container of ground beef already browned. I dumped it into the crock-pot, still frozen, still in a square from the container. After all, a blizzard was coming.

The beans, soft but not mushy, went from the stove to the crock-pot. They covered the vegetables, the sauces, and the square of meat. The beans reached to the brim of the crock-pot. I shook in a healthy amount of chili powder, some salt and pepper, and it was done. Into the refrigerator it went.

The morning of the blizzard, the snow hadn’t started falling yet. There was no wind, either. The sky was blue. There was sun. Before work, I skied along the creek running through the park behind my apartment. My skis glided across the snow, settled and packed.

I took the chili out of the crock-pot, plug it in and set it to low. A whole day of cooking ought to do it, I figured. I left for work.

The day of the blizzard, the snow hadn’t started falling yet, but the weathermen said it would that evening. Schools were already closing for the next day.  Co-workers left early, to beat the storm home. I stayed, to monitor the storm, because that, that night, was my job.

The snow started falling around 5 p.m. It got worse around 6. By 8 p.m., it the blizzard was here.

I work with Nick. He called me once the blizzard started. His job, that night, was to drive around and photograph the storm. He had to find people suffering in its grasp. He couldn’t find anyone. The streets, as I had observed from my second-story window at an intersection downtown, were empty.

I told him about the chili. He told me about his whiskey. We decided after work to wait out the storm together, kept warm by whiskey and chili.

The phones went dead at work, but that, they told me later, had nothing to do with the blizzard. Still, it was sort of scary. No one was on the roads outside, which quickly became white. By 9 p.m., all the schools were closed for the next day. By 10 p.m., snowplows were rumbling down the city streets, a fruitless war.

I left work at 11 p.m. and drove to my apartment alone. The streets were empty. The snow was high and blowing. I couldn’t see much ahead of me, just snow whirling toward my windshield and disappearing when it hit. My car slipped and slid, but I wasn’t worried. I drove slow and figured anything I hit would be cushioned with a layer of snow.

I didn’t hit anything.

When I opened my apartment door, I could already smell the chili. It’s an unmistakable smell, but indescribable. It’s that “I’ve been cooking all day” smell. I changed, bundled up, grabbed the pot of chili and walked to Nick’s apartment. It’s not far. I wouldn’t normally drive there and couldn’t that night.

The chili was warm. The whiskey was warm. Nick and I sat on his couch, watching television. Outside, the storm blizzard did whatever the blizzard wanted.

When I lived in the California desert, I missed this. I missed the yearly battle against the elements Michiganders call winter. It makes us tougher. It brings us together. The winter weather keeps us inside and there, we find each other. We bundled up and gather around for a few months each year. Each spring, we emerge victorious, to birds and budding trees and the sun. Each spring, we emerge with the common bond that we had survived the winter.

Around 1 a.m., I got up from the couch and peered outside through two slats of the blinds. The outdoor lights of other apartments lit up flakes of snow as they swirled.

“No peeking,” Nick said.

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