The Paths of Our Sources

Darryl Sanders hands out pinwheels in front of the Wisconsin state Capitol building for foster care awareness month in May 2008. (Photo by Kristyna Wentz-Graff, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel)

Kris’ voice was almost panicked.

“Did you hear about Darryl?”

“No,” I answered, confused and immediately worried. My first thought was that he had been in a car accident, this promising young man with the troubled past we had gotten to know so well. I had written his story. Kris had taken the photos.

“He’s been charged with felony murder,” she said.

“What?”

It wasn’t possible.

Kris continued, the details sketchy. Darryl had not been the shooter, but he was there when the victim, a neighborhood Good Samaritan, was killed.

I had seen the criminal complaint earlier. Glossed over it. Thought in passing that the name looked familiar. But it wasn’t him. It couldn’t be.

I told Kris that.

“It’s him,” Kris said. “I’m looking at his mug shot.” She paused. “It’s him, but he’s — harder.”

Darryl’s foster parents, the ones who loved him like their own child and stood by him even when he stole their son’s car and crashed it, must be dying inside.

And Laura, his mentor at a social services agency who helped him adjust to life on his own and gave him a job, must be going out of her mind.

I never imagined Darryl Sanders would become a senator. But I thought he had hope. He’d already gotten a driver’s license – the proudest day of his life. I thought maybe he would find consistent work in a factory like his brother, get his own apartment, meet a girl. Overcome his mother’s death and his father’s abandonment.

It is so hard not to become cynical when people like Darryl, people who seem to have so much hope and strength of character, fall off their tenuous paths.

The fact that they falter shouldn’t come as a surprise to me, and yet it does, every time.

Back in Indiana there was a woman, a mother dying of cancer. The only reason I’d even met her was because she was dying. I was working on a series about what the living can learn from the terminally ill. I’d interviewed her for hours about her children, her legacy. I listened to her talk about beating cancer, although we both knew she wouldn’t. And yet when she did lose the fight a few months later, I was devastated. And in shock.

Darryl’s arrest hit me the same way.

A fellow reporter joked that having me do a hopeful story about someone was like the curse of being featured on the cover of Sports Illustrated. He had a point, because Darryl’s story isn’t the first one I’ve covered that ended this way.

Before him, there was Annie.

She’d spent time in prison for drugs and prostitution. By the time we met she’d found Jesus, and it seemed she had finally conquered her addiction. Like me, she was a mother. Energetic and dedicated, she had started a nonprofit organization and was helping other women make the transition from prison back into the world. She had fallen in love and gotten engaged.

Then, quickly, soon after I wandered out of Annie’s life, it fell apart. Her fiancé was murdered. Cocaine regained control over her. In a moment so like Kris’ phone call about Darryl, I learned that Annie had been arrested, again, for prostitution.

Investigative reporters don’t get to do happy stories. The best we can hope for is a little bit of optimism — the folo story that shows how sometimes people can overcome adversity, get beyond the past and live normal lives.

Annie was one of those stories. So was Darryl.

According to the criminal complaint filed against him, he cooperated with the police. Admitted he knew they were going to the house to commit a robbery. Said he didn’t know his friend planned to shoot the old man.

It doesn’t matter. Darryl is 23. If he’s convicted on a charge of felony murder, he’s just as responsible as the man who pulled the trigger. He’s facing 35 years in prison. It might as well be life.

I can’t bear the thought of covering Darryl in court, when I’ve covered him before at work, at home, on the steps of the Statehouse as he lobbied to make things better for other foster kids. I can’t think of him as just another criminal.

And I can’t give up hope.

Gina Barton is a reporter for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. She is a 2000 Dart Center Ochberg Fellow and the author of “Fatal Identity: A True Crime Story of Friendship, Deception and Murder.“