by Lisa Fenn
“We wanted to share his triumphant spirit,” Leach wrote. On those pages, Leroy publicly declared that his life was better now than before the accident. Readers closed this chapter festive and content that Leroy had successfully overcome this most horrific experience. Ed won the Ohio Understanding Award for his work. The Beacon Journal nominated the coverage for a Pulitzer Prize.
And that is where the story of Leroy Sutton’s first trauma ended, and his second one began.
THE NIGHTLY WINNING lottery numbers were announced just after Wheel of Fortune, and Big Ma watched with her yellowed, taped-up copy of The Original Lucky Three Wise Men Dream Book on the coffee table. This eighty-page booklet purported to decode numerology and predict lottery combinations based on one’s “vibrations of life,” such as zodiac signs, seasons, and dreams.
Big Ma placed great importance on dreams. She said the Hebrews and Egyptians were warned of future peril in biblical visions. So any time Big Ma saw a celebration, a death, or an old friend in her sleep, she’d play the corresponding Pick 3 at the Quick & Easy convenience store at the top of her street. And anytime Leroy dreamed about the train, the two of them hoped that 15-45-63 was going to win them both some better living.
Though they never spoke directly of his accident, or the incidents that ultimately delivered him to her, Leroy appreciated the consistency of Big Ma’s company. He sat beside her each night for dinner and then some television. She tried to get him to sleep in the upstairs bedroom next to hers, but Leroy insisted on the basement. “He calls it his dungeon,” she said. The dungeon’s only visitor was Dartanyon.
“You gonna be talking to him too?” Big Ma asked me.
“Yes, I have spent some time with Dartanyon already,” I answered. “How well do you know him?”
“I love that child like I birthed him myself! He come around here with his silly jokes, but he’s always polite. He don’t curse, and there’s no sag in his pants.” She said Dartanyon often spent the weekend playing video games with Leroy and making up songs on an old guitar. “They have a good time watching movies, talking about girls and whatever and stuff.” One time, after Big Ma’s heart medication caused her hair to fall out in clumps, Dartanyon shaved her head. “He did a real nice job,” she said. “If it happens again, I won’t let anyone shave it but him. Got myself a blind barber.”
Big Ma would fry up chicken and pork chops for the boys. She watched Dartanyon clean his plate before moving on to her stash of chips, ice cream, and juice. She was on a tight budget, but she knew Dartanyon didn’t have a mother to keep him full, so she didn’t mind. Dartanyon often slept on the couch in the basement, or sometimes on the floor beside Leroy’s bed. On Monday mornings, Leroy’s driver would let Dartanyon hitch a ride to school on the wheelchair bus.
“Dartanyon hugs me when he leaves, so I know he appreciates coming,” Big Ma said. “He and Leroy are like brothers.”
“How did Leroy come to live with you?” I asked.
Big Ma shook her head and lowered her voice. “His mother wasn’t happy with me, I’ll tell you that.”
RIGHT AROUND THE time of the Akron Holiday Tree Festival in November 2002, Katrina picked up again, heading to Hudson, Ohio, an affluent community twenty minutes north of Akron. It marked Leroy’s tenth move in his twelve years, and each one had come without warning. “Get your stuff!” Katrina would yell. “We headed somewhere better.”
Hudson was the first place that actually looked like somewhere better. The hills that rolled through this whimsical town were dotted with wraparound porches and backyard gazebos, people rode bikes as a form of exercise rather than transportation, and the town square featured yoga, farmer’s markets, poetry readings, and wine tastings. What stood out most to Leroy about Hudson was its color. His previous neighborhoods were washed out in a sooty gray. Hudson was green, burgeoning with lush grass, flowering shrubbery, and wise old elm trees. Leroy reveled in the surrounding nature, spotting deer and rabbits and even a coyote. Life grew in every nook of this small town, and the Suttons dared to wonder if perhaps they could regain their vibrancy here too.
At first, things were working out nicely for the family. Katrina received a coveted Section 8 housing voucher in Hudson; her subsidized monthly rent totaled $27. Their dwelling resembled more of a shanty than a house, aging off the road behind a larger, newer home. But for them, the place’s most desirable feature was its distance from the clattering trains that thundered through their old Akron neighborhoods and battered their souls like storms.
“I chose Hudson because we didn’t have to hear the trains, the ambulances, the fire trucks. We didn’t have to be in the hood anymore,” Katrina said. “In Akron, every time we’d hear a siren or a train whistle, it would take us right back to the accident.”
Katrina began a job in home health care. Tony, now age fifteen, joined Hudson High School’s basketball team. And Leroy’s new middle school warmly welcomed the inspiring young man they had all read about in the newspapers. But Hudson’s starry country nights could only satiate Katrina and Tony for so long before they were lured back to what they knew best—hustling. Tony soon realized that rich white suburbanites liked their street drugs just as much as city folk. “The people in Hudson were just smarter about it,” he said. “They partied hard but still went to work and school the next day.”
By the spring of 2003, Tony was making weekly runs up to Cleveland to pick up marijuana supplies. “My uncle had a super deal where we could get weed from California for $250 a pound,” Tony remembered. “Because kids in Hudson had so much money, I could flip that for $1,600. That’s a sick come-up.”
Tony shared his spoils with Katrina so she could pay the electricity and food bills—or at least that’s what he thought she was doing with the money, until the electric company sent shutoff notices.
“Here she was flipping my money and Leroy’s disability checks with other dealers on the side,” Tony remembered. “She always did it with grimy dudes, though, who would take off with her money. She always trusted the wrong people.”
Tony started paying some of the bills himself, leading to heated arguments with his mother. Katrina slipped into avoidance, sometimes disappearing for days at a time. With Tony splitting time between Hudson and Cleveland, twelve-year-old Leroy was often left alone to care for five-year-old Keyiera. He braided her hair, fixed her breakfast, and if Keyiera’s school bus came late, he missed his own in order to see his sister off. School records show Leroy absent for fourteen days in the spring of 2003. And though he fell substantially behind in Hudson’s rigorous curriculum, his teachers gave him unending second chances.
“He definitely had his own set of rules and learned to use them to his advantage early on,” said Shawn Gaskins, Leroy’s science teacher. “He was a smart kid, but he used his smile to get by rather than his brain. He became the class clown, which was strange. We expected someone in Leroy’s position to be the opposite.”
The “class clown” title gave Leroy an identity other than that of the “kid with no legs,” and his classmates’ laughter compensated for the attention he lacked at home. But during the summer months, isolated from his audience of peers, Leroy grew sullen. His mother was often unreachable. Tony was out dealing all day. The get-well cards and fund-raisers had long ceased. His story no longer drew media attention. And Leroy discovered something worse than being an amputee—being forgotten.
Leroy wondered why everyone had left him, and each time he looked down at his lower half, he settled on the same conclusion: he deserved abandonment. His first trauma had torn off his legs; this one tore out his heart. Desperate for acceptance, Leroy started bagging weed for his brother that summer. Desperate to dull his heartache, he began smoking it.
“We had the biggest parties ever, like several times a week,” Tony said. “So many girls, cases of liquor, pot, raves. And Leroy was the drunkest dude there.”
Leroy tried it all—mushrooms, ecstasy, and every last strand and strength of weed. Pineapple Exp
ress, Starburst, Banana Kush, and perhaps most fittingly, Trainwreck. He sold his own prescription pain pills, since being drunk and baked numbed his phantom limb pain better than oxycodone anyway. Even when the summer debauchery wound down, Leroy continued using heavily. As he entered the seventh grade, he estimates that he attended school hungover and high 75 percent of the time.
Hudson High school was ranked in the top 4 percent of schools in the country in 2003, with an astounding 98 percent college placement rate; the other 2 percent entered the military forces. Hudson specialized in high achievers. No one slipped through the cracks in this system, and so when Leroy finished his fall quarter with two Ds and two Fs, with comments like “Leroy unable to finish test because he fell asleep” on the tops of his papers, red flags shot up. Furthermore, the school district had paid for an onsite physical therapist to get Leroy walking, but Leroy rarely showed up to his sessions, and when he did, it was without his prosthetic legs. Administrators grew impatient with Katrina’s failure to return calls and attend meetings. In a community of involved parents, this type of noncompliance was incomprehensible. When Hudson’s administration finally cornered Katrina in late October, they informed her that if Leroy did not bring his prosthetics to school, they would pursue neglect charges against her.
Leroy arrived on time the next day with tears instead of legs. “I’m supposed to get all of my stuff,” he said to Mr. Gaskins. “We’re moving this morning.” This time he had no smile to mask his disappointment.
“Where are you moving?” Mr. Gaskins asked. He peered out the window at the waiting van.
“My mom didn’t say. Just said it was somewhere better.” Leroy lowered his head and wheeled out the door.
“His mother literally plucked him out of a first-rate school, out of an environment that was committed to helping him,” Mr. Gaskins remembered. “He had this look on his face like he knew he had lost a great opportunity. He was very upset. I’ll never forget it as long as I live.”
The Suttons returned to Akron, where Leroy continued smoking marijuana and drinking while attending Litchfield Middle School. His work was undeserving, but teachers handed him just enough Ds to pass him along. Tony built up his weed clientele again, while Katrina flipped Leroy’s disability checks with neighborhood dealers. Tony grew hot that his mother wouldn’t invest her money with him yet always wanted a cut of his profits. Leroy hid in his room, trying to block out all of the yelling. One day, Katrina hit Tony in the face with a milk crate during an altercation. He stormed out, saying he was never coming back.
“You’re giving up on me too?” Leroy called out from the porch. “I thought you were my hero, but you’re just as cowardly as everyone else!”
“You never give me no props for saving your life anyway!” Tony screamed back. “Everyone acts like you the hero, like you saved yourself. All you did was get hit by a train! I’m done, man.” Tony threw his hands in the air and kept walking. Nine years would pass before Leroy saw his brother again.
Katrina shuffled Leroy and Keyiera around Akron four more times between 2004 and 2007, always headed “somewhere better.” They crashed on couches and floors, and as they dragged their black trash bags of worn-out stuff from one run-down place to another, Leroy’s only constant was the belief that this vagabond lifestyle was his fault. And no matter how many times they moved, he couldn’t escape the reminders of his accident. Physical problems plagued him, and the environmental and emotional stressors in his life added to his sense of defeat. His wheelchair had irreparably broken down, and he forced himself onto prosthetics that he remained unfit to use. He missed weeks of school due to the resulting skin ulcers and infections between his upper thigh and groin area. The Akron Children’s Hospital emergency department records noted pain, swelling, and tissue breakdown four times between 2004 and 2006. In February 2007, Leroy underwent a stump revision surgery to shave his right femur, which was protruding out of his deteriorating skin.
“A lot of times that revision is avoidable with good therapy and good follow-up at home,” said Dr. Crow, Leroy’s pediatric surgeon. “But my impression was that home was not optimal for him.”
Leroy would smile and assure his doctor that everything was good, and he did the same with Jim and Ed when they pursued a follow-up story in 2005. Their article highlighted how Leroy “learned to deal with the unimaginable, kept smiling, and held on to his faith,” and Leroy did not object. He knew his truth was not fit for print. The truth was that in lieu of physical therapy, he smoked a blunt each morning to combat the pain of his prosthetic legs gouging through his skin. The truth was that when the buzz wore off around third period, it was impossible to make it down the school hallway without pain shooting through his lower back. That pain then triggered a stress response that aggravated his phantom limb pain, and Leroy stabbed himself with pens and etched words like PAIN and NO LOVE and DEATH into his forearms with safety pins to divert his focus from the pangs. The truth was that he lit the hair on his arms on fire, bit holes through his skin, and sliced his wrists with six-inch blades. The truth was that he wore long sleeves to school to cover these bloodied pleas for help, but at home he left his wounds exposed, inviting his mother to notice his pain. She did.
“She came at me swinging with whatever she had in her hands,” Leroy remembered. “I got hit with extension cords, brooms, wooden spoons, switches, you name it.” But Katrina’s attempts to discipline Leroy missed the mark. She confiscated Leroy’s knife collection but never cut to the underlying issues. If his mother couldn’t handle his truth, Leroy knew he could never entrust it to anyone else either.
His final cry for help came in the fall of 2007 at Firestone High School, where Leroy sprayed aerosol deodorant into the choir practice room and ignited it with a lighter. No damage resulted, but Firestone expelled him for attempted arson. Leroy barreled home to tell his mother, certain she would storm the school in his defense.
“I guess you gonna have to find something else to do before you end up doing nothing with your life,” Katrina told him flatly. The truth was that feeling like nothing was something Leroy was already used to.
Big Ma caught wind of her grandson’s expulsion through one of Firestone’s security officers. The two had worked together up in Cleveland back in the day. As soon as Big Ma got the call, she drove down to collect her grandson.
“I want you to finish school,” she told him. “You can do that if you come stay with me.” Katrina yelled at Big Ma for undermining her; Big Ma bellowed back about Katrina blowing through money. From an adjacent room, Uncle Vonn hollered for Redd not to be taking the video games if he be leavin’. Leroy was done with the yelling, done with people fighting for everything but him. Akron’s wonder boy tossed some clothes in a plastic bag and followed Big Ma unceremoniously out of town.
THE LOSSES NEVER leave. The hurt never ceases. But life persists.
My presence returned Leroy to places and times he had worked desperately to forget. The whir of the camera, the scribbles in notepads, the clichéd sound bites. Once he moved into Big Ma’s house, Leroy gave up the alcohol and the weed. He put down the safety pins and the lighters. He was ready to forgo the public charade as well. He had learned that letting people tell stories about him would not ease his plight. He did not want to be the focus of my job. He did not want to be my protagonist. He wanted to suffer the punishment of his folly alone, and he had spent a year in coveted anonymity before I, the media, found him once again.
But Leroy did not tell me any of that, because no parent, no therapist, no teacher, no journalist, had taught him the language of suffering. Instead he had stacked up stones to keep himself safe, each stone a truth he had gleaned from his experiences: I am unlovable. I am unworthy. I am invisible. He used these stones to build a wall of protection—a wall that also served as his prison.
And although Leroy acted as though he wanted to be left alone, he had not yet said no to filming with me. As I sat on the floor in Leroy’s dungeon, I thought of how the great
poet Maya Angelou famously said that there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside of you. I thought of Leroy’s hospital photos and the tattered black leather relic in the closet. I stopped caring about doing a story and started caring about the broken boy before me. I thought back on Robinson’s audacious first words to me and wondered if perhaps I could be part of the solution to this boy’s pain, rather than an additional cause. With that, I broke the silence.
“Leroy, I want to thank you for allowing me to hang out with you these last few nights,” I started gently. “I can tell these visits have not been comfortable for you, so I will not be back tomorrow.” Leroy paused his game but continued staring at the television.
“Deep inside of you, I think you have a lot to say,” I said. I told him how I admired his caution in choosing with whom to share it, that he was wise to shield his heart. “If you decide to talk to me, know that it’s your story to tell. I am just here to help you do it in the most meaningful way possible,” I explained. “And if you don’t want to be on TV, but you do want a friend, I am even more interested in that.”
Leroy resumed his game. I trudged up the stairs and sank into the couch with Pat Sajak and Pat Sutton for one last round of Wheel of Fortune, wishing I could buy Big Ma an e for empathy. I wanted to tell her that no child—no human being—gets hit by a train and emerges unscathed. But I took a deep breath instead, reminding myself that Big Ma likely knew as much, otherwise she wouldn’t have earned the name Big Ma. She just didn’t know what to do about it. So she showed her love by doing what she knew best—standing guard.
