July Magazine 2012

When JUSTICE turns on those it swore to protect.

By Angela Hello. My name is Angela. I am fifteen years old, and this is the story of my life. All names, except mine, have been substituted with letters or general nouns to preserve anonymity since my case is still open. All expletives have been edited out of quotes; some things were not said as "politely" as the appear here.

Trapped - that's the only word that could describe my childhood. I was ten years old, and my parents were getting divorced. I wanted to live with my mom, but we had nowhere to live. My mom didn't have a job, and she didn't have any money to her name. We would go live with family, but M didn't want us near my mom's family. I didn't want to live with M, because he was very abusive towards me - he would always hit me, slap me, or beat me (sometimes until I was unconscious). He even beat up my mom in front of me on multiple occasions. I guess we had to take our only option - to live in another house M owned.

You might be wondering who "M" is. Well, "M" is my biological father.

He was never a father to me, in fact, he was the exact opposite. M became my only enemy. After my mom and I moved into the house that he owned, we took a sigh of relief. "Free," I thought, "free from him‌ Not completely free, but we're getting there." The house we moved into was a five minute walk from his house; M had plenty of other houses in multiple places, but he wanted us to move into this one. We lived in that house for two years.

September 23rd, 2008. I will never forget that day. I was in sixth grade English class, and we were assigned to write in our journals. The assignment was to write something that would make you happy - most kids wrote about fame, fortune, or superpowers. I, however, wrote about killing my biological father.

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