A Story of Weak Men and Their Prey

Note: this entry originally was written and published on February 25, 2015, at a time when I was trying to strengthen myself a little while knowing I was shouting this into the void without any readers. I have battled my personal beliefs in sharing this story publicly for many years. I have suffered panic attacks, crippling flashbacks, and a paralyzing fear of any sort of vocal conflict. Even as I write this, every time I see that face or hear that name, my flesh feels like it's burning, and my heart races as if he's still in the room with me. When I google him, I feel like I'm walking to his front door expecting to be attacked. And when I google him and see that he remained broken and continues to break other people, I feel guilty for having survived it. I feel guilty for not having prevented it from happening to my family, for happening to other families. Most of all, I feel guilty for taking the mantra of my childhood superhero idols to heart and not removing this man from the face of the earth, even at the cost of my own life and future, just to spare the pain he caused my family and has gone on to cause for many others. I have made almost no edits to the following story, but I feel the need to add this link for some additional perspective.

https://www.rapsheets.org/florida/palmetto-jail/SAVOIE_ROGER/10344759

This includes criminal reports below as well as his most recent criminal report that I could find from almost two years ago, and the details of it make me sick to my stomach.  "Great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement." They make me feel as though I failed a group of strangers out there in the world by not speaking out about it at the very least. The way my life has gone since then almost makes me feel like that was what I was meant to do, and I failed in it because I tried to put it behind me. My family was the first family he broke, and the ample police records show that he has only escalated his behavior and still walks the streets to do it again after serving no real sentence. The justice system has failed all of his victims, but there is more. If you look at the release dates, you'll notice that he was released a little over a month after each arrest. All three times. I know in my heart why that is, too. Even after "great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement," I know... KNOW... that the victim dropped the charges, probably the same woman every time. Because my mother did. Every time. I might have, too, when he almost killed me when I was seventeen, but I was a minor then. He served time for that. It wasn't enough.

Without getting repetitive, I'm just going to move into the actual story while I'm still able. I can't keep going over this without shaking, but I need to go over it at least one more time. It never gets easier to tell.

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     This is a story of domestic violence. If such stories make you uneasy, then I suggest that you do not read it because it will be graphic. It is not my wish that any harm come to any living person as a result of my story, and it is not my wish to urge anyone to action on my behalf or the behalf of others. I tell this story only because it is a story that should be told and remembered. Perhaps it will seem at times that I am still emotional over this subject. I am, but I am still not of the mindset that anyone has the right to take vengeance upon anyone else. This story did not change my lifelong ideal of being a peaceful person, but it certainly tests it to its limit.

     Some time ago, shortly after my mother's death, I thought about a significant moment in my late childhood (and my brother's early childhood) that had lasting effects on my family. Overcome with grief, I still managed to convince myself that I was being the better person by keeping this to myself because the Internet is such a hotbed of raw emotion as it is. However, after discovering I had gotten over a tiny fraction of the grief of my mother's passing and the sorry state of my personal life, I came to realize that keeping this story to myself doesn't mean that I have gotten over it. At one point, I tried to convince myself that this story simply never happened. Repression is never a healthy way to deal with memories. My brother still thinks repression works, and he's a hot mess. I tried to convince myself that this story no longer had power over me, but I was lying to myself. I tried to convince myself that simple human nature was responsible for my entire body shaking and my skin burning whenever I even felt a hint of a verbal or physical conflict coming, but the "everyone is born with PTSD" argument fell flat because I never suffered emotionally or physically as I have before the story I am about to tell.

     In the many years I have had access to the Internet, I have used it to look for a number of people. Why I never looked for this man until five months ago, a month before the first anniversary of my mother's passing, is a mystery to me. He came up in conversation a few times (never as a positive segue), but there never was any curiosity as to his whereabouts that made me think to look for him. Had I done so, then my mother might have known some peace of mind in the last months of her life... or she might have suffered even more for knowing it. I can't know which effect it would have had on her to know, but I know for a fact what effect this man had on her in the latter half of her lifetime. In a personal journal entry for that date, I said that he was dead to me, but he never truly could be dead to me because of the impact he had on my life. I had spent the entire evening trying to kill him off in the story of my mind, playing emotional games with myself and peering into "What If..." Marvel universes, pretending to be Uatu The Watcher as I narrated a handful of scenarios, just like the comics, to peer into alternate worlds where my family's life had been better-- or worse-- for having done things differently. At the time, it helped me to cope. I was still fractured from losing my mother. I tried to frame every imaginary notion of changing the past to remind myself that it was the past and that there were no guarantees that I could have fixed things no matter what I did. And, in the back of my mind, it was a silent prayer that we were the only family that he had broken, a prayer that had gone unanswered whether or not the truth existed in public record... which it did.

     Before I go on, I need to put a face to the name. I turn your attention to the focus of this story, Roger Conrad Savoie. From personal experience and comparison to his public criminal record, I can say with every ounce of certainty that this man has served no purpose in his life other than to make people suffer. He is a user, a drunk, and a man of both short temper and short intellect. He is also a very strong man and skilled in martial arts, skills he uses against women and children, not men his own size and strength. He is also skilled at making those same women and children feel sorry for him, only to forgive him until he does it to them again... and again... and again. Don't just take my story as the gospel truth because his criminal record tells the same story of battered women and children.

http://openpasts.com/PublicRecord/ROGER-SAVOIE/0026311389158

http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Roger_Savoie_14035581/

http://florida.arrests.org/Arrests/Roger_Savoie_15392565/

     When I was twelve years old, my mother and stepfather separated for good. My biological father was an alcoholic, and my parents divorced less than two years after I was born. My mother married my stepfather shortly thereafter because, as she put it, every child needs a father. In hindsight, I found this to be only a half-truth because my mother showed herself over the years to be a woman that could not live without a man in her life. My stepfather was a sociopath and a hard drug user, and the only positive memory I have of the man is that he fathered my only sibling, a brother eight years my junior. They were married for twelve years, and nothing he did prompted her to leave him until she began to develop some confidence in herself. Despite their marriage, she had been a single mother most of her life because he was either at work, in rehab, or disappearing for several days to shoot up the paycheck that was supposed to be buying food for his children. Not only was Christmas a dicey time of year with the threat of him disappearing for a week with all of the money intended for buying Christmas presents, but he also wiped out my savings account (granted there was not much there) and cashed in a number of family gifts and even the tickets for a trip to Disney World one year... just to disappear for a drug binge. My mother attempted suicide toward the end of their relationship, and he barely showed any emotion. It taught her just how much she had been raising her two children alone up to this point, and the decision eventually came that we did not want him in our lives anymore.

     There is more to the story of my stepfather, but this story isn't about him. He still deserves a good deal of storytelling from me for the abuses he handed down in the time he was a part of my life, but he changed his ways. He atoned for his sins. He still atones for them and has been clean for years as far as I know. He has no contact with me; I wasn't his child. I never was, and maybe that had some bearing on things. But my stepfather still tries to reason with my brother that my stepfather was a piece of garbage and that my mother deserved none of the resentment my brother's limited memories put on her. I would blame my stepfather for putting us in the situation that brought about what happened next if not for believing that it was some sort of destiny. We moved from Texas to Florida in 1987 for a new job that my stepfather couldn't keep due to his drug use, so my mother had the added hardship of being separated from a close-knit family that had helped her through many of the difficulties in their relationship. My mother was a proud woman, and being a single mother with only the benefit of a single parent's income was not an easy adjustment to make. She despised welfare, but we had no choice but to live off some of its benefits in the few years we lived in Florida without my stepfather's added income. My mother did not want to move us back to Texas with her family if she did not have to do so, but the choices she made brought that inevitability to us even more quickly.

     My mother dated a few men after she separated from my stepfather, but she put a great deal of focus on raising her children. This was perhaps the most attention she paid to raising her children in her life, and it came after a suicide attempt and a brief feeling of self-worth and confidence, the confidence that pushed her to separate from my stepfather. She did the best she could with what she had. She was a lonely woman with a difficult family history, and she did her best to try to instill some values and a better outlook on life in the two children she had. On top of that, her career was in-home childcare. She didn't just have her two sons. At any given time, there were a dozen children coming in and out of our home. Other parents trusted her and her sons with their children, and, as far as they knew, we were stable. For a time, we were because the toxic situation with my stepfather was gone. We were happy. But this didn't last two years. The income wasn't enough, and my mother started getting bounced checks because she was the kind of person to treat her business customers as friends too often, even when she had two children of her own to feed, and her customer base was already small to begin with. She became involved briefly with a pizza deliveryman that reminded her of my birth father, but she developed a relationship with his best friend shortly thereafter. This is where my story truly begins.

    Roger Conrad Savoie was 20 years old. My mother was 34. Despite the age difference, whatever she saw in him was strong enough to impact her life in such a way that she lost sight of the past two years of her life. She slipped back into the feeling of needing a significant other in her life after succeeding at doing it alone. This was not the sort of man she expected. I must point out here that this story is a combination of my own personal experience as well as secondhand information my mother was too willing to share with me throughout my life about how she felt about all of it. None of the words I use to describe here are any words of my own opinion. They are the words she used to describe herself in her feelings of guilt after the fact. The relationship she developed with Roger was when she was at her most selfish and immature, and it was at this point in her life when she began to doubt which relationship was more important to her: her relationship with Roger or her relationship with her children. One might say that a good mother would not make that kind of decision, but I'm not making that argument. Yes, my mother claimed she had a weak will when it came to many things, but there are also people in this world that sense that and feed upon it. Roger is one of those people.

     I only know of the first couple of weeks of the relationship what I saw firsthand. My mother did in-home childcare, and it was a rare occasion that the house was not full of children. I spent much of my time in my bedroom behind a locked door or playing at friends' houses, and I wasn't paying much attention to what was going on. She only had a few other children staying with us at this point, and none of them stayed more than a few hours in the mornings and afternoons. At night, when all the children were gone and her own children were in bed, Roger was appearing more and more often until he had completely moved in. He made every effort to befriend my brother and me, and he shared enough of our interests to hit it off with us. It seemed like my brother and I had someone in our lives for the first time that we could think of as a father figure, but what did we know? We were just dumb kids that didn't know any better, but we would learn. One night, shortly after Roger had moved in, I got up after midnight to use the bathroom. My mother's bedroom door was open slightly, and I could hear whispering. I sat in the bathroom and listened, and my heart started to race. I'd never felt that kind of fear in my life. What sounded at first like a simple argument soon lost all sense whatsoever as it became clear to me that Roger was drunk and that my mother was pleading with him in a whisper not to wake the children. I heard him ask her what pain was. Then I heard the slap, followed by my mother trying to muffle her cries. Then I heard him ask her why she made him do it to her. Shortly after, everything was quiet again. Even my mother's crying eventually stopped. I went back to bed shaking, and I don't know how I got back to sleep, if I did. I carried this eavesdropping memory with me without mentioning to my mother that I had heard what happened, but it didn't matter because Roger didn't care to keep it a secret for long.

     The story becomes sadly typical of domestic abuse after that. He apologized for his behavior, broke down and cried, and swore he'd never do it again. My mother believed him until he did it again, and it started out as one of those "only when he drinks" excuses until it became clear that he didn't need alcohol to fuel his rage. My brother was four years old, and he and I spent a lot of time in my bedroom playing with toys and making funny radio interview shows with my handheld tape recorder while my mother spent time in the living room with Roger and his friends and family. As long as they were with other people, things were fine. When everyone else went home one night after an evening of partying and drinking, the cycle started all over again, and I remember feeling that fear again. I remember her coming to my door and telling us to stay in the room as we heard him shouting in the living room. Then I heard him slam her against the wall. No matter how scared I was, I couldn't stand in my bedroom and listen to this. I had to be brave and try to put a stop to this. I opened the door and stepped out into the hallway, shouting at him to stop, but I was trying to reason with an animal. I could see it in his eyes. I remember that look in his eyes just as if he were standing right in front of me right now, and I can feel the back of my neck burning. Even the mugshots don't look as realistic as that moment frozen in my mind. I might as well have been staring down a wild bull as I told him to stop and think about what he was doing. I was a child trying to reason with an animal. All the while, as my brother stood behind me crying and Roger looked ready to charge down the hallway at me, my mother stood between us, crying and concussed, begging him not to hurt her children and begging me not to try to stop him. I couldn't abide that, and I called the police. He was taken to jail, but my mother didn't press charges.

     Of course, that it not the end of it. Far from it. Roger came crawling back to my mother, begging for her forgiveness, and she eventually gave in. My brother and I forgave him as well, and things went smoothly for a few months. It wasn't our first substance abuse rodeo; we'd had three failed tours of rehab with my stepfather, and Roger made an effort to stop drinking altogether and to change his ways. The damage had been done, however, because my mother slowly fell behind in her bills and rent because she started paying for his mistakes. Although I was not privy to the full details of the situation, I can put two and two together and add up why the last couple of childcare customers she had didn't show up anymore. It became painfully clear to her that we could not remain in Florida for much longer. This inevitable upheaval and Roger's personal responsibility for my mother's financial strain did not help the relationship as time wore down. My mother tried to delay it as much as she could, but Roger couldn't hold down a job to contribute anything to the family. He cost more money than he made. A few days before the move, Roger disappeared the night before we were to leave. He didn't call, and no one knew where he was. We finished packing the truck ourselves, already dealing with the difficult choice of having to leave some of our belongings behind because the single truck we could afford was not large enough to hold all of it. Beds, a living room couch, and several other things were left behind, and I sadly left behind a few boxes of toys and collectibles by accident due to the stress and the urgency of the situation. When Roger finally showed up late that night, he acted as if he had done nothing wrong. He said that he had been spending a little time with some of his friends before we were to leave because he was leaving his life to be with us, and he didn't think my mother should have made a big deal out of it. He had been drinking and didn't bother to call my mother and let him know where he was, and he hadn't been there as he promised he would to help his new family pack. It was a big deal, and my mother finally told him that she was through with him. She didn't want him moving with us to Texas. Roger lost it.

     What led to what happened next is a little hazy in my mind, but a previous argument at a family gathering prompted me to call Roger's parents at home instead of calling the police. When I reached his father on the line, it took far too much convincing to get that asshole to take a moment out of his life to come over and help. I should have just called the police again because I would learn that his father was an abusive sack of shit, too. What a surprise. But I am starting to digress on the emotional side. I pleaded with Roger's father for help as Roger held my mother in a headlock in the backyard and threatened to break her back. When it was all over, my mother went back on what she said, believing that she couldn't make the trip back to Texas without Roger's help.

     Things only got worse when we reached Texas because my mother's family was quick to get involved. The hint of a raised voice would bring them running from next door, so any argument that could have led to Roger being abusive with my mother turned into a different argument about the rest of my mother's family not knowing how to mind their own business. Secretly, I was grateful for every interruption. Roger and my mother argued less with each other because they had her family's dysfunction in common. All it did was to stave off the inevitable a little longer. At one point, Roger moved out because my grandfather, a controlling and abusive man in his own right, didn't want Roger on his property anymore and had even fired a gun at him to make the point. Roger managed to hold down a job and got himself an apartment, sober for a time, and my mother visited him often or snuck him into our house. Things started to smooth over a little again, but, as always, it was short-lived.

     The summer before my junior year in high school was among the happiest times in my life. Family was getting along, and I was feeling a great deal of confidence in myself. I certainly felt like I was turning around for the better. My mother was about to start a new job, and marching band practice was about to start for me at the beginning of August. I felt more spirit to participate at that moment in my life than I ever had before, and I wanted to be a part of things. Despite my own doubts about my performance, the band teachers had decided to promote me to a more advanced band class, and I wanted to take their faith in me seriously. My mother's new job was to be an in-home care shift for a mentally and physically disabled boy who went to my high school. I'm not sure what he suffered from, but he was severely impaired and needed around-the-clock care. He had to be fed and clothed, he wore a diaper, and he was carted around in a custom-made wheelchair everywhere he went. The night before band practice, my mother was getting ready to spend her first night at the boy's house taking care of him. The best way to describe what happened next is to follow Roger's laughably moronic logic and say that my mother was "too excited" about her new job. He hadn't been drinking that night, but it didn't take him long to twist my mother's excitement over her new job into her claiming that she was better than him. It got worse when he took issue with my mother changing the diapers of a seventeen-year-old physically disabled boy, and he even accused her of getting off on seeing the boy naked. Everyone laughed at him even making such an absurd statement, and the laughter only made it worse.

     For these few years living together in Texas, we had lived in a cramped two-story loft. It was not large enough for four people, but it was what we had. This crowded space allowed for little room to maneuver, and it offered no place for anyone to seek shelter when fists began to fly. I was seventeen years old now, and this night was a night when I was preparing for a turning point in my own life. The entire family had a bright and positive prospect ahead of us, and Roger just had to go and fuck it up all over again. My mother didn't take Roger's unnecessary anger seriously, and why should she? Nothing he said made any sense, and it turned into the most ridiculous argument with him being jealous of my mother spending any amount of time with another person that she would have to see naked, even a disabled child. It didn't matter. All that mattered to Roger was that my mother was starting a new job where she would have to look at and touch another man's dick. Then he shoved my mother hard. This was the first incident in over a year. My entire body felt frozen, and I could see my brother on the top bunk on the other side of the room. My brother was crying, and this was going downhill fast. I shouted at him, and my mother immediately stood between us, blocking us from each other and telling me not to get involved. All the while, Roger shouted at me and at her, and then I saw it firsthand for the very first time. Barely two feet from my face, I saw Roger swing his fist around and hit my mother in the side of the head. Without even a split second to think, I balled up my right fist, swung it around my mother's shoulder and connected with the left side of his face. In even less of a split-second, Roger's left fist swung around my mother's left shoulder and hit me in my left eye. The left side of my face went numb, and I went blind in my left eye.           


     Barely a few seconds passed in this moment, but I felt like minutes passed as I tried to understand why I had lost sight completely in my left eye. As my mother struggled to keep us away from each other, Roger pushed both of us against the wall and wrapped one hand around my throat. It was like trying to pull an iron bar loose, and I couldn't breathe. He was so unimaginably stronger than I was, and there was nothing in his eyes but rage. He was going to kill me. In that moment, as I looked down at his hand, I could see finally why I was blind in my left eye as I saw blood rushing down my face and stomach and all over his hand as he choked me. I couldn't push or kick him away because my mother stood between us the entire time trying to pull him off me. Everything started to go dark. What vision I had in my right eye was blurring, and the only sound I could hear was my own tongue gurgling in the back of my throat. I don't know how long we struggled there, but it seemed like barely a minute before the police rushed into the house and dragged Roger outside, handcuffing him and taking him to jail. All I really remember after that was feeling embarrassed that I was sitting in my underwear as an EMT bandaged my left eyebrow. To this day, I have an itchy and irritable scar that my eyebrow barely conceals. The state pressed charges against him for assaulting a minor, but he didn't serve much time. This information supposedly is out there as well, but I have yet to find a site that doesn't want me to pay money to see the records. Roger wrote her letters from jail, and he was seeking anger management and counseling for what he had done. Still, the damage had been done, and the relationship seemed to end when Roger went back to Florida shortly after his release.

     Believe it or not, this was not the most difficult part of the story to tell. The difficult part comes later, when he was released from jail. I had lost my place in marching band because I missed practice for the first week after the incident, and my mother was forced to turn down her new job completely. To save family face, my brother and I agreed to a story that my eye had been hurt playing baseball. My self-esteem was at its lowest, and my mother was unhappy. She made it clear that she couldn't let go of Roger, but she couldn't let him hurt her children and get away with it either. Things, however, began to return to somewhat normal as I reached my high school graduation the following year. My mother got a new job, and I was about to graduate high school. The hardest part of the story to tell is the part where, even after all of this, that I convinced myself that it was okay to let Roger back into my life. I don't remember the exact date, but it couldn't have been more than a year later. My mother received a phone call from a motel room, and she had a panicked look on her face. As some grand gesture of change and devotion that all of us bought lock, stock and barrel, Roger had hitchhiked and walked 1700 miles from Florida to Texas to try to win my mother back, and the experience almost killed him. Despite everything that had happened, even I couldn't look at someone in such a horrible physical state without feeling some pity. Even I couldn't stand to see a vicious animal suffer, and Roger looked like he had been starving in the desert for a week. His body was emaciated, he had lost much of his muscle mass, and he could barely walk because his feet were swollen to almost twice their normal size and covered with bloody blisters. He should have been in a hospital. Any one of a dozen people who saw him before we did should have taken him to a hospital. 

     This weak shell of a man seemed sincere enough that he was a changed man, but there was no way he was simply coming home with us. My grandfather had threatened to shoot him if he ever laid eyes on him again (and almost did), so things took a different turn. My mother snuck him into the house, and he managed to remain there as she nursed him back to health. His presence there remained a secret for several months. There was no arguing, and he truly did seem a changed man. Slowly, as one family member after another discovered the secret, the only person that didn't know about Roger hiding there was my grandfather. My mother looked at her relationship with Roger differently after that and took some of her power back. At the very least, seeing her oldest son bleeding from the eye woke her up. There would be verbal arguing again after that, but she would not take the physical abuse from him anymore. Roger seemed more than willing to accept his place in the relationship as not being the man of the house in any shape or form. There needed to be peace between us, and there was... for a while.

     When my grandfather finally found out that Roger was there, the reveal came from a heated argument with my aunt. My grandfather did, indeed, try to shoot him, and Roger moved out of town where he got a new job and an apartment, neither of which he kept. My grandfather finally washed his hands of it and didn't care what happened anymore. My mother still tried to hold a relationship with Roger, but things quickly started going back to the way they were. My mother began working long hours, and she seemed to be trying to escape problems at home more than she was trying to earn money. I was going to college and still living at home, but I was seldom there except to sleep. As my brother grew older, I began to discover that the time I spent away at college and the time my mother spent at work meant that my brother was at home alone with Roger. They got along well enough, but that's just that feeling you get in an abusive relationship during those small moments when the abuse isn't there. With my mother out of the picture, the relationship between Roger, my brother and me took a different turn.

     As I said earlier, Roger was much younger than my mother. He was only 8 years older than I was, the same age difference between my brother and me. I was fed up with Roger once and for all, and I took advantage of the fact that he was enough of a changed man that he never laid a hand on my brother or me after the night he hit me. He did, however, make moves toward us that made me think he was going to hit us, and he started picking on my brother just to make me angry. He even attempted suicide one night as a way to get back at my mother for neglecting him and working such long hours, and my brother and I were the only ones home with him at the time. I'm not proud of the fact that I didn't reason with him very strongly not to down an entire bottle of aspirin, but I had given up trying to reason with him long ago. I called 911 immediately after he smirked at me and said, "Down the hatch, motherfucker," and I still remember how calm I was when it happened. At that moment, I really felt that I didn't care if he lived or died, but I still wasn't going to be the instrument. I just stood there and watched, telling him he shouldn't do it in a matter-of-fact tone, and then I picked up the phone. He spent a few days in the hospital after getting his stomach pumped. All it did was delay the inevitable end to their relationship a few extra weeks.

     On my part, I am more than willing to admit that I simply let my emotions run wild. I was done with it, and I was going to fight him. I wasn't putting up with his shit anymore. He wasn't welcome in my life or my brother's anymore, my mother's feelings be damned. I remember lunging at him more than once, but the only time I remember doing it in detail was the day that he was angry at me for some reason and my brother stood in between us yelling at him. Roger threatened to slap my brother, and I told Roger that he'd better not dare lay a finger on my brother because his argument was with me. Roger smirked at me and lashed out with his hand, lightly patting my brother on the cheek, obviously doing it to piss me off, and I lost my mind. I jumped on Roger, tackling him to the floor and rolling around with him for a few moments. I don't remember anything after that, let alone how it was broken up. There were no fists used, and after that night when I was seventeen, Roger never laid a finger on me again. I merely tackled him to the ground and tried to pin him to the floor to keep him away from my brother. When my mother came home, she didn't know whom to believe, but the sad truth was that there was no sense of maturity between the three of us at all. My mother had spent 14 years (yes, that is the math of the full length of the relationship) with an abusive man-child, and our behavior seemed to get more and more ridiculously immature as time went on. The age difference shined light on the stark reality of it all because Roger was almost the same age I am as of this writing when he left. Additionally, when he left, I was almost the same age as he was when he met my mother. As far as I remembered, Roger finally left of his own accord because it was clear that my brother and I wanted no part of him in our lives anymore, but my mother argued with me until her dying day that she was the one that told him to leave. I still don't know if I believe it because she never truly got over him, and she never missed an opportunity to bring up the good times we had with him as an excuse to overlook the bad.

     My mother suffered from debilitating bone deterioration until she passed away, and she suffered a number of mental lapses and disorders that I wouldn't rule out were long-term effects from Roger's physical abuse, potentially from several instances of head trauma. Of course, none of that can be proven now, so all any of us could do was to try to move on with our lives. I've been sitting here writing this story-- living it-- for too long to try to tell anyone to take it as a lesson. It was just a story I had to find the strength to tell instead of trying to convince myself that it didn't have any power over me anymore. It will always have power over me because it was a large chunk of my life and memory, and it took over the entirety of my late childhood and early adulthood. The way it finally ended was just one day fading into the next and everyone slowly moving on from one dysfunction to the next. It wasn't long after Roger was gone that my grandfather's health began to fail, and my mother's health began to fail shortly after that. My mother's health was the only thing I thought of after that, so nothing else mattered anymore. I had to push these memories aside because they weren't important anymore, but I had to start taking stock in my life when my mother passed away unexpectedly. I had to go back and look at these moments and to find out what sort of impact they might have had. I had to find out if Roger was still alive somewhere. I had to know if he had changed his life for the better or not. He hadn't. He just moved on to other families and started the cycle all over again. I read the police reports. It almost felt like I had written them myself. Please forgive my vulgarity, but I am too tired to find a polite way to put it. For this, I have to quote Eddie Murphy as my mother did to describe her situation.

      "Once you make a woman come real hard... no matter how bad you fuck up, no matter what you do wrong, no matter what you say, no matter what you do... as long as you say I'm sorry, she will listen to your story, and that's the truth."

     After knowing Roger, that was the one Eddie Murphy joke I couldn't laugh at anymore because Roger had proven Eddie right. My mother said it herself. Roger has made it this far in life because he has easy targets: struggling and impoverished mothers willing to put the livelihood of their children aside and accept terrible physical abuse in exchange for how hard he could make them come. My mother admitted it. I can't state often enough that these were her words and her references and not what I personally believe about her, but she still made excuses for Roger for the rest of her life. He is an alcoholic asshole, and he never was a man not to take care of his body or to take advantage of the things he could do with it. The only thing he ever really did with his power was to hold someone down and feed off them like the parasite he is.

     I don't have anything nice left to say, and I don't want this to devolve any further into a vulgar repetition of attacks on his manhood and maturity because all it would do is to undermine my own. I'm not here to create anger or to reinvigorate pain. I'm telling this story now because I see the story for what it is: a story that had an impact on my life and clearly has had the same impact on others. I have tossed and turned in bed on a sleepless night feeling responsible for another mother and child he could be hurting right now, arguing with myself over whether or not the world would have been a better place if I had made sure he stayed in jail longer or taken out his kneecaps with a baseball bat. My experiences with Roger have tested my stance against violence. I have tried to be the better person in my life, holding on to the hope that Roger truly would change his ways and wake up to the reality of his miserable life, and I have learned that violence, anger and hate only strengthen each other. Even though my mother is dead and buried while my brother and I have to live with the memory of the suffering we endured, it doesn't put me in a place where I believe that a man is beyond redemption. But I no longer believe Roger is a man. I believe he is an animal. When I first published this piece, this section originally was more sympathetic to his pain because he, too, was a victim of terrible abuse as a child at the hands of an abusive father and mother. It came to light that he was severely premature at birth, and I have no doubt that he suffers from psychotic mental illness on top of his drinking and drug use. Despite that, he has failed at creating any positive impact in anyone's lives. I make no excuses for his behavior, even though I saw firsthand that he was broken and had the capacity to suffer. He knows right from wrong, and he continues to do wrong. Consistently. I still argue with myself to forgive because it's in my nature, but forgiving what was done to me is much easier than seeing the pattern continue from person to person. I don't forgive Roger Conrad Savoie for what he did and continues to do. And I'll never forget, either.

     If you see this man on the street, avoid him. Don't give him the time of day. Don't let him into your home. Don't let him into your place of work. And whatever you do, ladies, don't let him into your bed or your mind, and to the children out there looking for a father figure, do not let this man into your heart. He's very good at it. If he is your friend, your employee, your father or your lover, then you should cast him out. I already know that some of you can't because you still have that little collection of what you think are "good times." As I said, those good times are just the brief feeling of relief when the abuse isn't there. The abuse is always going to come back. You're just getting a small break from it. He only brings suffering, and he deserves to walk through the world alone, receiving no aid, no love and no sympathy from anyone else.

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The last paragraph of that entry used to be a long speech about how none of us has a right to judge. It came from a personal mantra that there is always another way. It came from a fear within me just how easy it is to become someone like Roger by losing sight of what is important, how easy telling this story could encourage someone else's rage. It came from a hope, several years ago, that maybe, just maybe, even the worthless sack of shit that Roger is could turn his life around, that he could find some way to be deserving of that chance, that he wasn't ever entirely in control of what he was. I wish the justice system would keep him caged forever like the animal he is, but I've also never wished death upon another living creature of any kind. It isn't who I am, and it's still not who I am almost four years after my mother's death, a passing that might not have happened at all or been delayed had she never met him, never suffered his severe physical abuse when she was already physically ill, never found herself in her ultimate position in life. Every possibility is just "What If...?"

Roger should be kissing my feet right now that I never was that person, that I never had the real desire to live out a Dexter-style fantasy with him. He should be kissing the feet of everyone he's ever known in his life for having the common human decency to think he still has a right to live. After "great bodily harm/disability/disfigurement," I don't believe, and never will believe, that he has the right to live among other human beings. He belongs in a zoo with the Harvey Weinsteins and the Bill Cosbys and the Donald Trumps and the Devin Faracis and the Harry Knowleses of the world, like an episode of The Twilight Zone, each one with a plaque of their criminal records and the names and photos of all of their victims, particularly photos of those victims just after they were abused. That's the only true purpose any of them serve, the only right they have to life after what they have done: a lesson to the rest of us what devastation and corruption that power and abuse bring to the world.