I used to post as “moltar”, after Space Ghost’s thick-as-lead sidekick, but now I’m moltar2, with a follow-up to a previous diary,
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2004/12/4/77784/-From-a-Homicide-Survivor
The problem is that my brother is still dead, and his murderer, Corey Joe McCutcheon, is still alive.
Google that name, and you’ll get links to contemporaneous accounts from his trial, plus a mugshot from www.mugshots.com. Even better: go to http://www.dc.state.fl.us/activeinmates/search.asp and look up inmate 912571. You’ll get the same mugshot, descriptions of his tats, record of convictions, etc. Current sentences are 14 + 14 + 19 + 19 years, plus the life conviction for murder. On the other hand, James Carl DeLand became ashes in a box in 1995. He’s in the Orange City, Florida cemetery, in a little area reserved for cremains. Stop in anytime. He’ll be there.
That 2004 post was 9 years after the murder, and 7 years after the trial. It was written in reaction to another “the death penalty is very bad, and pointless to boot!” comment, and pretty much unedited. It looks pretty choppy to me now, and raw. I’ll try to do better here in explaining what’s happened since, again from a survivor’s point of view. On the other hand, this is difficult to write about without kicking up some strong feelings, and it’s not meant to entertain.
On the plus side, I have in fact survived. I did not kill myself, as many survivors do out of overwhelming grief. And The Movie stopped several years ago. The Movie was relentless, and nearly inescapable, but I am no longer stuck in that video loop watching my brother crouching naked in the dark as Corey Joe pierced his back, chest, abdomen, eye, and brain with a screwdriver, somewhere between 100 and 200 times. The impacts were fierce; it takes a lot of force to break the skin with a Philips-head screwdriver, much less penetrate the skull and brain pan. I saw the frenzy of the attack in my mind’s eye, and I saw the photos of the result at the ADA’s office, before and after Jim’s body was cleaned up.
The images of the screwdrivers that Corey Joe left embedded in the side of my brother’s neck were quite striking, but it was the X-ray that was shocking; just the soft throat tissue kinda lumpy and blurry standing out against the stark physical presence of these very sharply defined, bright tools – the contrast really jumps out at you the first time, you know? You can feel it in your own neck, and imagine the pain. At that point, however, I’m sure that Jim was dead on the floor, with Corey’s bloody boot holding down his neck to drive the tools home. But the images from The Movie are still close to the surface after more than 20 years, and although I don’t become immobilized now, I can’t make them disappear entirely. I live with that. I predicted years of therapy and anti-depressants for me. That came true, and it’s helped up to a point, but the root cause is still there. I don’t know what the exact money cost for all the talk and pills has been, but it’s quite substantial after 20 years. I don’t care; it has to be done. I have to carry on for my family.
On the minus side, speaking of money, my career as a consultant basically collapsed for years after the murder. That kind of career collapse is not uncommon for survivors, when getting through just one day at a time would be a gift. Some people never recover. I create Help systems for a living, and at the time was working on projects for GM and SAP, plus writing a book on Help for tech writers. Modern Help systems are built like websites, with HTML5 and CSS and JavaScript, so you need a bit of web developer in you to do it right. I do that. I wasn’t able to complete the book on time, and I know it would have changed my life to have it published back then. I stopped giving lectures and traveling, and withdrew from the forefront of the electronic publishing revolution. My friends and rivals who persisted in the trade did well after their own books came out, but I have only recently gotten the business built back up. I went through a few attempts at corporate jobs over the years, but I am not a corporate guy. So, money-wise, I’d say you could make a case that Corey has damaged me significantly. Think I should sue? What kind of redress do you think I can get out of someone who makes 37 cents a day, or whatever it is that the state actually gives him?
My son never knew my brother. He is a fine young man now. Some day we will talk about the impact this has had on him, but I was only just now able to tell him what it was really like for me to get through the days, over a bottle of Knob Creek in a hotel room at 2 AM. I told him about the whiteboard at Huron Oaks PTSD clinic. My life was in total disorder when I went in for outpatient treatment in a 3-week, 9AM – 3 PM program. There was no logical sequence to anything, chaos was all, and that whiteboard listed what I had to do to get through the day, one half hour at a time. Group therapy, individual sessions, lunch, exercise, etc. Ah, bless that whiteboard; it gave me direction, as I slowly pulled myself back into life.
My son’s birthday is only a few days from my brother’s death day, so they are inextricably linked forever. I wrote about returning from the funeral and taking a car directly from the airport to his birthday party. What was it like for him to learn the truth about Jim’s death? How did he feel at age 5 when he saw me sobbing about my brother’s execution?
My son and I will talk more about it, but my sister and I will not. She is pretty fragile now and in a nursing home, and I won’t drop this on her. I have edged toward the subject a few times over the years with her, seen the dismay and horror on her face, and pulled back. She has lost her husband (to lung cancer), son (to lung cancer), and brother (to Corey Joe). She has a right to deal with it her own way. She was a teenager when Jim was adopted. I’m sure she did a lot of mothering with him, and I’m sure her bond with him was much closer than the bond I had with him. To see the baby you held and helped care for reduced to a mutilated corpse with screwdrivers sticking out of its neck – unimaginable for me, unbearable for her.
My wife and I have talked a fair amount. She is a gifted therapist, but there was no therapeutic distance for her from what happened to me, and she reacted the way any “civilian” would. She says that I withdrew terribly and was “unavailable” to her and my son. I tried explaining to her about The Movie and how it was a struggle to get through one minute, just one minute, at a time. She was hurt and angry about my PTSD, to say the least. We did not divorce or come near it, but the strain on our marriage was intense. She has other problems now: a near-fatal head-on collision resulting in a broken neck and many other injuries. The trauma surgeon told me that he had never seen someone survive this particular set of circumstances. Ten months and six surgeries later, she is walking with a cane. The pain is ferocious and unremitting, but she carries on. She is a remarkable woman. I guess we’re both survivors of different sorts.
And yet, life-shattering as it was, that was an accident. My brother’s death was the opposite of an accident. Corey Joe wanted him dead, and succeeded. Simple as that, even though a videotaped interview shows Corey sobbing that he “didn’t mean it” to the detectives, At which point did he “not mean it”? Would that be impact #37, or #128? Did he not mean it when he tried to kill victim #2 days later? Would he have not meant it with a potential victim #3 after that? I have court records of a conversation he had with a friend. His statement about the murder to his buddy was not that he didn’t mean it; he bragged, “you know me, man; you know me.”
Seen in the abstract and from a great distance, it’s not hard to pity someone like Corey Joe. Alcoholic mother gives birth to a 3-lb premie, potentially with fetal alcohol syndrome; abusive alcoholic father who suicided; scrawny, homeless and living under scrub palms, giving blow jobs under the pier at Daytona for a few bucks at a time to go get high. He couldn’t afford a White Aryan Resistance tattoo, so he did it himself, with a pin. A psychologist testified at the trial that he has an “anti-social attitude” and borderline personality disorder. This makes him a volatile guy who “doesn’t care about others’ feelings” and experiences “impulsive behaviors and feelings of fear, abandonment and rejection”. He stated that his girlfriend had broken up with him just before the murder, and he wanted to “take the world down with me.” He started with Jim, and continued with another attempted murder a few days later. This guy (a client washing up at the bathroom sink) screamed loudly enough for the neighbors to hear as Corey attacked him with a knife from behind. He fell backwards into the tub, and protected himself by kicking at the knife blows. I remember him walking slowly up to the witness stand, rocking back and forth from the pain in those lacerated feet, wincing.
One of my wife’s therapist friends opined that Corey Joe was basically a serial killer who was stopped early. I think she’s right. When would he have stopped? What for? Does he get a pass because of mental illness? I have mental illness and a not-so-great childhood. Do I get a free pass to kill him? Why not? Because I am better than that? More responsible? I have a moral compass and he does not? We both have free will. Corey “made some bad choices”. Yeah.
I am guessing that it would not be all that hard, given the Florida state prison population, to arrange Corey’s demise for a few bucks. I do know that my brother-in-law would have actually, literally, physically, hanged Corey if he could have. He told me so, matter-of-factly as he rolled another cigarette at his kitchen table, and I saw in his eyes that he would have done it. I don’t know if I could. Maybe with a gun, from a distance. Maybe. Drone strike? Fuck, yeah.
Wouldn’t it be pointless for Corey to die for the murder? What would that achieve? “You want revenge!” I was lectured after my 2004 post. No, I want my brother back. How do we undo that murder? How do we un-dead Jimmy DeLand? Run the film backwards, like Kurt Vonnegut’s fantasy (was it Slaughter-House Five?) of the explosions healing up and the bombs traveling back up into the belly of the planes, leaving everyone safe and sound down below? Show me the blows from that screwdriver running in reverse, healing the punctures over and over again. “You want an eye for an eye!” someone shouts. No, I want my brother back. You don’t get it, I reply: Nothing less will do. Nothing less can and should do. My brother had a Constitutional right to life. Even now, in the Year of Our Trump 2018, as I watch the American Empire crumble at breathtaking speed, I believe in that.
I don’t obsess over the murder; it’s just there with me every day. Paradoxical? Sorta. It sits in the background, like a lot of my past now. Do I hate Corey Joe? That’s a very good question. I hate him about as much as I hate a virus that brings me down. The virus is indifferent, just doing its thing. If the host dies, tough shit. Corey’s thing was to kill and keep killing - tough shit! I certainly hate the effect: illness in one case, death in another.
One thing’s for sure: At this minute, even if Corey Joe is getting raped, he is alive. He can feel it, no matter how unpleasant. He can eat and sleep and get up again; he gets his three hots and a cot, guaranteed, every day forever now. No more sleeping on the sand. Drugs? Plenty available, I’m sure.
Is Corey in fear for his life? Could be. Wouldn’t that be a terrible way to live? Umm, examine the question: Corey HAS a life to be fearful ABOUT. I remember that the public defender wrote telling me how awful it would be for Corey Joe if I were to agree to a life without parole plea. “There is no air conditioning in that prison.” Yeah. It’s a little stuffy in my brother’s box under the ground, too.
I worked really hard to get the death penalty for Corey Joe. I wish I’d succeeded, but I did not. I have survived, at an immense cost to me and my family, and I am just one of the hundreds affected by Jim’s death.
I have the option to be notified of any changes in Corey’s situation; I haven’t chosen that. If one day I look him up and the record says Deceased, I won’t be especially happy, but I won’t be sad, either. My brother got the death penalty, and he did not.
Sleep tight, Corey. I’ll wait.