It's News to Me by R. G. Belsky

Author:R. G. Belsky
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oceanview Publishing
Published: 2022-12-15T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 34

IT TURNED OUT I couldn’t get an on-air interview with Donnie Ray Bakely. Not yet. Even with his mother’s permission. I needed official approval first. But she was able to get me in to see him as a friend of the family. Even though they weren’t going to let me bring in a TV crew to film the interview.

I decided to go see him in jail anyway. Just to see what he had to say, in hopes I was able to do something on air later.

He was being held at Rikers Island, which is still the main correctional facility in New York City. It’s about as bad a prison as you could imagine. Located on an island in the East River between Queens and the Bronx, and no way for a prisoner to escape until he tried to swim. Some had made the attempt, but few succeeded. Sort of like Alcatraz, New York style. Periodically, there was political debate about tearing down Rikers and replacing it with smaller, more modern jails around the city. But they’d been talking about that for a long time, and Rikers was still there.

Donnie Ray Bakely looked different from the person I’d seen in the courtroom that first day he was arraigned. Acted differently too. At least at first. In the courtroom, he had seemed strangely detached from the proceeding and almost unaware of his situation. Now he looked nervous and scared.

He was wearing a gray prison outfit that looked too big for him. He was in his twenties, I knew that, but he appeared much older. There was stubble on his face—I guess you didn’t worry about shaving when you were in prison—dark circles under his eyes, and his hand trembled when I shook it to introduce myself.

But, despite all this, he seemed much more aware and alert than he had in court. I remembered his mother saying they had put him on some kind of new drug regimen, so I guess that had helped him get past whatever deranged state he’d been in when the police first picked him up on the street.

I decided to start with the incident in the park when he’d been arrested for attacking the woman.

“Why did you do that?” I asked him.

“I don’t really remember anything until the arrest. Well, I do … but it was like a dream. I was back in Afghanistan. The bomb that was planted under the vehicle I was traveling in was put there by a woman. I saw her place the bomb in front of us, but it was too late for me to do anything. And then my friends were dead, and I was badly hurt in the hospital—and my life has never been the same. When I saw the woman in the park, she became the woman with the bomb for me. I had to stop her before she did it again. That’s what I was doing—saving me and my buddies. But then I was suddenly back in this park in New York and the woman was screaming and the police arrested me.

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