This is the part that breaks my heart.

This is the part that breaks my heart. The burglar is kicking at his bedroom door and the hinges are buckling. You can see the hallway light cast a beam across the carpet, off and on, quickly as the kicks land. My son is standing next to his bed. He looks a little scared but he isn’t crying, in fact he’s rather calm. He’s so brave for being so young. He flinches slightly with each blow that hits the door. Finally the hinges break off and the door falls forward and with a huge BOOM. It sends out a blast of air that shoves up the little black bangs that hang over my sons forehead. The burglar stomps his way in and goes right up to my son. He brings the knife up as if to bring it back down in a long angled slash, right across my son’s chest.

This is the part that absolutely tears my stomach out. As the burglar is about to bring his knife-hand down, my son holds up a doll I’d bought him for Christmas a few weeks earlier. It was a stupid little monster doll that you were supposed to draw on with these special markers. I remember him showing me the commercials so “I could make sure Santa knew.” They had pictures of a kid holding the doll up and grossing out and scaring people with it. And that’s what he was thinking. The only thing my son could think to do, his only form of defense, was to hold up the little stuffed monster. He was sure it would gross out the burglar and scare him away, just like he’d seen in those commercials. The look on his face, when he holds that doll up in front of him, he was so sure he was gonna make it. He wasn’t worried at all.

The guy just grabbed the doll with his left hand and threw it across the room. My son’s face changes from assured calmness to outright panic and fright. The burglar brings his foot down on my sons chest and then proceeds to butcher him.

I was lucky to live, I was unconscious from blood-loss in the kitchen and probably shouldn’t have survived. The doctors were able to save me. My son was pronounced dead at the scene. The footage that we got from the camera in his room, put there because we wanted to catch his babysitter stealing things, was the thing that convinced the jury to give the guy the death penalty.

After he was convicted I locked the door to my sons room and haven’t been in there in years. Sometimes I see the commercial for that doll on the television. Inevitably, I have to run away from the screen and into my backyard where I just stare at the sky.