Isn't it funny how you can know horrific things but get so used to knowing them that they start to seem like a normal part of life after a while? Like this story.
I met Barefoot through Jeremy, my boyfriend. Barefoot had shacked up with Jeremy's mother, Judy, for about ten years and when Judy finally left she left Jeremy with Barefoot, something she feels guilty about to this day but doesn't do so much about it. Jeremy wasn't, isn't exactly her favorite son. (Stop by her place sometime and ask to see pics of her boys and try to find one of Jeremy.)
Barefoot is one of those guys you see on the edge of many small towns who thinks he is some kind of king of White Trash. He sold drugs under the cover of being a handyman, which he did a little of, too, calling his business "Barefoot Services" , "Need a hand call the foot" etc. But he was more like, "Need to get high?" and known all over town for his side business.
Barefoot raised Jeremy with an iron fist of bullshit and a lot of abuse and when Jeremy inherited a large amount of money from a passing grandmother, Barefoot made sure to pay himself back well for raising Jeremy. He had Jeremy put ten thousand dollars down on a trailer home on a bit of land on the border of South Houston and Pasadena, Texas, so that neither of them would ever be homeless again. Of course he eventually put Jeremy out on the street after the money was gone and that's where I met Jeremy, living on the street.
I should explain a little about Jeremy here real quick. Jeremy was in a car accident with his father that killed his father and either that or a suspicious fall into a cellar gave Jeremy right temporal lobe damage that resulted in severe Epilepsy with emotional and learning disabilities. Foot liked to call him Wooden Head for short and swung back and forth between telling him how retarded he was and then in magnanimous high times he mixed in a little You can do anything any one else can, usually referring to something he wanted Jeremy to do. When Jeremy was ten he decided the boy should learn the facts of life so he arranged for Jeremy to have sex with his elderly, drunk babysitter.
When I first met the great Barefoot after a glowing description of the baddest, raddest dude in town he was sitting in a chair with his shirt miss buttoned and drooling all over himself. He woke from time to time to take a handful of pills and slur out some cuss words. The next time was worse since he was alert. Jeremy was trying to have me get to know his hero and Barefoot got up and walked to his kitchen scratching his ass and saying, "Don't be a fucking idiot. Pussy is pussy and never be with a woman who tries to take away your right to fuck who you want to fuck..." He charmed the hell out of me.
Barefoot was black haired and about six foot tall and considered quite handsome in that hard, trashy way some women love. (You'll find them at the hole in the walls bars.) Jeremy was dismayed that I didn't view Barefoot as the be all see all and it took a long time before Jeremy saw him through my and the world at large's eyes. I think when his live-in girlfriend died under suspicious circumstances is when the scales first started to fall from Jeremy's eyes although I still have to flick a bit out every now and then.
I didn't get to know Krisha very well during the short time she lived after I met her but she was very kind to me out of Foot's earshot and really quite sweet I thought. She had Hepatitis C and was addicted to pain pills, which was about the only hold Barefoot had on her by the time I met her. She had blond hair and was rather plain until she smiled revealing a touch of a Meg Ryan smile.
Jeremy and I left Houston for four months and when we returned and went over to Barefoot's house I didn't recognize Foot. I wondered why Jeremy was shaking this stranger's hand until I realized it was a rail thin, strung out Barefoot. While we were gone Foot had gone from smoking weed and popping thirty pills at a time (NO exaggeration!) to shooting up Cocaine. He had a houseful of strangers living with him now, one of them, a young man named Randy, seemed to be running Barefoot's home, business and money now. I waded through the people in the living room heading for Krisha, the only familiar face to me, and I sat by her while Jeremy and Foot shot the shit. Krisha whispered to me, "I need help! Barefoot has gotten worse than ever. He is almost keeping me a prisoner here and won't even let me use the phone. Please! Help me get out of here!" Jeremy and I had come to Houston with his mom and a friend of hers to gather the things we had all left in Texas but Jeremy and I fully intended to return to Pasadena to live. I told her that I couldn't do anything right now, that I had nothing and no way at the time but that I would be back in two months and could help her then. She said sadly and softly, "But I will be dead by then." I felt terribly sorry for her and agreed that she needed to get out right away if it was like that. I told her to do everything to get to her mother and she gave me her mother's phone number to contact her if she got away.
I don't feel excused at all but I have heard a lot of women say similar things in an abusive relationship without really dying and have high handedly said many times, "You are only a victim of abuse once. After that you're a volunteer." I don't know if that is what I was thinking but whatever I was thinking I sure wasn't thinking that she would be dead by the time I came back in two months. And of course she was.
When we got back to Texas two months later the first thing we heard was that Krisha was dead and that Barefoot was in jail and that kid, Randy, and his wife and two small children were living in Foot's house carrying on business none too successfully. We went there to get the story from Randy and his wife, Bridget. Then over the next few weeks we would hear the story from most of the dozen or so people who were there when Krisha died and we went and visited Foot in jail and heard his version, too, all of them nearly enough the same that I feel safe in delivering what I know as fact except for little discrepancies.
Everyone was over there partying and shooting up Coke and Foot went in the bedroom and found Krisha unresponsive and not breathing. Someone started CPR on her and no one called 911. When the CPR failed, Barefoot shot her up with some Coke trying to restart her heart. She sat up screaming and passed back out and stopped breathing again. They brought her back with CPR and then lost her again so Foot shot her up again with Coke and they got a weak pulse. Then they sat and tried to decide what to do. No one wanted an ambulance and certainly not the police to come; I suppose it was a real buzz kill to begin with and they didn't even want to clean the house of drugs and call for help for her and take their chances. So they all sat around her laying on the floor, shooting up and partying for eleven more hours before they decided to do something. Someone gave Barefoot a ride to Bayshore Hospital and they took her in and propped her in a chair and left her there. She was found and taken to intensive care where she died several days later.
Barefoot was waiting for the police to come question and likely arrest him and when they finally pulled up in his driveway he started banging Coke trying to get in as many shots as he could before they got in the door. After a search they arrested Barefoot on charges of possession of a small amount of Cocaine and he was taken to jail. The prosecutor on the case was thinking about charging Barefoot with some kind of murder but, even after Foot admitted to them that he had given her the two shots of Coke and how long they had waited to do something, they decided not to try to press murder charges against him because her Autopsy report showed some evidence that she had "actually" died of liver failure from the Hep C. I can't really imaging the outrage her family felt but they were extremely outraged to say the least. Barefoot was sentenced to fifteen years in TDC penitentiary for possession of Cocaine, perhaps somewhere taking into consideration that there was a death involved. I do know that her parents were there for Barefoot's first two parole hearings and he wasn't released but have since then lost track of them all and for all I know he could be back on the streets by now.
Jeremy and I threw Randy out of Barefoot's trailer, mostly because we didn't like him, but also because he wasn't keeping up the place or the bills. Foot was three payments short of paying off the house and land Jeremy got him but none of his loyal friends and followers were willing to step forward and save Foot from losing it all. Jeremy asked me to save it for Barefoot for his sake, the scales still hadn't even started to fall from his eyes! and I paid off the trailer and then we spent a month cleaning out the most ungodly mess I have ever seen. I don't think they took out the trash once in three months and the cockroaches and rats ran the place. We set off six bug bombs in a single wide trailer and when we went back the next morning there were one or two dead ones and the rest of them were still partying. We spent hundreds of dollars just exterminating the house. We found syringes all over the place making the cleaning job terrifying.
That first year Barefoot wrote to Jeremy regularly and those letters were what finally opened Jeremy's eyes to who Foot is. The letters were all full of self pity for his rotten deal and begging for money although I had just spent all I had to save his place. Then when we didn't satisfy him the letters got nastier and nastier reverting to calling Jeremy names and putting him down until I had to take up pen and paper and finally put him in his place a bit. The tone changed a little then and he even finally thought to mention it was kinda nice of me to save the trailer for him but there were three things you never read anywhere, not even between the lines. Grief, guilt or sorrow at Krisha's death. He did ask Randy to get all of the bitch's things out of his house before he got out. That's the only mention I know of he made of her.
Those letters stopped the growth of a new generation of Barefoot. He is no longer Jeremy's hero although Jeremy still loves him out of habit or something. And sometimes acts like him but that gets less and less with separation.
In my opinion, everyone who was in that house for that critical eleven hours and didn't call 911 is guilty of murder. Barefoot more so for playing doctor and God shooting her up with coke and because she was his girlfriend of several years. I remember when Krisha and I were once watching Barefoot and Jeremy talking together in the kitchen laughing at some vulgarity of Foot's we both commented on how Jeremy imitated Foot and Krisha said, "Rhoda, don't let things go for you with Jeremy like they have for me with Foot. Don't walk in my shoes." When we were cleaning out the trailer I tried on a pair of her shoes and they fit me perfect. It still gives me goosebumps.
I met Barefoot through Jeremy, my boyfriend. Barefoot had shacked up with Jeremy's mother, Judy, for about ten years and when Judy finally left she left Jeremy with Barefoot, something she feels guilty about to this day but doesn't do so much about it. Jeremy wasn't, isn't exactly her favorite son. (Stop by her place sometime and ask to see pics of her boys and try to find one of Jeremy.)
Barefoot is one of those guys you see on the edge of many small towns who thinks he is some kind of king of White Trash. He sold drugs under the cover of being a handyman, which he did a little of, too, calling his business "Barefoot Services" , "Need a hand call the foot" etc. But he was more like, "Need to get high?" and known all over town for his side business.
Barefoot raised Jeremy with an iron fist of bullshit and a lot of abuse and when Jeremy inherited a large amount of money from a passing grandmother, Barefoot made sure to pay himself back well for raising Jeremy. He had Jeremy put ten thousand dollars down on a trailer home on a bit of land on the border of South Houston and Pasadena, Texas, so that neither of them would ever be homeless again. Of course he eventually put Jeremy out on the street after the money was gone and that's where I met Jeremy, living on the street.
I should explain a little about Jeremy here real quick. Jeremy was in a car accident with his father that killed his father and either that or a suspicious fall into a cellar gave Jeremy right temporal lobe damage that resulted in severe Epilepsy with emotional and learning disabilities. Foot liked to call him Wooden Head for short and swung back and forth between telling him how retarded he was and then in magnanimous high times he mixed in a little You can do anything any one else can, usually referring to something he wanted Jeremy to do. When Jeremy was ten he decided the boy should learn the facts of life so he arranged for Jeremy to have sex with his elderly, drunk babysitter.
When I first met the great Barefoot after a glowing description of the baddest, raddest dude in town he was sitting in a chair with his shirt miss buttoned and drooling all over himself. He woke from time to time to take a handful of pills and slur out some cuss words. The next time was worse since he was alert. Jeremy was trying to have me get to know his hero and Barefoot got up and walked to his kitchen scratching his ass and saying, "Don't be a fucking idiot. Pussy is pussy and never be with a woman who tries to take away your right to fuck who you want to fuck..." He charmed the hell out of me.
Barefoot was black haired and about six foot tall and considered quite handsome in that hard, trashy way some women love. (You'll find them at the hole in the walls bars.) Jeremy was dismayed that I didn't view Barefoot as the be all see all and it took a long time before Jeremy saw him through my and the world at large's eyes. I think when his live-in girlfriend died under suspicious circumstances is when the scales first started to fall from Jeremy's eyes although I still have to flick a bit out every now and then.
I didn't get to know Krisha very well during the short time she lived after I met her but she was very kind to me out of Foot's earshot and really quite sweet I thought. She had Hepatitis C and was addicted to pain pills, which was about the only hold Barefoot had on her by the time I met her. She had blond hair and was rather plain until she smiled revealing a touch of a Meg Ryan smile.
Jeremy and I left Houston for four months and when we returned and went over to Barefoot's house I didn't recognize Foot. I wondered why Jeremy was shaking this stranger's hand until I realized it was a rail thin, strung out Barefoot. While we were gone Foot had gone from smoking weed and popping thirty pills at a time (NO exaggeration!) to shooting up Cocaine. He had a houseful of strangers living with him now, one of them, a young man named Randy, seemed to be running Barefoot's home, business and money now. I waded through the people in the living room heading for Krisha, the only familiar face to me, and I sat by her while Jeremy and Foot shot the shit. Krisha whispered to me, "I need help! Barefoot has gotten worse than ever. He is almost keeping me a prisoner here and won't even let me use the phone. Please! Help me get out of here!" Jeremy and I had come to Houston with his mom and a friend of hers to gather the things we had all left in Texas but Jeremy and I fully intended to return to Pasadena to live. I told her that I couldn't do anything right now, that I had nothing and no way at the time but that I would be back in two months and could help her then. She said sadly and softly, "But I will be dead by then." I felt terribly sorry for her and agreed that she needed to get out right away if it was like that. I told her to do everything to get to her mother and she gave me her mother's phone number to contact her if she got away.
I don't feel excused at all but I have heard a lot of women say similar things in an abusive relationship without really dying and have high handedly said many times, "You are only a victim of abuse once. After that you're a volunteer." I don't know if that is what I was thinking but whatever I was thinking I sure wasn't thinking that she would be dead by the time I came back in two months. And of course she was.
When we got back to Texas two months later the first thing we heard was that Krisha was dead and that Barefoot was in jail and that kid, Randy, and his wife and two small children were living in Foot's house carrying on business none too successfully. We went there to get the story from Randy and his wife, Bridget. Then over the next few weeks we would hear the story from most of the dozen or so people who were there when Krisha died and we went and visited Foot in jail and heard his version, too, all of them nearly enough the same that I feel safe in delivering what I know as fact except for little discrepancies.
Everyone was over there partying and shooting up Coke and Foot went in the bedroom and found Krisha unresponsive and not breathing. Someone started CPR on her and no one called 911. When the CPR failed, Barefoot shot her up with some Coke trying to restart her heart. She sat up screaming and passed back out and stopped breathing again. They brought her back with CPR and then lost her again so Foot shot her up again with Coke and they got a weak pulse. Then they sat and tried to decide what to do. No one wanted an ambulance and certainly not the police to come; I suppose it was a real buzz kill to begin with and they didn't even want to clean the house of drugs and call for help for her and take their chances. So they all sat around her laying on the floor, shooting up and partying for eleven more hours before they decided to do something. Someone gave Barefoot a ride to Bayshore Hospital and they took her in and propped her in a chair and left her there. She was found and taken to intensive care where she died several days later.
Barefoot was waiting for the police to come question and likely arrest him and when they finally pulled up in his driveway he started banging Coke trying to get in as many shots as he could before they got in the door. After a search they arrested Barefoot on charges of possession of a small amount of Cocaine and he was taken to jail. The prosecutor on the case was thinking about charging Barefoot with some kind of murder but, even after Foot admitted to them that he had given her the two shots of Coke and how long they had waited to do something, they decided not to try to press murder charges against him because her Autopsy report showed some evidence that she had "actually" died of liver failure from the Hep C. I can't really imaging the outrage her family felt but they were extremely outraged to say the least. Barefoot was sentenced to fifteen years in TDC penitentiary for possession of Cocaine, perhaps somewhere taking into consideration that there was a death involved. I do know that her parents were there for Barefoot's first two parole hearings and he wasn't released but have since then lost track of them all and for all I know he could be back on the streets by now.
Jeremy and I threw Randy out of Barefoot's trailer, mostly because we didn't like him, but also because he wasn't keeping up the place or the bills. Foot was three payments short of paying off the house and land Jeremy got him but none of his loyal friends and followers were willing to step forward and save Foot from losing it all. Jeremy asked me to save it for Barefoot for his sake, the scales still hadn't even started to fall from his eyes! and I paid off the trailer and then we spent a month cleaning out the most ungodly mess I have ever seen. I don't think they took out the trash once in three months and the cockroaches and rats ran the place. We set off six bug bombs in a single wide trailer and when we went back the next morning there were one or two dead ones and the rest of them were still partying. We spent hundreds of dollars just exterminating the house. We found syringes all over the place making the cleaning job terrifying.
That first year Barefoot wrote to Jeremy regularly and those letters were what finally opened Jeremy's eyes to who Foot is. The letters were all full of self pity for his rotten deal and begging for money although I had just spent all I had to save his place. Then when we didn't satisfy him the letters got nastier and nastier reverting to calling Jeremy names and putting him down until I had to take up pen and paper and finally put him in his place a bit. The tone changed a little then and he even finally thought to mention it was kinda nice of me to save the trailer for him but there were three things you never read anywhere, not even between the lines. Grief, guilt or sorrow at Krisha's death. He did ask Randy to get all of the bitch's things out of his house before he got out. That's the only mention I know of he made of her.
Those letters stopped the growth of a new generation of Barefoot. He is no longer Jeremy's hero although Jeremy still loves him out of habit or something. And sometimes acts like him but that gets less and less with separation.
In my opinion, everyone who was in that house for that critical eleven hours and didn't call 911 is guilty of murder. Barefoot more so for playing doctor and God shooting her up with coke and because she was his girlfriend of several years. I remember when Krisha and I were once watching Barefoot and Jeremy talking together in the kitchen laughing at some vulgarity of Foot's we both commented on how Jeremy imitated Foot and Krisha said, "Rhoda, don't let things go for you with Jeremy like they have for me with Foot. Don't walk in my shoes." When we were cleaning out the trailer I tried on a pair of her shoes and they fit me perfect. It still gives me goosebumps.
