To Free the Truth

When I was twelve years old, our family took a trip from Houston to Corpus Christi, Texas to visit relatives. Along the way, we stopped in Beeville to see my sister’s children. As we got back on the highway we crossed an overpass with a panoramic view McConnell Unit. My father, a career criminal who had already served 4 terms in prison, explained that McConnell was a new “farm,” nothing like the old joints he did time in throughout the 60s, 70s, and 80s. I vividly recall gazing out the backseat window at the enormous 3000 man compound surrounded by sparkling, razor-wired fences and dirt fields being worked by men in white. I thought about the prison horror stories Dad used to tell to scare me into staying out of trouble and wondered if such things were happening inside McConnell…
Little did I then know that I’d one day be living there, working those fields, and eventually be unwittingly thrust into the center of the investigation of murdered prison guard Daniel Nagle, for which I’m sentenced to die.