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Clutching a single sheet of typed A4, Jackson calmly takes his place next to his mother, five seats away from his father. "I tried to keep my eyes forward. I didn't want to make eye contact with him," he says.
He can see him out of the corner of his eye, though, and at one point momentarily glimpses his face.
"I recognised him from his mugshot, but I have no connection to him," Jackson says. "I wouldn't even recognise him as my father."
The parole board calls on him to read aloud his victim's statement. Jackson pauses.
"In that moment wondered if I was doing the right thing, but my mother always taught me to be courageous."I tried to remind myself that God was with me. Whatever the result of the hearing, God is bigger than me, bigger than my father, bigger than that room or even the Justice Department."He takes a deep breath, fixes his eyes firmly on the parole board and begins to tell his story.It begins when his mother and father met at a military training facility in Missouri, where they were both training as medics. They moved in together and five months later - in mid-1991 - his mother was pregnant."When I was first born my father was really excited, but everything changed when he went away for Operation Desert Storm. He came back from Saudi Arabia with a completely different attitude towards me," Jackson says.Stewart began denying Jackson was his child, demanding DNA tests as proof of paternity, and became verbally and physically abusive to towards Jackson's mother.When she finally left him, the couple fought bitterly over child support payments, which Stewart refused to pay. During their fights he would make sinister threats, Jackson says. "He used to say things like, 'Your child's not going to live beyond the age of five,' and 'When I leave you I'm not going to leave any ties behind.'"Meanwhile Stewart, who had found work as a blood tester in a laboratory, had begun secretly taking samples of infected blood to store at home, investigators later discovered.Image copyrightJACKSON FAMILYImage captionAn infant Jackson, right, with his father"He used to joke around with colleagues saying, 'If I wanted to infect someone with one of these viruses they'd never even know what hit them,'" Jackson says.By the time Jackson was 11 months old, his mother and father had all but lost contact. But when Jackson was hospitalised following an asthma attack, his mother picked up the phone."My mother called my father to let him know - she assumed he'd want to know his son was sick. When she called, his colleagues said, 'Bryan Stewart doesn't have a kid.'"The day Jackson was due to be discharged, Stewart paid an unexpected visit to the hospital.
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最新
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15
2019-11-15