As the months passed, the anger didn’t ease up. It settled into my bones, and it hardened into something colder than rage. It was something that did not flare and burn out, but stayed hot and quiet.
Every delay in court felt personal. Every ruling that leaned even slightly toward the defense felt like a test, like somebody was watching to see how far they could push me before I actually exploded. I had spent decades inside courtrooms arguing for justice. I understood procedure, and caution, and I understood how slow the system could move, especially with high profile cases. I could respect a careful pace when careful meant fair. But the moment I watched two caskets disappear into the ground, the rules changed for me in a way that no one else in on this island could understand unless they had buried their children too.
This became about my sons.
The bond hearing still replayed in my head whether I wanted it to or not, and it played like a threat every time I closed my eyes. Mikel Marston denied Kay’Lo’s bond at first, and I respected that decision because it made sense. It was the one moment in this entire case that felt like the court remembered what death meant. Then somehow Kay’Lo walked out of jail anyway, and not long after that Mikel stepped off the case citing scheduling conflicts and administrative adjustments that sounded clean enough to pass inspection. It was written the way these things always get written, with polished language meant to soothe the public, but I had been in rooms where those words were crafted. I knew what they meant. They meant somebody leaned on him. They meant somebody reminded him who built the rooms he sat in. They meant somebody made it clear that his career could become uncomfortable if he kept acting like the law did not have an exception for the Mensahs.
I didn’t say anything publicly, but my anger deepened because I knew influence when I saw it. I knew it because I had used it too. I had signed off on favors. I had watched cases move faster when the right people asked, and I had watched cases slow down when delay served a purpose. I had always been ableto justify those moves as strategy, as politics and as doing what needed to be done for the greater good. Now that it was my sons on the other side of it, it looked exactly like what it really was.
Corruption…
Then the next judge stepped in and stalled the trial date again, and she did it like she was doing everyone a favor. She said the shop needed to be re searched for the remainder of the footage, but the footage was not missing. It was secured. It had been secured the entire time, and I made sure it stayed exactly where I wanted it.
An investigator who understood loyalty had it, and he kept it out of the chain because once it hit evidence, I lost control of what the courtroom saw and what it did not. As long as that footage stayed outside that process, I could shape the narrative. I could decide what got revealed and when, and I could make sure this case stayed sharp. People loved to talk about fairness until fairness came for them. I wasn’t interested in fairness. I was interested in conviction.
What I refused to accept was my office being treated like we were incompetent, like we didn’t know how to prosecute, or like my sons’ murder was just a messy file that needed more time and more patience. Each continuance chipped at the momentum I built. Each new date gave the Mensahs another chance to breathe. They started to look comfortable in court. They leaned back in their chairs, whispering to one another, wearing their expensive clothes like armor and moving like they believed the system would eventually fold in their favor because it always had.
I couldn’t shake what happened outside the courthouse weeks ago.
My son was knocked unconscious, and my wife was slapped.
Officers stood there watching while my family was humiliated in public, and when it was over, nothing came fromit. There were no consequences that matched the disrespect, and there was no accountability that carried weight. Within days it was just another headline, and the Mensahs walked away like the chaos around my family was a minor inconvenience. That was when something in me snapped in a way I didn’t discuss with anyone. It wasn’t only grief anymore. It was humiliation. It was the realization that these people didn’t just take my boys. They were now comfortable taking pieces of my family in public too.
I was a father before I was anything else, but I was also the Attorney General of this island, and I held power most men only fantasize about. I hadn’t used my leverage fully yet, and I realized that I had been trying to behave like a man who still believed in the purity of the system. That belief died with my sons. The system was a weapon like anything else, and I was done letting the Mensahs hold it by the handle while I stood there bleeding.
The trial date had been reset again, and I understood procedure, but I refused to tolerate it. I refused to let my sons become a case that grew cold because somebody with money and influence wanted time.
That realization stayed with me until I picked up my phone and called Chief Judge, Thomas Caldwell.
Thomas and I went back years. From golf courses and fundraisers to private dinners where the wine flowed long after the staff cleared the plates. Our wives vacationed together more than once, and our families had spent holidays under the same roof. We built careers side by side in rooms most men would never see. We knew how this stuff worked behind the curtains because we helped hang them.
I stood beside him when his son was murdered, not as the Attorney General, but as a father who at the time knew nothing about that particular pain. I helped manage the media when hecouldn’t stand in front of them. I made sure certain questions never reached him. I made sure certain rumors died before they grew legs. When he was drowning in grief, I shielded him from everything I could, and I didn’t ask for anything in return because that was not how bonds like ours were formed.
When I buried both of my boys, he didn’t send a statement. He showed up. He stood there through the service, through the burial and through the quiet afterward when most people drift away because they didn’t know what to say. He sat in my living room long after everyone else left, and he didn’t fill the silence with empty comfort. He just stayed.
There were cases over the years that required discretion, and moments when one of us needed the other to make something move without drawing attention to it. We never wrote those things down. We never spoke about them in public. We simply understood each other. When he needed a legal interpretation framed a certain way, I framed it. When I needed a docket adjusted because timing mattered, he adjusted it. We trusted each other because we both carried secrets the other could have exposed and never did.
That kind of loyalty didn’t fade, and that kind of history didn’t require long explanations.
He answered on the second ring. “Roderick.”
“Thomas. I need to see you.”
He told me I caught him while he was off the bench and said to come by that afternoon.
I drove myself because I didn’t want security this time. I didn’t want drivers or want anyone guessing what I was about to set in motion. I needed this to be quiet.
His house sat behind iron gates, and when he opened the door, he looked at me for a long second like he was measuring how much of me was still intact. Then he stepped forward and wrapped his arms around me. His grip tightened out ofrecognition, the way men hold each other when they understand a pain that doesn’t leave.
“Roderick,” he said low. “How are you holding up?”
“I am managing,” I replied, and he could hear the strain under it because I didn’t bother hiding it.
He pulled back just enough to study my face, his hand still on my shoulder. “Jamie?”
“She is breathing,” I said, and that was the only way to describe my wife right now. She existed, but she was not living. She was moving through days with a hollow look that made me want to tear the world apart.
Thomas nodded because he understood exactly what that meant.
