The Redemption Story of a Fugitive Who Duane “Dog” Chapman Refused to Pursue

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And this next story, well, it’s close to home. And by the way, the best stories that we all have are right near us: folks in our neighborhood, in our families, in our churches, in our businesses, and here in Our American Stories, we’ve gotten to know one of our workers—an affiliate sales guy from Alabama, and a great guy, a great family. Well, he shared his story with me, and I was just, well, it wasn’t just me; it was everybody in the room listening. It was as if we were hearing a movie being told—a great movie, a compelling movie. It was a heck of a story, and so we asked him to tell it. And so, without further ado, this is a story about everything, folks: love, hate, family, and redemption.

I had a pattern in my life with girls putting me in the friend zone. The very first girl that ever put me in the friend zone, I remember, was in eighth grade. I was in Mister Dunnscience’s class, and I remember leaning over to my friend Ryan and saying, “Who’s that?” And neither of us knew who she was. And I developed the courage to ask her to the eighth grade graduation dance, and I guess what I mean by “developed the courage,” I asked one of her friends to ask her if she would go to the eighth grade graduation dance with me.

And she said yes.

After that, I told her how much I liked her, wanted to be with her, professed my, you know, undying love for her, and she put me in the friend zone. And that would be a pattern that we want for the kind of the long haul, you know. Looking back at my childhood, and there’s a couple of key moments that really stick out to me. You know, as far as I can remember, you know, my mom and my dad never really being together. Like, that’s never a memory that I can remember them actually being together, being married. But I do remember, as it got to be about my first-grade year, my mother joined the Army. She would kind of bounce around from job to job and couldn’t find anything solid, and she really wanted to do something to support us. And I have a brother, Brad, who is—he’s two years older than me—but we have different dads. She eventually got stationed in Germany, and that launched into a giant custody battle. My dad was a very responsible, hard-working, structured individual, and the obvious best place for me would have been with my father. But the court’s tendency is to always place the child with the mother unless there’s just an absolute, you know, crazy circumstance that would lead them to do otherwise. But at that point, I was going to be with my dad, and my mom had me go out to lunch right before, really, they were going to make their decision. And we had a lunch with my brother, and she basically said, “Well, you don’t want to leave your brother to you,” and, “You know, there’s ass in Germany,” and basically said all the things to you’d want to tell a kid to make them want to go that way. And I just remember the biggest feeling having is that I didn’t want to leave my brother. I didn’t want to leave my brother in that environment without me to be there with him. And I was, I think, seven years old at that time. And I went back and told the judge that I didn’t want to go with my dad, as I had said previously, that I, that I wanted to go with my mom, and that was ended up being the ruling.

After all the time and money and everything that…

was spent in that custody battle. And I remember leaving the courthouse that day—at seven years old, six years old, whatever it was—and my dad looking down at me as we waited for the light to turn across the road. He said, “You know, I’m very disappointed in you.” And that kind of set a pattern, really, for the rest of my life with my father: that I was kind of a disappointment. And then when we moved to Germany, my mom was still with this abusive guy. He’s the one that convinced her to join the Army. And when we moved to Germany, we lived in what’s called the econ, so we didn’t live on base. We lived in an apartment above a pub, and the pub was called Klaus’s Pub. And my mom and her husband, Dave, would drink every night, and they would fight every night. And sometimes it would become abusive, and sometimes the screaming and all those things got to be so bad. My brother and I would always wonder if it was going to be us next. And fortunately, we were never physically abused.

But, you know, I…

remember wanting to protect my mom, but only being, you know, eight years old and small, and having this desire to protect my mom and inability to do so. And it kind of developed feelings of cowardice that I wasn’t able…

to protect my mom.

That all came to an end when we started going to church, and, well, she left Dave.

We moved on base.

We started going to church—you know, Sunday morning, Sunday night, and on Wednesdays—and every time the doors were open. We got involved and really began to experience a sense of belonging. And that went on for about a year, and there was no drinking, and it was like this stability in our lives. It was like the calm and the storm of my life as I looked back on it. I remember coming home from school one day. It was one of my last days of fourth grade, and I came home and my mom had been, you know, free from drinking for a year, free from partying. Our life was, you know, so much better. I mean, I came home and there was a beer sitting on the end table beside the couch.

And I looked at the…

beer, and I looked at my mom, and I knew that we were going back into that lifestyle and that all that peace and calm was over. I was old enough to equate beer with pain, and, you know, my mom drinking beer and alcohol with pain and suffering for my brother and me and instability. And I remember being fueled and filled with hatred and anger towards my mother, and I remember screaming at her and telling her that I hated her and I wanted nothing to do with her. And then I wanted to move back to the States and I wanted to move in with my dad. Then when I moved in with my dad, I used to go to church with my friend and his mom. And we would go to church, and it would be fun and it would be fine, but then we’d get in the car, and his mom would gossip about everybody in the church all the way home. And then she would pick us up, and she actually gave us a ride to school on the days that the weather was bad, and she would just gossip about people in the church the whole way to school and the whole way back, and I’m like, “You people are ridiculous!” And so what I did is I took a few Christians and I labeled all Christians as these few, right? And so, my mind, I had this core belief that all Christians were these gossipy, judgmental people, and so I hated them.

And when we come back, we continue with this really raw and really real story, and it’s Brian Dawson’s story here on Our American Stories. Folks, if you love the great American stories we tell and love America like we do, we’re asking you to become a part of the Our American Stories family. If you agree that America is a good and great country, please make a donation. A monthly gift of seventeen dollars and seventy-six cents is fast becoming a favorite option for supporters. Go to OurAmericanStories.com now and go to the donate button and help us keep the great American stories coming. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. And we’re back here at Our American Stories, and we continue this remarkable story again—one that comes close to home, as close as can be right here on our own staff. Let’s continue with Brian Dawson’s story.

My mom moved back from Germany, and she went to Colorado Springs. So I went and spent a summer with my mom in Colorado. Well, my brother was two years older than me, and he had friends that were, you know, drinking beer and drinking liquor and going camping and smoking pot and doing all that kind of stuff.

And I went out there.

I’d never been exposed to any of that stuff personally—obviously seeing my mom drinking and things like that—but never personally. And, you know, I remember, you know, drinking a beer and then, you know, trying. And the first, first liquor I ever tasted was Hot Damn One Hundred. And I was the little brother of not only my big brother but that whole group, and I fit in. And the more I drank, the more I fit in, and the more I drank, the more comfortable I was in my own skin. You know, they call it liquid courage, but it was so much more than liquid courage.

for me.

It was liquid: I can actually deal with life. Everything in my life. I’ve always been very intense and very all-in whatever it was that I was doing. And I began to drink heavily. I was drinking tequila, whiskey, Hot Damn that whole summer, and the following summer I went back to Colorado and I started to smoke pot. And as I smoked pot, it was the same thing. You know, I just enjoyed not being who I guess I thought I was. You know, I eventually made. When I was sixteen years old, I got my driver’s license. I made a fake ID on a computer, and I got to the point where I could go and buy liquor. And then I became very popular for that reason. So there was a lot of it—it was fitting in and all of those things. And I would go, and I was able to, you know, buy liquor for these parties, which made me like the coolest person in the party. And, you know, I would drink to the point of blacking out once or twice a week. And this is as a sixteen-year-old. And meanwhile, I was, you know, working a job at Dillons (which is a Kroger store) and playing football, playing baseball, and somewhat maintaining my grades. I went from a straight-A student to probably about a C student, and I just—I stopped caring about school, which is interesting, because up to that point, when I started, you know, drinking and doing drugs, all I cared about was school. I got straight A’s; I scored off the charts on all these tests—the standardized tests—and I didn’t care about school anymore. All I cared about was the social aspect. The partying, the girls, and being wasted. Basically, the summer between my junior and senior year, I went out to Colorado, and my brother was a driver for a—I wouldn’t say notorious, but a pretty big-time—drug dealer in Colorado Springs.

His name was Casey, and my brother had a driver’s license and a nice truck. So Casey would just…

have him drive him around, and, you know, they’d be dropping, you know, mostly pot, but, you know, whatever, around, and the craziest things would happen.

Man.

So I spent the whole summer riding around with them, you know, just seeing him be this alpha male that everyone looked up to and everyone respected. And he had money, and he had girls, and he had all these things. And I’m like, “That’s what I want to do!” So I went back to Kansas that summer.

And here’s the thing:

Up to that point, I was excelling in football, and I did really well in baseball too. But I excelled in football. And we had a great football team that year, and I was really coming into my own as a defensive end and a tight end on offense, and we were expected to do really, really well that year. And I was so torn between really wanting to pour myself into football or pour myself into this party life. And I had tried cocaine when I was out there, so I was really starting to do more serious drugs as I’m going into my senior year. And my senior year, I got about two weeks into it, and I snuck out of the house and I went and tried ecstasy with some of my friends. And a couple of the guys were actually football players on the team. And I remember trying to sneak back in, and I got caught, and he told me that I had to quit football and go to rehab, or I could quit football and go to Colorado, but I wasn’t going to continue playing football. This is really when the resentment with my dad hit its peak. So I decided to quit football and move back to Colorado with my mom. And what that basically meant is I was on my own, and I just started partying full-blown. And I started working for Casey and started selling weed and got involved in that lifestyle. And then I started doing cocaine on a pretty regular basis. And as I did cocaine, I realized, “Hey, man, I can’t pay for cocaine selling weed!” So I started selling cocaine, and I just had this knack and this ability to rise to the top in these—in these, I guess, you know, drug dealer ladders of influence.

I just had a knack for that life.

And so I started selling a little bit of cocainex, you know, I was selling a lot of coke, and I was doing a lot of coke, and it got to the point it was so bad. I would have to take Xanax to go to sleep. And then I would wake up the next day—and really the next evening, at like four or five in the evening—I’d wake up. I’d blow my nose, and snot and cocaine and blood would come out. My nose would just be bleeding and bleeding and bleeding. As soon as it would start to kind of slow down a little bit, I would do another line and start drinking.

And then that was what I did.

And it got so bad to where I couldn’t even, like, breathe out of my nose anymore. My friend tried to introduce me to crack, and I’m like, “This isn’t for me!” So then he—he had me try crystal meth, and that was it. And once I did crystal meth, it was: there was no having to take Xanax to go to sleep, there was no drinking whiskey to mellow out. It was just, it was wide open. And already at this point, when I started doing meth, I already had my first felony arrest. I was arrested with a half-ounce of cocaine and bonded out and got probation and all those things, and didn’t slow me down. I continued to use drugs, continued to party, didn’t go to my probation appointments, didn’t do any of those things. And I got to a point where I was very well known in Colorado Springs for my ability to sell drugs and do a number of other things. And I remember getting a phone call from a girl named Camille, and she said, “I’ve got some pretty serious guys that I know that want to talk to you about, you know, kind of you partnering with them or working with them.” And so I came to…

her apartment, and I walked into her apartment. I remember it.

It was kind of an uneasy feeling, and there were some very mean-looking, dark, nefarious-looking individuals that were Hispanic guys, Mexican guys. And they had handkerchiefs on over their faces, but they were in suits. It was weird, and I’m like, “Well, I’m either going to get killed or this is going to go really well.” And, you know, they sat out and just talked to me and asked me a bunch of questions and asked me what I could do for them. And I think they were kind of new to coming into Colorado Springs to do what it was that they were wanting to do, and they needed somebody to help them. So they asked me to do that, and I did that. And not long after that, I ended up getting in a high-speed chase with the cops and ran. And I had a briefcase with meth and a pistol, got pulled over with that, got arrested, spent four and a half months in county jail on that, got probation again, got out, went right back to it. I mean, by that time, a lot of my connections had either gone back to Mexico or had been arrested as well. And I got into, basically—I mean, I guess what it looked like was—we would steal four-wheelers and motorcycles and things like that and give them to Mexicans that were bringing back across the border in New Mexico, and then they would pay us some drugs. I was supposedly the ringleader of that whole thing. I don’t know how true that was, but that’s the way it was in the cops’ eyes. And they busted a house that had some of those motorcycles in them, and they pressured the guy who was there, and he told on me and said, “You know, it was me.” I was the one that was doing this. I was running all these rings. So he and a bunch of other people had told the cops that I was responsible for, you know, all this crime that was going on. And I eventually got arrested, and I did another four months in county jail and ended up bonding out after those four months. And in that time, I got my discovery, and it said that, you know, who had told on me. I was out driving around up to no good. I’d been up for four days, and we drove by the guy’s house who told on me—who was the main informant in the case—and the guy was with kept pumping me up. “Oh no, we have to go in there!” “You know, we can’t let him, you know, just let him tell on you, and you’re not doing anything.” And so we went—you know, went up to the front door, knocked on the door—and he opened the door and walked in the house and asked him why I told on me. And he said, “You know,” told me, “Well, I didn’t tell any, Brian. I would never tell on you,” and I knew that he had. He was the informant in my case. So I began to beat him up really, really bad. And the guy was with hit him in the head with a blunt-force object. It was called a blackjack, and it cracked his head open, and I thought he was going to die. So, you know, we grabbed a few objects out of his house, and we left, and by the time I got back to my house, I ended up getting arrested and charged with attempted…

murder, aggravated robbery, and extortion.

And on top of all that, this was a guy who was state’s evidence. So he was an informant that I did all these things to, so that aggravated it.