WARNING: EXPLICIT GRAPHIC CONTENT

NOT SUITABLE FOR MINOR CHILDREN

Beginning in 1997, Gerry L. McAdams Jr. selected her, groomed her, slowly, purposefully, and systematically breaking down her inhibitions, befriending her, encouraging her to keep their “friendship” secret from her parents. He used his dog as an icebreaker, taught her to meet him in alleyways and side streets away from her parents’ oversight, gradually started touching her just a little here and there, gradually grooming her to physically satisfy his sexual desires.

She was homeschooled, and not only was she an easy target, but her family’s beliefs made the fallout from what McAdams did to her that much more severe. Her father had been diagnosed with metastatic melanoma, and she was sheltered and isolated, the perfect target. Because of her religious upbringing and friend groups, there were a lot of expectations about boys and girls remaining “pure” until marriage, and her family didn’t believe in divorce.

At first, it was just casual conversations. He jogged around the neighborhood every morning and afternoon with his dog off the leash, and when he was about to leave or when he had returned, sometimes his dog would cross the street when she was in the front yard and try to get her attention. Then he’d walk over and “apologize” and start up a conversation from there. He suggested that she meet him on purpose for these friendly conversations before he went to work. She remembers that he must’ve drunk coffee because in the morning the coffee odor was incredibly strong, it smelled pungent and black, smelled like he didn’t use any creamer. It smelled different to her than her parents’ coffee, she remembers that, too. He wore some kind of uniform to work every day, and he drove a pickup truck that had a company name and logo on the front doors.

He left for work early, around dawn. He would go for his morning run while it was still dark, then he would disappear inside the house for a while, then come back out and do these activities in his yard. After he had developed this perceived friendship with her, he would walk over to the sidewalk in front of her parents’ house and start up conversations with her. It was a very short time he did this particular thing, and one of these mornings he came over and asked her if she wanted to go talk with him in front of his house because he was running late and had something or other to do. So she went with him, and that was how he got her going over to his property.

On one of those mornings when he brought her over to his driveway, he took her hand and walked her across the street, and held it just a little longer than it took to cross the street. She wondered if maybe he “liked” her since he was holding her hand like that. Some more time went by while he maintained the new status quo. His driveway was wide enough on the left side (facing the house) for two vehicles to be parked side by side, and long enough to almost park at least two vehicles (end to end) where the carport was (one under the carport). She remembers he had all trucks, two Ford F-150s and the work truck, she didn’t and doesn’t know the years. One Ford-150 was blue and white, older style, the real metal frame kind of truck, the kind of thing you’d associate with the 1960s or 1970s, though she guesses it could’ve been newer than that (she’s not a truck expert). The other F-150 looked like varying shades of brown, dark brown and light brown, stripes running lengthwise. The work truck was white, and she believes it was also a Ford. He parked the work truck on the street and his personal vehicles on the driveway, usually one behind the other. Because of the location of his house in relationship to hers, the trucks created a visual barrier between her house (located southwest of his) and the east side of his driveway.

After maintaining the status quo for some time, walking her over to his driveway each day holding her hand and talking to her on the other side of the trucks, she was positioned with her back to the truck, and he was facing her, so she was between him and one of the trucks. He placed his hand onto the truck (which placed his shoulder over and a little to the side of her shoulder) and leaned his weight against the truck, and he asked her if it would be okay for him to hug her a little. She was shy, flattered, and by now she had a crush on this guy. He was the only male “friend” she had outside of her family, she didn’t even really know any other boys or men at all, besides the chubby little boy who lived up the street with his grandmother, went to public school.

At one point, he asked her after weeks of just “hugging” her daily, he asked her, “Can I kiss you?” Then he kissed her daily for weeks, slowly becoming more overt, first just closed-mouth kisses, then he began putting his tongue in her mouth. There was an alleyway behind his house that ran the length of Redcliff Drive, most of the streets in the neighborhood had alleys (her house had one, also). She’d ride her bicycle every afternoon, he’d jog with Jerry Lee (his German Shepherd), and they’d meet her where his alley came out onto Mertz Drive (she remembers thinking that street was named after Ethel Mertz in the “I Love Lucy” show).

After he had progressed the physical touching to groping her breasts, he began having her meet him at a different spot, a place more private, northernmost Mertz Drive where the street dead-ended. There were just people’s backyards there, and because it was a dead end, it was essentially private on three sides, plus Mertz Drive is on a hill, so no one could really see them up there unless they drove all the way to the dead end, and no one did that because it was just the people’s backyards.

There was a neighbor girl a few years older than her who lived up the street (west of McAdams’ house) on the same side of the street McAdams lived on, her name was Nina. They weren’t really friends, but they would talk sometimes. During one of these infrequent conversations, she asked Nina if she knew McAdams, and when Nina said she did, she asked her what she thought of him. Nina responded that she didn’t like him that much, she thought he was weird and that he had tried to get with her, but she didn’t want him. She was put off with Nina for accusing her “boyfriend” of wanting someone besides her, as she had an incredibly childish, romantic, and naive perception of the world. She believed that her “first love” would be her last, and that it would be reciprocal, she would, of course, be his “first love” also. McAdams had done nothing to contradict her childishness; in fact, he fed into it at every opportunity.

But then one day she had been gone a while, and so her mom was looking for her on her bicycle, and she couldn’t find her, so she was driving around looking when she drove up Mertz Drive and saw him there with her, but he was facing downhill Mertz (she had her back to the street) and saw her mom coming just in time to back away from her so her mom didn’t see that he was kissing and groping her. Her parents talked with her and told her she wasn’t allowed to see or talk to him anymore, but they weren’t aware of the fact that he was meeting her in the early mornings before they were awake.

Then he had this idea to leave notes to her in between the slats of the privacy fence of the property at Mertz & Redcliff Dr. on the north side of Redcliff, the first house just east of Mertz Drive. This was how he then coordinated the times he would meet her without being seen in public doing so. She would ride her bicycle around the neighborhood, and when she drove by the fence, she’d look to see if he’d left her anything. In one of his letters to her, he gave her his phone number, and after that, she would sometimes call him from Wayside Chapel church where she volunteered in the church library, if by chance the church ladies happened to leave her alone in the library and McAdams happened to be home.

There was also one instance where her parents left her home alone at a time of day that McAdams wasn’t at work, and he came over to her house. This was one of those instances where he seemed extra excited to intimately touch her, in her parents’ home while they were gone. They sat on the couch in the living room, and he kissed her, kissed on her neck, pulled her bra down and handled her breasts skin to skin with his hands, and thrusted himself at her while he rubbed his groin up and down her with his pants on.

She also would stay at her grandparents’ home in Castle Hills overnight sometimes, and she’d call him from their phone; they didn’t know who she was talking to and they didn’t think anything about her having a call with one of her “friends.” They had no reason to be suspicious of her behavior: she was a polite, precocious, homeschooled 13-year-old, with braces and hair down to her elbows. She volunteered at church, babysat her two younger siblings occasionally, helped with Vacation Bible School, did all her schoolwork, read voraciously, helped with her grandparents’ varying house/lawn chores, and was working on getting her HAM radio license with her Grandpa.

She doesn’t remember exactly when it was, but there was one time after he had begun kissing her that he was going to go on vacation with a “friend” of his who was a female. He said they had been friends for a long time, and he’d be back after a few days. She had this crazy idea that if she packed a bag, maybe he’d take her with him, so she packed it all up and tried to get him to take her along. He refused, naturally. She believes it was before he left for that vacation that he left her a letter in the fence, and it contained a wallet-sized photo of himself with his German Shepherd (Jerry Lee) with the words “Love, Gerry” written on the back. This was tantamount to a proposal in her 13-year-old mind; he gave her a photo and expressed his love to her! She started practicing her handwriting, “Morgan R. McAdams,” over and over again, then ripping it up so her parents wouldn’t see or find it.

Sometime during the summer of 1998, there was an “IBLP” (Institute in Basic Life Principles) seminar held at a local church that wasn’t the church her parents attended. The IBLP organization was who her parents got some of their homeschool curriculum from, and her parents attended the seminar while she volunteered alongside older teens and adults who were supervising seminar attendees’ children. During the seminar, McAdams was bemoaning that she wasn’t available in the afternoons because she was at the church, so she suggested jokingly that McAdams could meet her at the church, and she’d sneak to meet him. To her surprise, he came to the church all dressed up and proceeded to undo her bra and grab her breasts, kissing her more forcefully than usual, rubbing his hands all over her. He put his hand through the waistband of her skirt and into her underwear, placing his fingers onto her clitoris and using one of his fingers to shallowly enter her vagina, all of this taking place in one of the stairways at the church. He seemed to take great pleasure in this event, even commenting that it was amusing that she was letting him do this to her in a church.

Then one afternoon, he told her if they were going to meet the next day that they were going to have to meet earlier than the usual time because he had to leave for something (she honestly doesn’t remember if it was work or a vacation) earlier than usual. She agreed to everything he asked of her, and that next morning, he brought her into his living room and sat her down on his living room couch. At first, it was just the usual hugging and kissing; he had been touching her breasts for a while, and he did that also. That day in his living room, he moved down her body and took her underwear off, kissing her all the way down until he was kissing the outside of her vagina, then he spread her apart and put his tongue on her clitoris, eventually penetrating her vagina with his tongue. He was asking her continuously if it was okay, if it felt good. While she felt very uncomfortable, she felt then that this was wrong, but at the same time, it did feel good, and what was she supposed to say? No one knew she was there, she was a 13-year-old homeschooled girl, and she knew she would be in trouble if anyone found out that she had gone over to his house and allowed all this to occur. She would be in so much trouble. She also was afraid that if she didn’t do what he wanted her to do, he wouldn’t want her any longer, that she’d lose the only “friend” she had. So she acquiesced to his requests.

After some more time passed with the new status quo, he invited her to come over to his house in the middle of the night. Naively believing this man loved her and wanted to marry her, and knowing everything she had already allowed him to do, feeling as though there was no going back because she had given him so much of her innocence already, she went. In her mind, she “needed” and “loved” him, he “loved” her, and when she turned 18 years old, they would finally be able to be together as a couple.

She thought it was going to be just like last time; he brought her into his living room (it had black and white ceramic tile, she can still picture the layout of the furniture and the floor plan of the house), and she thought they’d stay in the living room, but this time was different, this time he wanted more, and now. He offered her a glass of water, which she accepted and drank, then he took her hand and while she can’t remember his exact words, what she does remember is that it wasn’t a question or an offer, it was a statement that that was where they were going. She was instantly very, VERY nervous and uncomfortable.

She hesitantly followed him into the tiny room; it seemed like the bed barely fit. He laid her down and started aggressively touching her all over her body; she remembers when she laid down that she had her underwear on, and she didn’t have any intention of taking them off herself. She was scared, she wanted to object, she wanted to leave. He had never touched her like he did that night. He aggressively grabbed her wrist in his hand and forced her hand onto his exposed naked penis, telling her to “touch it.” She tried to pull away, she was in shock, this wasn’t anything like what she had been expecting, and after that, she doesn’t remember anything that happened until there was a banging on his front door; it was her father.

McAdams got up, and she remembers that his buttocks were exposed; he pulled on shorts and was rushing her, telling her to get out of the house, to go out the back door, and she also remembers that she didn’t have any panties on, and she was trying to find them somewhere in this tight bedroom she could barely turn around in, and she was so frustrated she couldn’t find them, and she was confused how they had gotten off of her in the first place. She finally located them on the floor, got them on, and he rushed her out the back door and into the alley.

She went east down the alley and walked to the Wal-Mart on Jones Maltsberger. She spent a while there just walking around; she remembers an employee asking her tentatively if she was okay, she told her she was fine, and then she felt like she had to leave. So she left and just started walking, and walking, and walking. At first, she didn’t even know where she was headed, she was just walking, and it was dark outside. She walked down Jones Maltsberger to Basse Road and then took Basse Road to Broadway Street; Broadway Street all the way to Commerce Street, and then walked down Commerce Street to Rivercenter Mall. She had a small purse with her that had in it some lip gloss and a checkbook with checks that drew from a savings account she had at USAA; she had less than $30 in the account at the time. She got a haircut at a cheap salon in the mall (paid for with what she didn’t realize at the time was a hot check because she didn’t have enough to cover it in account), she walked around and around, watched Armageddon at the movie theater, and waited for 4:30 pm to roll around so McAdams would be home from work, and she could call him to come pick her up.

When she called him, he was very short with her; he told her that her parents had called the police, and they had come to his house to talk to him. Further, he told her not to call him anymore, ever, and that he was absolutely unable to come get her. She was crying her eyes out on the pay phone, she didn’t know what to do, who to call. If she called her parents, they’d be mad, she just knew it, and the man who put her in this situation wasn’t going to come save her, so she waited a while and finally decided to call her grandparents and ask them to come get her.

Her grandfather was the third most impactful and meaningful person in her life, just after her parents. Her family lived in San Antonio just to stay near her mother’s parents, and they spent a lot of time at their house with them. She spent even more time with them than anyone else did because she would go and spend the night at their house at least once a week, and in addition, Grandpa and Grandma would come pick her up and take her to Fort Sam with them (her grandfather was a WW2 Veteran with post privileges). She was devoted to these two people; they could do no wrong, and the sun and moon rose and set over their heads. To this day, she doesn’t know what her parents had told her grandparents; they just came and got her, they weren’t mad, they didn’t act sad or disappointed, but she was so ashamed she was mortified. She felt like they knew everything, she knew they MUST be disappointed in her. After her grandfather and grandmother picked her up at Rivercenter Mall, they took her to their home for the night.

She was scared of what her parents’ reaction was going to be, so she got this idea that she would take some money (less than a hundred dollars) from her grandpa’s wallet and buy herself a bus ticket to anywhere as far away from San Antonio as she could afford to go. So she took the money and snuck out, walked to Greyhound in the middle of the night, but they were closed and wouldn’t be open anytime soon. She was more tired than she was scared, still a child after all, so she wound up walking back to her parents’ home. Her mother came out crying and hugging her.

McAdams refused to communicate with her further, despite her repeated attempts to reach him. He had told her he loved her, he told her he would wait for her to turn 18 so they could be together, and she believed him. It was a crushing blow to her when she was told by her parents that McAdams had a girlfriend who lived out the direction of Randolph Brooks AFB; she didn’t believe them. She knew he left his house every Friday afternoon and didn’t return until the next day, just to leave again on Saturday evening not to return until Sunday afternoon, but she had always wanted to believe that he had family he was staying with, and she had always been too afraid of the potential truth to press him on it.

Her parents contacted the woman he was spending his weekend nights with; she doesn’t remember her name, but she does remember her parents saying (she doesn’t remember if they said it to her or she was eavesdropping) that she had a granddaughter about her age. It has always puzzled her that even after her parents told her about her, it seemed that she continued to have a relationship with McAdams, because his routine hadn’t changed one bit from the time they informed her to the time they moved out of the house on Redcliff Drive in early 1999.

Her parents moved their entire family off of that street because of McAdams. They had no idea at the time the trauma McAdams had inflicted on her and, by extension, their family. She was angry at her parents for “keeping them apart”; she spent days in her bedroom just sleeping because she didn’t want anything but McAdams. They would talk about pressing charges, and she’d say things about how she wouldn’t let them hurt him, and she’d refuse to testify; she was a groomed and brainwashed angry 13-year-old with absolutely no sense of self-worth who was now livid at the world and confused about why this man who had spent so much time with her, promised so much, and took everything she had from her, her whole life as she knew it, had been and was, apparently, cheating on her when he had told her he would wait for her to turn 18 and wouldn’t so much as answer the phone when she called him, even months later.

After they moved, things started to settle down some; she got some distance between herself and the memories of what had happened, she wasn’t seeing him every day, and her attachment to him lessened. Her mother, well, she set up counseling with Bob (Robert) Oswalt, and she encouraged her to attend churchy things with titles like “True Love Waits” and the like, but because of how McAdams had groomed her mind to make her believe that she had chosen to do all the things he, in reality, had coerced her to do, she was obstinate in the idea that he was her first because she chose him and that he would be there for her when she was 18. She had to believe that he was a choice she made, because the alternative was too much to consider for even a single moment, much less bear.

Further, because of the period of time that fateful night that to this day she still cannot remember, she was determined to believe that she had not been raped by McAdams; she needed to believe that somehow she was still “intact” and “clean,” that she hadn’t lost her purity and that McAdams still wanted her. She couldn’t cope with the idea that McAdams had taken from her everything he wanted and thrown her away, that she was just used up and spoiled goods to him. As a result, she was incredibly resentful toward her mother for anything that resembled even the most remote implication that she wasn’t still a virgin. Sitting here today writing this, a mother herself, she knows that her own mother only loved her and had her best interests at heart; she was only trying to help her recover, but she had no idea how much or what kind of emotional and psychological damage had been done to her by McAdams.

They moved, she rebelled, and when she turned 18, she had gotten up the courage to try and call McAdams; he didn’t answer, and he didn’t return her messages. Turns out he didn’t want her at 18, like he promised he would. So when she was 19, she threw herself into the arms of one of the worst human beings you could imagine.

Her first husband was three times divorced with a history of domestic violence, and a lifelong alcoholic, and he was exactly what she thought she deserved. He physically assaulted her no less often than every three months for the duration of her cohabitation with him. She told him about McAdams, and he told her she deserved everything McAdams had done to her, that she had asked for it.

In 2007, she gave birth to her first daughter, and she had an epiphany at the hospital in her recovery room: McAdams had groomed her not to fight back against him, to allow him to do everything he did to her, and that at no point in time is it ever okay for an adult to touch a minor sexually. She thinks back on that today, that McAdams tainted the birth of her beautiful daughter, and she is both grateful she realized she had been groomed and assaulted, and livid that her memory of her daughter’s birth includes him in any way.

It took her some time, but she had a journal she had kept during the time McAdams was grooming and molesting her, and she got up the courage to go downtown to the main station of the San Antonio Police Department. She took her two infants with her; her firstborn son was a bit over one year old, and her daughter was under a year old, at the time. An officer took her report, looked over her journal, and informed her that it wasn’t enough to do anything with. If she wanted to even try and get to a point where charges could be filed, he said she’d have to get McAdams to admit what he had done on the record, which meant she’d have to get him on the phone, likely more than one conversation, develop a relationship with him again, to get him to open up and talk about what he had done. This was devastating to hear.

She wanted him to be punished for what he had done (which she didn’t even know then just how much damage), but she also was terrified of even calling him, much less talking to him, that much more petrified of trying to get him to talk about those things, those things she wanted to forget. She couldn’t do what the officer said they needed; she wasn’t in a place for that, and he gave her back her journal and sent her on her way with nothing but a card with a report number on it and some references for victim organizations.

Even after she had done what she could, even after she divorced her first husband who said for 8 years that she deserved what McAdams had done to her, the trauma wasn’t over; in fact, it has never been over, and she’s come to realize it never will be. What McAdams did to her will be part of her life forever, and there is nothing she can do about that.

• His actions still hurt her, they hurt her parents, her brothers, her husband, all eleven of her children in different ways.

• His actions hurt her husband, a good man who loves her but in his sincere love sometimes triggers memories of McAdams.

What he did still eats away at her, making her feel shameful for being so naive; she feels stupid and “easy” for giving away to this perverted, lying, cheating, pedophile, what should’ve been saved for a man who truly loved her. Then she remembers that she was just a child, and then she still feels ashamed and stupid but now she feels angry, lost, and she dreads the possibility that he may have done this to other people, also, that he could be doing it to someone right now.

She feels so incredibly ashamed of herself for not having the strength to do what the SAPD told her she would have to do in 2008 in order for them to even open an investigation, to try and talk McAdams into some kind of an admission of guilt. Then she’s livid at the SAPD because they didn’t even take her journal into evidence, they didn’t give her the time of day other than to tell her they couldn’t do anything if she couldn’t re-traumatize herself.

She thought the cops were all good guys like Captain America, she thought they were there to protect people like her and to give victims like her justice, but they just sent her on her way to suffer for the rest of her life.

For years, she has wanted to make him pay financially, because it’s the only justice she has left that she can exact after the SAPD dismissed her, but she has never had the emotional health to even begin writing about what he had done to her, not until now.

Why now, you might ask: because she finally realized how much he has hurt the people she loves because of how he negatively affected the whole of her life. In retrospect, she has come to the understanding that it is impossible for her to separate who she would be if McAdams had not methodically groomed, molested, and sexually assaulted her. Her brain was still in a developmental stage, and the trauma created indelible harm that contributed to traits within her temperament.

She has control issues; the more anxious she becomes, the more she needs to control her environment. This leads to disruption in her family because she resorts to the prioritization of her need for control and order over the emotional and psychological wants and needs of her family, negatively affecting their home life. She has to remind herself and cope with these imbalanced approaches that originated from McAdams’ actions toward her.

She also experiences sexual dysfunction, which negatively affects her husband. Whenever her husband does or says something reminiscent of McAdams (“you feel so good” or “I love the way you kiss me”), it triggers anger and flashbacks, disrupting both of their pursuits of happiness. McAdams’ choices have negatively affected not just her, not just who she grew up to be, but also hurt every relationship she’s ever had or attempted to have; his harm is exponential.

Why should he get to live comfortably and securely while she suffers the rest of her life from what he did to her? When her entire family loves her so much that they stay by her side even when what McAdams did to her causes them to suffer, why should he be excused from consequences when he is the perpetrator of all this pain and suffering, when he forever altered her life because he wanted to steal something from her that she didn’t even understand what it was he was stealing, and wasn’t his to take in the first place?

Yesterday, today, tomorrow, next week, next year, she will be suffering and coping with what this man did to her, and by extension, her family. Her parents had to move because of him; later in 2013, her husband had to move their family out of San Antonio and even Bexar County because of McAdams and the emotional baggage she still carries even today. She can’t go home to San Antonio and drive by her childhood home with her kids without also driving by the house of the man who ripped her childhood away from her.

At this midlife point in her life, she finally realized that she’s not stupid, or worthless, and that McAdams stole from her. She is an incredibly smart and talented woman, and she had amazing potential before she met him.

He not only took all she had, her life as she knew it,

he not only took and changed who she was,

he stole her dreams, her future,

and all that she would’ve become.