Member-only story
A Time To Grieve
My foster son was murdered.
But that’s not the most important fact about his life.
Yesterday I was writing a humor piece when I was interrupted.
At the point where I was running out of ideas, the phone rang. It was the high school girlfriend of my foster son, Larry Otis Clark. She told me he had been murdered.
He died of blunt force trauma and asphyxiation. In an apartment breezeway where he was discovered eight hours later. It isn’t a particularly dangerous part of the town where he lived. It isn’t the safest either.
Larry was one of the quiet, gentle ones. He survived Hurricane Katrina as a child, and as a result, was relocated to Fort Worth, Texas. He and his brother and father were in Fort Worth, while his mother and sister were evacuated to Houston. Shortly after, his mother and sister moved back to New Orleans, and Larry stayed in Fort Worth. My son met him in Middle School.
My son, Blake Scott, is now six foot five and weighs 250. In middle school, he was five foot four and cute as hell. He was also a year younger than everyone, at thirteen. Larry was nearly six feet and wiry at age fourteen. Blake was bullied in middle school. One incident was in the locker room after basketball, when he was attacked from the back and pushed over a bench. He left campus and called me. I picked…
