This biker brought my baby to prison every week for 3 years after my wife died and I had no one left to raise her. This sixty-eight-year-old white man in a leather vest held my mixed-race newborn against the glass while I sobbed and begged God to let me hold her just once.
My name is Marcus Williams and I’m serving eight years for armed robbery. I was twenty-three when I got sentenced. Twenty-four when my wife Ellie died thirty-six hours after giving birth to our daughter Destiny. And twenty-four when a stranger named Thomas Crawford became the only reason my baby didn’t end up in foster care.
But my daughter doesn’t deserve to grow up without both parents. And my wife didn’t deserve to die alone in a hospital room while I sat in a cell sixty miles away, not even allowed to say goodbye.
Ellie was eight months pregnant when I got arrested. She was in the courtroom when I got sentenced. She collapsed right there when the judge said eight years. The stress sent her into early labor. They rushed her to the hospital. The prison wouldn’t let me go.
I found out she died from my court-appointed attorney. He called the prison chaplain who came to my cell. “Mr. Williams, I’m sorry to inform you that your wife passed away due to complications from childbirth. Your daughter survived.”
That was it. Sixteen words that destroyed my entire world.
I wasn’t there when Ellie took her last breath. Wasn’t there when my daughter took her first. I was sitting in a concrete box because I’d made the worst decision of my life.
I had no family. Grew up in foster care myself. Ellie was all I had. Her family disowned her when she married me. They wanted nothing to do with a Black man who’d gotten their white daughter pregnant.
When Ellie died, Child Protective Services took Destiny. She was three days old and already inContinue reading…
