Wasted (13 page)

Slap.

She had leapt.

Thomas had slapped his hands on her window. “You hear that?” he had said.

“What?” she had answered.

“The gunshots.”

“Yeah, but hardly at all. I could hardly hear it at all.”

“Get out and come with me.”

Brown had walked with Thomas the block and a half or so, back around the bend. She had seen tail lights fading into the darkness—the tail lights of Rafael’s car, driven by Thomas’s teenaged cohort. She had seen Rafael lying dead in the dirt.

“Get in the truck,” Justin had said, “and drive.”

She had gotten into the truck.

Thomas had picked up the dead body and tossed it into the truck bed. He had jumped into the back of the truck with the body and yelled, “Go.”

Dorothy had gone. She had driven what seemed to her like forever down the trail, with Thomas barking directions to her the whole time. In reality, Brown had only driven in a circle. When she ended up right back where they had started, Thomas had said, “Your car’s right down the trail, just over the hill.”

She had gotten out. She had seen again the weird green-colored duffel bag in the back of the truck between Thomas and Noriega’s corpse, and she had run. She had run back to the safety of her stolen truck.

With the sun rising over the California foothills, with the coyotes bedding down for the day, Dorothy Brown had driven back to her home in Moreno Valley. The last block or two, she had pushed the truck so as not to wake anyone.

 

 

But scared coyotes can’t always sleep, even in the day.

Two hours later, Thomas had arrived on Brown’s doorstep, showered and clean-shaven. He had shoved a broken shovel into Brown’s face. “Here,” he had said, “I borrowed it earlier.”

She hadn’t known that. “I don’t want it,” she had said, still shaking.

Thomas had thrown it in her backyard. “I’ve gotta leave town.” He had handed her a large bag of crystal meth and Thomas was gone. To Texas. In a pickup truck with blood in the bed. “Deer hunting,” he had explained to others. “I went deer hunting. That’s what the blood is.”

 

 

Dorothy Lee Brown and Detective Wilson stood in the same general foothill area where Noriega’s body had been found. There was no doubt in Wilson’s mind that Brown had witnessed the murder.

Over time, Dorothy Brown was convicted thrice—on the charges of the sale of methamphetamine, possession of firearms, and grand theft auto.

Justin Thomas was not pursued.

 

 

On April 18, 1993, Justin Heith Thomas’ driver’s license was suspended for six months. The suspension was a culmination of a string of many California vehicle violations and convictions dating back to 1991. It didn’t matter, though; he was in Hawaii with Dawn and Prestin. The Army had stationed him there.

 

 

In the land of paradise, everything was good. For the first time in years, Justin didn’t smoke dope every day. He focused instead on his war playing. He, after all, had a self-admitted fetish for guns.

He also spent time playing chicken with other soldiers, burning his arms with lit cigarettes. The sting of the ash, the sizzle of the flesh hurt, but it showed how tough he was.

Thomas got Dawn’s name tattooed on his right forearm. The needle cut his skin so that his blood oozed. It hurt, but the hurt felt good. He got four more tattoos. The more tattoos Justin Thomas wore, the more he silently shouted to the world, “I have pain inside this heart.” That’s what he believed—the more tattoos one had, the more pain one felt inside one’s soul.

Emotion, to Justin Thomas, as it was to his dad, Jim Thomas, was not something that was easy to deal with. Extreme love, extreme anger, those two he could deal with. But depression, sadness, he didn’t know what to do with them.

When Thomas was in the field, on maneuvers, depression and sadness weren’t factors. In the field, he was the best of the best.

He agreed to let Dawn go to work in a bar, and that created a whole new world of problems, particularly a problem of trust.

As an infantryman, Thomas was gone on deployment for days at a time. It meant that he often wasn’t there for his wife, but that an island full of military men was. Justin returned from deployment to hear rumor after rumor—Dawn was with this person and Dawn was with that person. Dawn had allegedly succumbed to the shine of temptation, just as Justin always had back in California.

But he didn’t think on that, not on his own past. Or maybe he did. Extreme love. Extreme anger.

“What the hell’s going on here?” he yelled at Dawn. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“You don’t trust me? You don’t love me?” she answered.

Justin felt he had to believe her; she was, after all, his wife. The men telling him these stories were a bunch of drunk, stoned, horny, GIs.

Still, it got to Justin, and he started drinking. Whereas he was the best of the best in the field, when he was on base, he was the best of the best at screwing up. He drank a fifth of vodka and a twelve-pack of beer at a time. Just as Dawn had told him years earlier that she wouldn’t go out with him if he drank, Dawn and Justin’s relationship deteriorated even faster after he resumed drinking.

They were growing further apart, yet he loved her so much. Justin Thomas didn’t know how to cope with the pain. So he coped through violence. The 6
’
4
”
infantryman grabbed his 5
’
2
”
bride by the throat. He threw her on the bed, and he belted her, forcing Dawn to listen to his tirades, his accusations, his pleas as to how much he loved her. Manhandling her, beating her, that was the only way, Justin Thomas believed, to get his wife to listen to him.

That wasn’t the first time he’d struck Dawn. He’d done it in California too. He’d pushed her to the ground. He’d thrown her on the bed.

And Dawn had stayed with him.

Dawn Thomas, according to court records, had been molested as a child. Justin Thomas, according to court records, boasted that he had murdered Dawn’s rapist. To the moon and back for the woman he loved.

 

 

On Valentine’s Day, Dawn Thomas planned a special celebration. She planned it to please her husband, who constantly complained that she always went to work early and came home late, which led him to believe even more deeply that she cheated on him.

At the time, Justin had a broken leg. Carrying a 120-pound rucksack on his back, a machine gun, and more, he had tripped and fallen through the mountains and canyons and gulches of Hawaii on a training mission. He had survived all of his falls intact, until he crossed a man-made road. There, he fell in a crack, twisted his ankle, and broke his leg.

Thomas was left to work company quarter duty on the base while his unit was out on deployment. The day he was assigned to CQ duty was Valentine’s Day.

“Can’t you stay?” said Dawn. “I’m going to cook dinner.”

“I’ve gotta go. You know, I’ve gotta go when they call.”

Dawn got angry. She was really trying to work on her relationship with her husband. They had a son together. She loved her son and her husband. She thought about the good times they had together—the way Prestin had watched his daddy with awe as Justin had jumped off a sixteen-foot cliff on the North Shore. Three-year-old Prestin had grinned and clapped for his daddy and jumped up into his big arms as Justin had swum ashore.

Dawn really wanted her marriage to work.

“Are you sure you can’t stay?”

“Fuck you, Dawn. I told you. I’ve gotta go. It’s my job. Don’t you understand anything?”

“Fine. Just fine,” shouted Dawn.

Justin went on duty. He phoned Dawn to tell her he loved her—that “if I can’t have her I want her” thing.

“I’m busy,” she said. “I’m getting ready to go out.”

“Whatdaya mean you’re going to go out? Why are you going out? Are you pissed because I had to come to work?”

Dawn hung up on Justin.

He called back.

She hung up on him again.

The wife of Justin’s sergeant-in-charge was the Thomases’ babysitter. The sergeant said, “You know, your wife dropped your son off.”

“Nah, I didn’t know that,” answered Justin.

Justin phoned Dawn again. She didn’t answer. He phoned her throughout the night, but she never answered. He left messages on the machine. “What the fuck are you doing? I know what the fuck you’re doing!”

At 7 a.m., he phoned her again, that time to tell her to come pick him up, he was off from work. Still no answer. At 9 a.m., 10 a.m., 11 a.m., still no Dawn, still no ride home. When she did finally arrive, Justin was livid. He screamed at her. He berated her. He belittled her.

She didn’t want anything to do with him. “Let’s just pick up Prestin and go home. I want to go to sleep.” She refused to talk.

They picked up Prestin and went back to the house. Dawn took a bath and went to bed. Justin took his son and went to the liquor store—a fifth and a twelve-pack. He went back to the house and drank.

Two hours later, Dawn came downstairs and sat down on the couch, next to Justin. He looked at her. He spotted a hickey on her neck. The bottom dropped out of his gut; Justin Thomas felt destroyed, annihilated. They fought, violently. But it didn’t matter. Justin didn’t care anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. He was dead inside. Just like he had been when his mother shouted, “I hate you. I hate you.”

Dawn’s mother soon arrived for a visit. She watched her drunken son-in-law. She overheard his loud, profane verbal attacks on her petite, beauty-queen daughter. She took Prestin back to California with her.

Justin started snorting cocaine and smoking pot on a regular basis. He’d smoked a little pot and snorted a little coke in the Army before, but he’d never gotten caught. The drug NCO had warned the men when there would be urine tests, so Justin had always been clean for them.

But not anymore. He failed a urine test for cocaine.

“Since you’re an exceptional soldier in the field, I’m giving you a chance,” his captain said. “But you have to complete the program to stay in the Army.”

Justin entered a six-week drug-and-alcohol-rehab program, his second introduction to rehab, including that quick stint in junior high.

Just like in junior high, the anti-drug program had not one iota of influence on Justin Thomas. Rehab, doing drugs while in rehab, it was all a joke to him. Justin tripped on acid and did cocaine. He told his drug counselors what he thought they wanted to hear. Inside, he laughed and sneaked more drugs into his body.

At the same time, Dawn said to him, “I’m sorry. I know I messed up.”

Justin Thomas began to care about life again. It was near the fifth week of rehab, and just as he was beginning to care, he was told, “You’re not working the program. You’re not showing that you want to do this.”

He was kicked out of rehab.

Justin was devastated. Getting kicked out of the program meant he was to be kicked out of the Army, and he loved the Army. Guns, grenades, fighting, killing, war, drugs, alcohol, and the U.S. government paid him to do all that; life couldn’t get much better than that.

What am I gonna do now? How am I going to support my family?
he worried.
I can always go back to getting my hands dirty, but I can’t go back to the people.
He was already in deep trouble with his drug boss in California. Afraid, panicked, Justin’s heart raced as though he were on bad coke.

He went home to Dawn, but she still worked in the bar, and nothing had changed. He got that don’t-care attitude again, lit up a joint, and got another bad urine test.

“There’s no way,” he told his officers. “Can’t be. There’s no way.”

They retested him.

That second test came back bad, too.

But Justin Thomas, the fast-talking, smooth-talking charmer, convinced the Army to let him try to be a good military man again. They let him stay in for another year.

 

 

Dawn started seeing someone else. Justin started seeing someone else. He failed a third urine test. Justin Thomas was booted out of the Army. It was September of 1994.

He moved his family back to California.

Dawn was pregnant.

I’m still young. I’m only twenty-three,
he thought.
Maybe I can still give this football/college deal another shot.

He called his dad in Austin.

“Can I come back there? I want to go to school.” Justin knew he was telling his father what he wanted to hear, just like he had the rehab counselors.

On Halloween night, Harlie Thomas was born to Justin and Dawn Thomas. Harlie developed into a shy little girl who liked to get her way.

Her daddy, Justin Thomas, left for Texas, just like his own daddy had two decades before—Austin, Texas.