He said he didn't really know what day he was born. His parents were both dead before he turned 5, he said, and he'd never celebrated a birthday in his life. But Jerry Joseph's birth certificate read January 1, so on New Year's Day 2010, his family gathered around him. It would be a new year, a new decade, a celebration of Jerry's brand-new life. There were flimsy cardboard hats and streamers and wrapped gifts. Jerry, who at six feet five and 220 pounds was several inches taller than anyone else in his adoptive family, was presented a white cake adorned with candles in the shape of a 1 and a 6.
Danny Wright, the 50-year-old basketball coach who had taken Jerry in a few months before, noticed the kid get misty-eyed, just as he had at his first Christmas a week earlier. When his wife saw Jerry crying, she too was moved to tears. Wright stood by as his five children, none of them his own biologically, surrounded their new brother. The youngest, a 2-year-old adopted girl named Ariana, crawled into Jerry's giant arms. They sang the boy a song, told him to make a wish. It's a moment Wright keeps coming back to, when Jerry closed his bright brown eyes. What could the boy have wished for? he wonders. Basketball glory, maybe, and untold riches in the pros. But if Wright had to guess, he'd say Jerry offered a more solemn prayer: that if this life somehow turned out to be a dream, he'd never feel a pinch—that he'd never wake up in another world.
At the far edge of the oil-rich Permian Basin, the rust-colored town of Odessa, Texas, is profoundly dedicated to two things: church and football. The only mall in town has an oversize tablet of the Ten Commandments on permanent display; the city's 19,000-seat stadium plays host to the champion Permian Panthers, the high school football team that lured Buzz Bissinger down Interstate 20 over two decades ago to write Friday Night Lights.
Jerry Joseph showed up here on a Greyhound in February 2009, carrying little more than a birth certificate and a duffel bag of old clothes. He'd been homeless in Haiti, he said, and stowed away on a boat to Florida. The good Christians of Odessa welcomed the stranger like a lost soul. Danny Wright, a sharply pressed figure who could be mistaken for a minister, took him into his home, gave him a bed alongside his 16-year-old son. And just like the man-child in The Blind Side—which was still playing at the local theater—Jerry rewarded the love he received, becoming a good student, a dedicated Christian, and a dominant force on the court.
"We're nice people here," says Roy Garcia, the principal at Odessa's Permian High School. "Good people with good hearts. That's what makes this place what it is." Garcia first met Jerry one afternoon in late February, when the boy walked into his school looking to register for ninth grade. He was with a man he introduced as his half brother. Garcia, who jokes that he looks like a Hispanic Super Mario, remembers Jerry vividly, even among the 2,500 kids at Permian. It wasn't just his height. He was full around the chest; his face was thick. "Like, well, like a full-grown man," he says. At first the principal assumed Jerry's companion—whose name, he later learned, was Jabari Caldwell—was the registering student. But it didn't matter, he explained, because in the Odessa school district, ninth grade is at the junior high.
Down the road at Nimitz Junior High, Jerry presented a Haitian birth certificate verifying he was born in 1994. He explained that Caldwell was his legal guardian, that they'd be staying in the dorms at nearby University of Texas of the Permian Basin (UTPB), where Caldwell was on the basketball team. Caldwell signed an affidavit saying he was Jerry's half brother, and as is the law for any child who is homeless or has only temporary lodging, the boy was enrolled immediately.
Basketball coach Melvon Anders was in the Nimitz gym a few days later and saw Jerry take his shirt off. "I was like, Jee-sus Christ!" he says. The kid had all sorts of tattoos, inflated pecs, and shoulders like a racehorse. He'd never met a freshman like him. Then again, plenty of kids have tattoos these days, and this kind of early development is not unheard of, especially in basketball. When LeBron James was 16 and already nationally known, he could have passed for 24. As a junior in high school, Greg Oden looked like a middle-aged man.
The coach kept an eye on Jerry when classes started. Most kids that size are magnets for fistfights, but in his four months at Nimitz, Jerry never got into a single one, unless you count the brawl he broke up before it started. He was studious, a hard worker—"a pleasure to have in class, actually," Anders says. Despite never attending a school of any kind in Haiti—which of course meant no school records to transfer in—Jerry breezed through his accelerated "catch-up" curriculum. He explained that when he was little, his relatives brought him textbooks from the United States. He had a slight accent but spoke English well. A few of the teachers joked that Jerry was secretly an adult. Once a teacher mistook him for a substitute.
Jerry had a beautiful wide smile and what nearly everyone describes as an exotic "swagger." He skipped down the halls when he thought nobody was watching. With his headphones on, he would sway and sing—sometimes in Creole—lost in a world all his own. If anybody asked, he explained he was living in the dorm with his brother because his parents were dead. With an answer like that, nobody asked much more. Plus, once you watched him play ball, it was hard to think of anything else. Coach Anders saw him up close in a spring student-faculty game. "We were out there stretching, and he ran up to the other rim and threw down this monster dunk," he says. "I've never seen a 15-year-old do that. I've had kids taller than him, and they still can't dunk like that."
When the coach asked the boy where he learned to hoop, Jerry said he'd seen the game on television and played a little on the streets of Haiti. Anders wondered if maybe the kid wasn't some kind of prodigy.
At Nimitz, Jerry never asked for a handout, which, of course, made people all the more willing to help. That summer, when school let out, some of the coaches recommended him for a job in the concession stand at the public pool. Melvon Anders supervised him. Jerry was popular with the teenage girls, a good employee—never late, never snapped at anyone, never had any money missing from his register. One dry-roasted day in August, someone asked him about his home, and Jerry pulled up Google maps on an iPhone. He showed a group, Anders included, a mountain in Haiti where he grew up. He said that most of his life was spent herding goats. They all listened dumbstruck. Goats? A hut on a mountainside? "Who were we to question his story," Anders says. "He was the first Haitian most of us had ever met."
Divonte Wallace and Demorri Wilkerson remember meeting Jerry that summer at the UTPB gym, where the best area players gather for pickup games. Divonte and Demorri grew up in Odessa, balling on playgrounds and at the Boys & Girls Club. They were on JV together the past two seasons: Demorri was a defensive specialist, Divonte a rail-thin six-foot shooting guard who perfected his form with 250 jump shots a day.
This year, Divonte says, a few colleges were looking to recruit him. Nowhere huge—just some schools around San Antonio—but still, usually recruiters only came to Odessa for football. Things would be different this season. "This was going to be our year," Divonte says. The day Divonte and Demorri met him, Jerry unleashed a 360 dunk over a mesmerized player. "When I heard he was going to play for Permian, I thought it was like a sign from God that we were going to win state," Demorri says.
It wasn't long before Danny Wright heard reports about the six-foot-five wunderkind. The former director of the Boys & Girls Club, Wright is more than just a coach in Odessa. Dozens of kids in town call him Dad or Pops. Many have lived with him; he can't remember if it's seventeen or eighteen. The oldest of five in a single-mother household, Wright has been taking care of kids his whole life. It's why God put him on this earth.
On their first meeting, Wright was struck by Jerry's confidence. He asked the boy to dinner and introduced him to the rest of the family. He explained that he has no problem helping kids, but only the ones who really want to improve their lives. "I've had a lot of kids stay with me," Wright told Jerry, "but I didn't ask one of them."
The timing of that dinner couldn't have been better. A few days later, Jerry called Coach Wright with his own housing crisis. His half brother was going back to Florida; Jerry asked Wright if he could stay with him. Coach gave Jerry the usual spiel: my house, my rules. "Everyone helps out," he told him. "If I come in and see leaves on the porch, I know you saw those same leaves. I shouldn't have to come in and tell someone to sweep them." In Wright's house, kids are kids and the adults are adults, and there would never be any confusion on that.
He told Jerry he could sleep in the same room as his stepson Dominique, who was also on the Permian basketball team. Did Wright ask Dominique how he felt about the idea of sharing his room?
"Why would I do that?"
···
Everybody thinks about it at some point: What life would be like if we were given a second chance, a fresh start in a place where nobody knows our past. Jerry began his first year at Permian on a mission, running to school from Coach's house. Lots of people saw him out there in the hot August sun. Three miles each way, jogging through the streets like he was Rocky or something.
Just as he had at the junior high, he excelled in his classes. At one point, his Spanish teacher singled out Jerry, an immigrant with less than a year of total schooling. He started seeing a girl, a tenth grader on the dance team, whom he'd met at Nimitz. His teammates saw them together in the halls once in a while, but he didn't like to talk about her. He was all about basketball.
When the season started in November, the Panthers basketball team looked better than anything Permian had assembled in years. They were big, with six players at least six feet four. Jerry didn't begin the season as a starter. But when the team dropped three of four games—each by only a few points—Coach Wright pulled Divonte Wallace, the sharpshooter. He told him there were going to be a few people changing positions to make room for Jerry, who would now be starting at point guard. "I'm not gonna lie," says Divonte. "It hurt. But I was all about the team, whatever's best for the team."
Jerry rewarded his coach with a giant game in early December against district rival San Angelo Central. Just seconds into the first quarter, he snatched the ball and drove the length of the court, throwing down what several teammates describe as a "gorilla slam." "It was a moment you could just feel in the air," says Demorri Wilkerson. "That was it. We were on our way." On the bus ride home after the win, they felt like all those great Permian football teams must have felt: like champions in wait.
The gym was soon packed for every home game. Fans remarked that with his flat-top haircut and the way he always seemed drenched in sweat, Jerry looked a little like Boobie Miles, the star-crossed running back from the Friday Night Lights season. The seniors invited Jerry to hang out with them at the back of the bus. They called him Grandpa and the Haitian Sensation. He'd get to school early to shoot around and stay late to impart his basketball IQ. "If Jerry told you something, it wouldn't be wrong," says a teammate. "He knew the game like a coach." When a player relied too much on one hand, he told them to go an entire practice using only their off hand. That, he said, is what gave him such a powerful crossover. Just when you knew where Jerry was going, he went in a completely new direction.
···
In the days between Christmas and Jerry's sixteenth birthday, the team traveled to Lubbock for the Caprock Classic, a statewide competition in which Permian normally struggled. But this year the team breezed to the semifinals, where, down by three with 2.1 seconds left, Coach drew up a play to get the ball to Jerry. After curling around a screen, he took the pass, left his feet, and released the shot all in one fluid motion. The ball seemed to dangle as the clock ran out, gently floating toward the rim, until...the entire gym exploded. Fans and parents leapt from their seats. Jerry stood there, awestruck. His teammates piled on top of him. Coach Wright, in his eternal sobriety, reminded his players that Jerry's buzzer beater merely sent the game into overtime: "We still have a game to play here, gentlemen!" They went on to lose that game and the third-place contest, too—but in the end, nobody could forget that shot.
Back in Odessa, Jerry's roots were growing. He asked teammates about their church youth group at Mission Dorado, a Baptist church on the eastern outskirts of town with a sign that proclaims A FELLOWSHIP OF EXCITEMENT. Jerry liked it there, and soon it wasn't just Sundays. There were Wednesday services, Bible studies, group prayers. "Very quickly he became a regular fixture," says Philip Skelton, who was the church's pastor at the time.
One day Jerry approached Skelton with a request: He wanted to be baptized. The pastor responded with a dinner invitation. "I don't want to baptize someone without them realizing what's going on," he says. Over steaks at the Golden Corral, Skelton explained to Jerry that when he plunged into that water, his old life would end. When he emerged, he would be reborn in Christ. Jerry told the pastor that was exactly what he wanted. "He gave all the right answers."
At church, an older couple gave Jerry small amounts of cash so he could go to the movies. They talked about getting him a car. The entire town, it seemed, was falling in love with Jerry. After the January 2010 earthquake that leveled Port-au-Prince, the Odessa American ran a feature dedicated entirely to the town's Haitian import. "I didn't go looking for Jerry," Wright told the paper. "And Jerry didn't come looking for me. I believe God sent him here, and he sent him here for a reason."
The Haitian Sensation went on to average more than twenty points a game for Permian. The team went 16-13 and finished fourth in the district, the best season in Coach Wright's five-year tenure. In the playoffs, they were matched up with one of the district's best, the El Paso Americas. The lanky Americas dominated from the start with a stunning alley-oop and a barrage of unanswered threes. By halftime, Permian down by eighteen, the game was out of reach. Jerry scored only eleven points and accounted for most of the team's twenty-four turnovers. A few of the seniors, their basketball careers over, cried in the locker room. Despite his performance, Jerry was named the district's Newcomer of the Year.
After the season, the recruiting letters starting showing up. Coaches from big programs all over the country had heard of the combo power-forward/point-guard. There was a new piece of recruiting mail for Jerry every single day. "Texas Tech was ready to take him," says Wright. "They wanted him bad."
Jerry kept practicing. He played in a series of travel tournaments with an AAU team from New Mexico, one of the best in the region. If he thought he'd miss church, he made sure to e-mail Pastor Skelton saying he'd be thinking of them.
One weekend in April, he was playing at the Real Deal in the Rock, a massive AAU tournament in Little Rock that draws the best high school players—and plenty of college scouts—from all over the nation. In the middle of one of Jerry's games, a group of players and coaches from a Florida team gathered at the edge of the court. Some of them were laughing. They watched as one of their coaches approached Jerry.
"Hey, Guerd, what's going on?" the coach said. "What you doin' here?"
The players saw Jerry look back over his shoulder. "Sir, I don't know you," he said and hurried off, shaking his head.
···
Louis Vives swears he knows the guy he saw that day in Arkansas, but he'd never heard the name Jerry Joseph. He knew him as Guerdwich Montimere, a kid who'd played around Florida for years. "He walked just like him," says Vives, the president of the South Florida Elite basketball club. "He talked like him. He played like him. He even sweat like him. This kid used to sweat like someone poured water on him."
When the team went for sandwiches later that day, Vives's players joked that they were going to find aliases when they turned 21 so they could keep playing. But that night at the hotel, Vives got to thinking. He Googled the New Mexico squad. He found the Permian roster, along with stories about Jerry's success in Texas. He thought about how strange it was, the idea of a 22-year-old man walking around with a bunch of high school kids. What would they talk about? What would they do? Then he thought about what high school kids do. The coach has a teenage daughter himself. He couldn't sleep that night. This whole thing wasn't so funny anymore.
When Vives's team got back to Florida, word of the Guerdwich sighting spread quickly. "He was definitely the talk of the town down here," Vives says. A former AAU coach started looking up other Permian players. He found Divonte Wallace's MySpace page and on it a phone number.
Divonte was sitting on his couch watching TV with Demorri on a Saturday afternoon when he got the call. The adult voice on the other end asked if he went to Permian, if he knew Jerry. Divonte was initially concerned about narcing on his friend and said he went to crosstown Odessa High School. "Just have Jerry call me," the coach replied.
Divonte immediately rang Jerry, who asked him to call the guy back on three-way, concealing Jerry's number. Divonte tried not to listen in after that, but really, how could he not? He remembers hearing the coach calling Jerry by a strange name and saying, "What the hell are you doing?" Then Jerry: "Look, I don't know you." He heard Jerry ask the guy to stop contacting him.
Permian administrators started receiving anonymous tips suggesting they look into Jerry's background. Similar messages went to the Odessa American. Principal Roy Garcia got a series of e-mails and voice mails. He started amassing evidence: Turns out Jabari Caldwell, the man who'd said he was Jerry's half brother, wasn't related to him at all. Caldwell, in fact, had been teammates with Montimere in Florida. Garcia compared photos. There weren't a lot of pictures of Montimere available, but the ones he found looked a lot like Jerry—though it was hard to be certain three years on.
Garcia called Jerry to his office, confronting him with what he'd found. Jerry insisted that he was who he said he was. "I talked to him for hours," Garcia says. "As a principal, getting kids to confess is part of my job. But this guy never broke. He never wavered once." Garcia eventually pulled Jerry from off-season workouts "just to be safe."
As rumors spread around Odessa, people started talking: Was Jerry really some 22-year-old? The Wright household circled around its newest member. Divonte called Jerry again to ask him man-to-man. Jerry denied it, told him not to worry, that this would all blow over soon.
On April 29, two weeks after the tournament in Little Rock, the principal called Coach Wright and Jerry into his office. He had something for them both to see.
There on Garcia's desk were two new photos next to each other. On the left was Jerry in a white Permian uniform, playing defense: His right arm was extended, his brow furrowed, his lips open and puckered ever so slightly in a moment of concentration. On the right was Montimere in a blue Dillard uniform, playing defense: His right arm was extended, his brow furrowed, and his lips parted in the same expression.
"This is you," Coach Wright said, barely able to contain his anger.
"That ain't me," Jerry said.
"Look," Wright said, leaning in, "I'm not asking for confirmation. I'm telling you. I don't know what you're pulling, but you need to get your things and be on your way."
Wright stepped out of the office to call his wife, Jimmie. He told her to look through Jerry's bags. She didn't want to, but Wright insisted. Sure enough, there in his duffel bag, she found it: a passport for "Guerdwich Montimer." Jimmie didn't want to believe it. She cried into the phone. Wright searched desperately for the right words to comfort her. Those words never came.
Principal Garcia turned over everything to the Odessa PD and to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Jerry earnestly maintained that the passport wasn't his, that he'd gotten it from an uncle, and within a few hours ICE officials came forward with news that shocked everyone: Jerry Joseph, they informed the school district, was definitely not Guerdwich Montimere. The specifics of their investigation were never made public (and ICE has refused to comment), but officials told principal Garcia that they'd run Jerry's fingerprints through the FBI database and had come up empty.
Despite the evidence against him, Jerry was allowed back in school. "When the United States government tells me he isn't this other guy, who am I to argue with them?" Garcia says. Still, there was another problem. Since Jerry was here illegally and didn't have a guardian in the United States, ICE said, he would have to be deported. While Coach Wright felt betrayed that Jerry had lied about his half brother, he figured the kid was desperate. He volunteered to adopt the boy. His wife agreed. "We didn't have to think twice," he says. "You just do."
···
Like Jerry, Guerdwich Montimere was born in Haiti. His mother, Manikisse Montimere, says the boy's father died while she was pregnant with Guerdwich and his fraternal twin, Guerdwin—who stands about five inches shorter and has a much rounder face. They were born on February 23, 1988. Unable to find work, Manikisse left Haiti and moved in with a network of aunts, uncles, and cousins in Florida in 1994, the year that would later appear on Jerry Joseph's birth certificate.
Manikisse and Guerdwin still live together outside Fort Lauderdale, in a small white house with red-tile shingles, an American flag flying over their perfectly manicured front yard. An employee at an auto-parts store, Manikisse has short glossy hair, bright brown eyes, and a beautiful wide smile that disappears immediately when the topic of Guerdwich comes up. It's just too painful, she says.
His childhood was "typical," a happy kid, plenty of friends, nothing particularly traumatic. She took her sons to a Baptist church whenever she could. Throughout middle and high school, Guerdwich's grades were poor, but always good enough to keep him eligible for athletics. "That's all he did for a long time," says his uncle Wilner Montimere. "Anytime you saw him, he always had a ball in his hand."
Vives, the AAU coach, started recruiting Guerdwich when he was 16. During his senior year at Dillard, the team made it to the state semifinals, and Guerdwich was a McDonald's All-American nominee. "He was a good, hardworking kid," Vives remembers. "Always polite, always driven." But on a team of stars, he didn't have the size, the stats, and especially not the grades to stand out to scouts. He ended up at Highland Community College in Freeport, Illinois. But when he was redshirted until his grades improved, Guerdwich left school before a single game.
Back in Florida, living with his mother, Guerdwich was clearly depressed. They fought constantly. She would press him about his future, where he was going to go to school, what he would study. He'd say that he wasn't giving up on basketball; she'd fire back that he was living in a dream world. Before long, one of these arguments turned nasty. She says she can't bear to repeat what they said to each other. "It was just...just...awful."
And that was the end. Guerdwich thundered out and didn't come home that night. Or the next. Some of his former Dillard teammates say they heard he went to Haiti sometime in early 2008, but nobody can say for sure. His mother says she hasn't seen him since the fight.
···
The coaches in Florida were persistent. There were more e-mails, more newspaper stories. Under pressure, ICE continued its investigation. Ten days after clearing Jerry, the agency turned up damning evidence: a hard copy of Montimere's immigration file with fingerprints—taken before the agency converted to an electronic database. The prints were a match.
Jerry was arrested at school that day and charged with presenting a false ID to a police officer, a misdemeanor. His friends at church bailed him out immediately. Less than twenty-four hours later, he was arrested again, this time for tampering with government documents, a third-degree felony. Again he was bailed out and, this time, given a lawyer. From the beginning, his attorney has claimed that the kid is who he says he is; or at the very least, he says, the burden of proof that he isn't falls upon the prosecutors.
Within days, Principal Garcia agreed to forfeit all sixteen victories from that season and give back Jerry's Newcomer of the Year award. The governing bodies all decided the coach and principal had done their due diligence in checking Jerry's eligibility. It was personal vindication for Garcia, but the principal was hardly at ease. He needed to know one thing: Was there a girl?
···
They were in the same grade. She has fair skin and dark eyes and is a member of the Panther Paws dance group. Though, as her mother says, "she developed early in the chest—we can't go anywhere without men staring," the girl is most certainly still a teenager, a child. On Facebook, she "likes" texting, sleeping, and Despicable Me, and under favorite books says only, "Doesn't matter."
She was really in love with Jerry, says her mother: "Even if it was a puppy love, it was a real love." The mother will talk about what went on between her now 17-year-old daughter and Jerry, but she doesn't want their names published. "The incident," as she calls it, happened one night in August of 2009. The girl was 15. Montimere was 21. The mother was out of town, and the girl was staying with her father for the summer. She says her daughter was likely the aggressor. "We're very close," the mother says. "Best friends. She tells me everything." After a pause, she adds, "Eventually."
She says the girl was honest when the school district, and then the police, asked if they'd had sex. But the mother emphasizes that she and her daughter did not ask for Jerry to be charged with statutory rape. She isn't sure if her daughter would testify, should the case go to trial. When the news first broke, kids at school were vicious. They called the girl a whore. They blamed her for putting the town star in jail. They wore FREE JERRY shirts to school and called at all hours to make horrific threats. Mother and daughter have moved twice in the past year.
Even after all that, she says that Jerry—and she still calls him Jerry—is the best boyfriend her daughter has ever had. "He was sweet, polite, respectful," she says. "A hell of a lot better than most of the trash around here." Jerry even reached out to the girl from jail through friends to say he was sorry for all the trouble. The girl still keeps every article that she finds about him. "That's a teenage girl in love."
As a mother, isn't she concerned about the possible age difference? "Actually, not really that much." She says when her daughter was born, she herself was 15 years old. Her boyfriend, a former Permian football player from the Friday Night Lights era, happened to be 20 at the time.
She says her daughter will be okay. "She's strong," the mother says. "And she has so much light in her. So much light."
Still, the mother has looked into suing the school district. This entire ordeal has been exhausting, and she figures that's worth something. She says her daughter hasn't tried to see Jerry. But she's 17 now, the legal age of consent in Texas. No matter what happens, Jerry will be out of jail someday. "He'll always be welcome in my house," she says.
Odessa is still dumbstruck. Principal Garcia wonders if maybe the kid picked Permian because it's the school from Friday Night Lights. "Maybe he thought we were all a bunch of dumb hillbillies?" Divonte Wallace, the guard who lost his starting spot to Jerry, says the year's a blur. With no college offers, he stuck around Odessa, landing a job at FedEx. He wakes at 3 A.M. and spends the morning slinging boxes. He's staying in shape, though, in case a college ever comes calling.
These days, almost everyone has a theory about Jerry. Some say that he is crazy, possibly traumatized by something so bad it's made him forget his entire life. Some say that he is one of the greatest actors alive—"Maybe he should be in Hollywood," says Divonte. Some even say, despite all the evidence and the incredibly long odds against it, that the person in the adult-male section of the Ector County jail is a very scared 17-year-old boy.
Then there are the dozens of people who witnessed Jerry get baptized. Whoever he was when he went into the water, they say, Jerry Joseph came up. That's what baptism is. They still write him and visit him. They sit behind him at hearings. "I love Jerry," Pastor Philip Skelton says. "To me, he was a kid who sought after God. You don't get too deep into the past. It's not about where you're from. It's about where you're going."
Danny Wright wishes it was that simple. Wright's family, once strong enough to add members without straining, is now torn. His wife and kids still love Jerry. She can't stop thinking of him as her son—the same teenage boy who used to sing as he did the dishes. They visit him and talk to him on the phone.
"Dad, you're not being fair," the kids will say.
"I just don't think it's a good idea," Wright replies. He knows they go see him anyway. Now there are secrets. Now there are things they don't tell Dad.
Coach hears people in town talk. They ask why he's taken in so many kids over the years. They ask if he gets money from the state. He doesn't. "If you know you're right with God," he says, "what people say doesn't matter." Wright would like to think that if some other needy young person came to him asking for help, he'd still give it. "But honestly," he says, "I'm not sure anymore."
This year the Permian basketball team lost eleven of its first twelve games and finished last in the district. The coach and principal both warned the team before the season that they'd get a lot of grief. When they traveled to rival San Angelo, the home crowd wore black T-shirts with GOT JERRY? on the front. On the back of the shirts was OH YEAH...HE'S 22.
"These kids don't deserve that," the coach says. "People forget, they're just kids."
Christmas and New Year's were more subdued this year. Though no one mentioned it, everyone was thinking about Jerry, even little Ariana, now 3. She spent Christmas running around, helping everyone else unwrap their presents. But every so often she'd stop to ask what happened to her brother.
"She's so persistent and so smart," Wright says. "It just cuts you."
They told her he was away at a tournament. But she wanted to know when he was coming home.
"Where's Jerry, Daddy? Where's Jerry?"
···
Between the parking lot and the front door of the Ector County jail is a sign reading BEWARE OF THE SNAKES. The surrounding fence is rimmed with barbed wire. Overhead flaps the Texas flag. And inside is the man so many people know as Jerry Joseph—the same one so many others are convinced is Guerdwich Montimere. He's facing six felony charges, the most serious of which, sexual assault, could land him in prison for twenty years.
His hair has grown out since he was arrested. His eyes aren't as bright as they are in the photos. From behind bulletproof glass, he talks about his new life. He spends much of it alone, he says, reading the Bible—especially the Book of Job. He appreciates stories of God testing men. He plays basketball every so often, but only to stay in shape. A lot of the guys in here just use the game as an excuse to fight. Besides, he says, he doesn't really like the sport that much.
"Basketball is a skill," he says. "It's a gift from God. But it was never my passion." He says it isn't that anyone pressured him to play, exactly. It just made everyone else so happy. Everyone seemed to like him so much more. "I thought about quitting all the time," he says.
He really wants to spill his heart, but his lawyer tells him he shouldn't. He says he's writing a book in his head.
His biggest regret? Not staying home more, he says. He wouldn't have gotten in the trouble he's in now—by which he seems to mean the sexual-assault charges against him—had he just stayed with his family. That's what he imagines these days when he closes his eyes and he needs to get away. He pictures himself with people who love him. He imagines he's at church, with everyone he cares about so much. He's at home "with my mom and my dad and my brothers and sisters." He thinks about them all having dinner together at their house on a quiet avenue in Odessa. "Why do people forget the good things about me?" he says. "They just think I'm some monster."
Of all he's heard and read about himself, the most painful part, he says, is when people imply that he may have gotten baptized to further ingratiate himself. He can't stand someone thinking he exploited the church. And watching him, you can't help but think: He believes. His faith is complete and unwavering. He seems so earnest, so certain that there really is some other guy out there, that this has all been the most incredible series of coincidences. Then again, maybe his fellow church members are right. Maybe Jerry did experience a rebirth of sorts. Every man dreams about it, after all—how life might be different if we had only studied more or gotten the girl or sunk the winning shot. How much fun it'd be to replay the game of life if given a second chance.
"I can't wait for this to be over," he says. But he's not scared. "No matter how it turns out, I know who I am. I know my life."
He says it doesn't matter how he's judged when his court date comes around in August. What matters is the next life.
"I persevere with God in my heart," he says. "He knows me by name."
The name on his court docket is Guerdwich Montimere. And when he gets visitors, the guards call out the name Guerdwich Montimere. And the plastic wristband he wears at all times, that too reads Guerdwich Montimere. So what is his name?
He answers without a second of hesitation or a hint of insincerity.
"My name is Jerry."
