It was in one of his earliest letters that Daniel told me about being left at the famous LOVE statue by his father as a little boy in Center City Philadelphia. It was a cold winter day. He was with his little sister, Eboni. They weren’t dressed for the weather, and they had no money to get home or even make a phone call. They sat for hours with strangers walking by them. It was starting to get dark. They were scared and alone. Finally, Daniel, who was about 10 at the time, figured out a way they could take a public bus home to their mother.
I’ve since asked Daniel about that incident over the years, because it fascinated me. As someone who grew up in the Philadelphia area, the statue was a happy place. It was a place we took class pictures on field trips as kids, and then later, as adults, we took photos on our iPhones that we posted to social media. But for Daniel, the statue represented everything but love.
Looking back on it now, he says he knows his father was a drug addict who was trying to score, and that he also struggled with mental illness. Daniel is not angry at his father anymore for the incident, just sad that it happened, sad that they put their trust in this man because they wanted so much for him to be a loving, responsible father, but it didn’t work out. It was just the one of the many disappointments when it came to their dad.
So when I talked to Eboni in December of 2019, I naturally wanted to hear the story from her point of view. She basically told it the same way Daniel did, but with a different tone. She felt scared and alone, but she never saw that in Daniel. In him, she saw her protector, she saw confidence, she saw her big brother who would make a plan to keep them safe and get them home, and he did.
For me, this moment says so much about Daniel and his relationship with Eboni. It’s a cliché in a way– a neglectful father leaving his kids in a drug-infused state in what was at the time a very dangerous city in the dead of winter. A sad tale. Or is it? In my opinion, it’s an example of Daniel’s resilience, his firm desire to overcome his circumstances, to not have his life defined by them.
I will never pass that statue again without thinking of Daniel and Eboni. A few years ago, before I heard Eboni’s version, I was there on a college visit with my oldest daughter. She posed for typical teenage photos of herself in front of it with dramatic expressions. But all I could see were the ghosts of a little boy and girl at that foot of that statue in the 1980s waiting for someone to come for them.
In this episode, we see a Daniel no one has ever heard about, through his family’s loving eyes, we peel back the layers of the man the world knows as a murderer and the mother who is holding her breath, waiting, just like he waited as a child at that statue, waiting for her son to return.
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August 26, 2021 at 05:00PM
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Follow the Truth: The City of Brotherly Love - WRAL.com
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