The Journey Of Chase Stain

I was born on November 17th, 1977 in Glendale, Arizona. Born six weeks premature, I spent the first few weeks of my life in an incubator, and despite entering the world a bit early, I recovered quickly and was an overall healthy child.

My parents divorced when I was two, and my mother gave birth to my younger half brother three years later. My brothers father was my dad's former best friend, and it was an overall sad story of how the love triangle ended many friendships.

A few months after giving birth, my mother left my brothers father and became a single parent. Over the next five years, My mom frequently worked two, or sometimes three jobs at a time in order to pay bills. I was a latch key kid, and somewhat raised my younger brother in many ways. My mom also went through a series of bad relationships during that five year span as well, and my brother and I frequently moved, bouncing from house to house.

In early 1988, my mom made the decision to move to Southern California after meeting a man at her work and starting a relationship. The romance was short lived and the couple broke up just a few days after arriving in the state. Newly single, my mom started dating again, and she soon met a new man named Bob. The new couple eventually moved in to an apartment in San Marcos, along with my younger brother and myself.

After a few months of dating, my mom realized that she had made a huge mistake. Her new boyfriend was a large cocaine distributor and was putting her family in harms way. Over the next few months, we lived in various areas across California such as Poway, El Cajon, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Compton, San Francisco, Burbank, and several others. We eventually ended up in Mexico, staying in Tijuana for a week before relocating to Guadalajara.

Unable to leave her new boyfriend and fearing for her childen’s safety, my mother made the decision to send my brother and I to go live with each of our fathers. In 1989, my younger half brother, David, moved to Seattle, Washington to live with his father, and I moved back to Phoenix, Arizona to live with my father. The situation was strange for me, as I had not seen my father in several years and had actually thought that my younger brothers father was my father before my mom informed me just a few weeks before the move. I think I adjusted well to the situation, probably because my father enrolled me back into my original elementary school, giving me familiar surroundings and allowing me to associate with the children that I had grown up with. Children can be extremely resilient, and are capable of overcoming many situations. A child doesn't know what normal is, and I still feel to this very day that I had a wonderful childhood. The most important thing is to make sure that the child feels loved, and I always felt as though my mother loved me very much.

My brother and I were never aware of the situation we were in at the time, and we did not find out until years later when I was in my late teens. I also never found out who we were fleeing from at the time, despite both me and my brother asking our mother several times about the events throughout our lives. My mom always replied that it was a bad time in her life and she didn’t want to think about it. Unfortunately, she passed away without ever answering any of the questions regarding that time period in my youth. My brother and I have come to terms with the fact that we will most likely never receive the answers to the questions that we have regarding our childhood.

My brother and I spent the majority of the year with each of our fathers, and spent ten weeks in California visiting our mother during their summer break. During one summer visit, my mom’s boyfriend became extremely violent after a night of heavy drinking. My best friend, Phil, from Phoenix had come to San Francisco with me for the visit, and as the fight escalated, Phil and I locked ourselves in my bedroom to stay protected as my younger younger brother slept through the chaos. We cracked open the door and watched as my mom was physically assaulted. After several blows to the head, he took my mom and held her over a kitchen counter as he started to sexually assault her. I remember not even knowing what he was doing at the time. I had never scene a porno, and my complete knowledge of sex was all visions in my head. I had never seen the act, so at the time, I assumed that he was just holding her down or something, trying to show dominance. During the assault, my mother was able to open a kitchen drawer and grabbed a steak knife and drove it into Bob's hand, giving her a chance to escape out the back door. I heard Bob shout, “I’m gonna kill your kids now bitch!”, and he walked to the bedroom door where Phil and I had been watching. I quickly closed and locked the door and frantically woke up my brother David, just as a fist came smashing through the door and reached to the door knob and started to unlock the door. I grabbed a small baseball bat that I had got at a San Diego Padres game and used it to strike Bob's hand as it reached through the door, and then Phil pushed over a bookshelf to barricade the door as my brother ran outside.

The three of us ran across a field that was littered with broken glass from a recent earthquake to get to the closest neighbor. As we arrived to the neighbors house, we saw my mom was already at the door, pleading with the homeowner to let them stay and call the police. The neighbor refused, so we pushed him aside and entered his home and locked the doors as my mom’s boyfriend arrived and started kicking the door. As Bob attempted to break down the door, Phil, David, my mother and I all escaped out a side door and got into my mom's car. Just as we were about to drive away, a fist smashed through the drivers side window and Bob started pulling my mom outside of the car. I was in the passenger seat, so I reached my foot over to the gas pedal and pushed down, driving the car about two feet into a wall. Bob lost his grip on my mom and I threw the vehicle into reverse and pushed the pedal again, and the front wheels pulled Bob down, forcing him to be sucked under the car as we drove over his legs. My mom put the car into drive and we drove to a corner store and used a payphone to call the police. While Bob was in the hospital, and then eventually put into jail until his hearing, my mom packed our belongings and moved in with a friend.