David Garlock: From a Chaotic Childhood to a Voice for Change

David Garlock called me on New Year’s Day 1991, wanting to watch the Rose Bowl together. I hadn’t talked to my brother in months since he’d been kicked out of our dad’s house for drinking and smoking marijuana. But when my mom got on the phone, I knew I had to go over. I hadn’t seen her in two years.

What started as a family reunion became the beginning of eight years of hell.

The Nightmare Begins in a Basement

David was eleven when his world changed forever. After three hours of catching up with family, the man who had befriended his brother suggested they play hide and seek in the basement. Nothing unusual about that for kids. David found what he thought was a good hiding spot in a closet.

“That’s when the abuse began,” David told me. “I wrote a poem about it, you know, and talk about like hands on me and ways that shouldn’t be, you know, and just the whole scenario happened. And then walking up those steps, I was in this like state of confusion, you know, I didn’t know really what happened, why it happened.”

The abuser pulled him aside afterward with a threat that would control David’s life for the next eight years. If he ever told anyone, the man said he would kill David and his family. For an eleven-year-old, that threat became gospel.

“That’s when I began putting these masks on because no one could know anything about me,” David explained. “For the next eight years, I became a really good actor because no one could know anything about what’s going on because I feared that my parents, my brother, my sister, and or I would all be killed.”

Perfect Storm of Dysfunction

David’s childhood was already fractured before the sexual abuse started. He and his brother scored 10 out of 10 on the ACEs test. Adverse Childhood Experiences. A perfect score you never want to achieve.

His earliest memory was hiding under his grandmother’s kitchen table at age five, watching his father chase his mother and sister with a hacksaw blade. His grandmother had to call police on her own son. David thought his job was to protect his mom.

When his parents divorced, his mother got custody for four months. She’d wake them up asking if they wanted to go to school. As eight and nine-year-olds, they said no. They went maybe eight times in four months, spending their days playing Nintendo and eating pizza and Pepsi every night.

The abuser had manipulated his way into their lives through David’s brother, who had been placed in a group home. The man had just gotten out of prison in South Carolina and befriended the group home operator to gain access to young boys. After grooming and abusing David’s brother for months, he convinced their mother to move to Washington, promising free housing. His real goal was accessing David.

Eight Years Behind Masks

David became an expert at compartmentalizing. School mask. Church mask. Football mask. He played fullback and linebacker, starting both ways.

“I really used football as a way to get my anger out, you know, because I could legally hit somebody as hard as I want,” he said. “I played fullback and linebacker. So I’m constantly hitting people every play.”

The sexual abuse escalated to severe physical beatings. David was forced to drop out of high school with one semester left. They moved to Vegas, then Louisiana, where it got worse.

The breaking point came at the Morgan City Grill, where all three of them worked third shift. David went to the bathroom to count his tips after waiting on some customers from a nearby restaurant. The abuser followed him, shut the door, grabbed him by the throat and slammed him against the paper towel dispenser. David blacked out. When he came to, the man was punching him back to consciousness.

“It was instances like that, you know, where I knew that he would kill us at any point at any time,” David said.

The Night Everything Changed

On the night of the murder, there wasn’t really a decision. David and his brother had been drinking. Eight years of rage and hatred finally boiled over. In psychology, they call it seeing red. David describes it as everything building up until it exploded.

“I don’t go a day without regretting that decision and regretting that we took somebody’s life,” David told me. “At that moment, you know, it was what we felt had to be done, you know, to escape, you know.”

They buried the body in the backyard. For four months, David lived in a different kind of prison. He couldn’t tell anyone what happened. During the day, he worked as a waiter. At night, he numbed himself with any drug he could find. “I was doing any type of drugs. I’m talking, I was huffing freon,” he said. “That tells you that I was doing anything and everything just to stay out of it.”

His brother left after a week and a half. David was arrested alone on October 29, 1999. He was twenty years old.

From Confession to Conviction

When detectives came to his workplace asking for questioning, David partially confessed that first night. They booked him on murder charges. Alabama loves the death penalty. David spent his first weekend in a cold booking cell, crying himself to sleep, wondering if he’d get executed.

Three days later, they put him in an interrogation room for seven hours with two packs of cigarettes. He chain-smoked both packs in thirty minutes, then sat alone with his thoughts about the abuse, the murder, everything.

Finally, he called the detective back and told him everything. The abuse. The murder. All of it. First time he’d ever told anyone.

“That was this big weight taken off my chest because this is the first time that I ever told anybody about abuse. The first time I’d ever told anybody about the murder. And I was actually able to begin to take off these masks. I no longer had to hide anymore.”

When the detective drove him back to county jail, David asked if he’d get the death penalty or life without parole. The detective asked if he believed in God. David said yes. “You need to seek him now,” the detective replied.

That conversation changed David’s trajectory. He asked for a Bible and surrendered his life to God.

Twenty-Five Years to Thirteen

David’s court-appointed lawyer was pitiful. He didn’t tell David about youthful offender status, which could have limited his sentence to three years since he was under twenty-one. David only discovered this by reading law books himself. The lawyer offered one deal: twenty-five years.

“Hey, if you have to serve all 25 years, you’ll still be a young 45 when you get out,” the lawyer told twenty-one-year-old David.

They took the plea because they didn’t know better.

David decided to do the time instead of letting the time do him. He got his GED in county jail. In prison, he earned certificates in drafting and a master’s in theology. He went through behavior modification programs.

The hardest work came in his last three years: hospice care. Taking care of men dying in prison, knowing they’d never experience freedom again. Watching the Department of Corrections treat them as numbers, not humans.

Brian Stevenson’s Equal Justice Initiative started working with David and his brother in 2008. Because of everything David had accomplished while incarcerated, he made parole after thirteen years.

Finding Purpose in the Pain

Today, David speaks at universities across the country. He serves on national boards focused on criminal justice reform. He works on geriatric medical parole and parole eligibility for people with life sentences.

His mother never knew the full truth until David and his brother wrote her a thirty-page letter from jail. She died of a massive heart attack while writing them back. In that final letter, she said she thought something was happening but was sorry she never asked.

David blamed himself for her death for over a year. Then he realized it was just her time.

Now he uses his story to give voice to others suffering in silence. Sexual abuse survivors. Kids in dysfunctional homes. People trapped in cycles they can’t see a way out of.

“I always tell people, you know, because there’s a lot of people who have experienced what I have, who wish that they could do what I have. You know, I always tell them, like, no, you don’t, you know, because you’ve experienced a lot of trauma up until this point. But I have to live with a thought every day that I took somebody’s life.”

David Garlock carries that weight daily. But he’s turned it into something that helps others find their own way out of the darkness.