Dear Listener,

The news sent me looking for something. I found the notes from 2011 exactly where I knew I had left them, in a small cubby hole in my desk in the kitchen. The story they told was so painful that the evening after it occurred, I felt compelled to write it down, but even without looking at the notes in years, I had not forgotten.

My notes begin like this: Javier is seven, Ollie is nine.

Ollie is the youngest of my four children. He was nine on the day I went to a meeting at the Hispanic Coalition of Alabama, HICA!, along with my colleague Tom Perez, then the Assistant Attorney General for DOJ’s Civil Rights Division.