Am I wrong for going completely off-script and letting a group of bikers walk my client into the courthouse when the judge explicitly said no outside parties?
I’ve been a child advocate for the state of Missouri for nineteen years. I’ve walked hundreds of kids through the worst days of their lives. But I have never seen a seven-year-old shake the way Destiny Watts was shaking in my backseat last Tuesday morning.
She was supposed to testify against her mother’s boyfriend. The man who put cigarette burns on her arms. And he was going to be sitting fifteen feet away from her.
Destiny hadn’t slept in three days. Her foster mom, Brenda, told me the girl had been throwing up every morning since she got the subpoena. She kept asking the same question over and over: “Is he gonna be mad at me?”
I picked her up at 7:45. She got in the car holding a stuffed rabbit so tight her knuckles were white. She didn’t say a word the whole drive. When we pulled into the courthouse parking lot, I put the car in park and turned around to check on her.
She was crying. No sound. Just tears running down her face, her whole body rigid in the booster seat.
That’s when I saw the motorcycles.
Fourteen of them. Lined up along the far end of the lot. Big guys, leather vests, patches. I knew exactly who they were – Guardians of the Innocent, a volunteer group that escorts abused kids to court. Brenda had called them without telling me.
The chapter president, a guy named Dale who looked like he could bench-press my Corolla, walked over to my window. He said, “We’re here for Destiny. We’ll walk her in. We’ll sit behind her. She won’t have to look at him.”
Destiny saw them through the window. She said, “Are they here for ME?”
Dale knelt down to her eye level and said, “Every single one of us.”
For the first time in three days, she stopped shaking.
Here’s where I screwed up. Judge Morrison had issued a standing order – no outside support persons in the gallery without prior written approval. I knew the rule. I KNEW IT. But I looked at this little girl finally breathing normally and I made a decision.
I walked all fourteen of them through the front doors.
Court staff stopped us immediately. The bailiff, a guy named Phil I’ve worked with for years, pulled me aside and said, “Tammy, what the hell are you doing? Morrison is going to have your ass.”
I said, “Then he can have it.”
My friends and colleagues are split. Half of them say I put my entire career on the line for a gesture. My supervisor left me a voicemail that night and her voice was SHAKING. She said the judge had already filed a formal complaint and that I needed to come in first thing Wednesday morning.
But Destiny walked into that courtroom holding Dale’s hand. She sat in that witness chair and she looked straight ahead and she DID NOT SHAKE.
Wednesday morning I walked into my supervisor’s office. She closed the door behind me. On her desk was a single sheet of paper from the judge’s chambers. She slid it across to me and said, “Read it.”
I picked it up. The first line started with –
What Nineteen Years Looks Like
I need to back up, because people keep asking me how I could risk my career over one case. One morning. One call I made in a parking lot.
And I get why it sounds reckless. But nineteen years in this work does something to you. You stop seeing cases. You start seeing kids. You see the specific way a child holds their body when they’ve learned that adults are not safe. That rigid stillness. Like if they move wrong, something bad happens again.
I’ve seen it in kids as young as four. Destiny had it bad.
I first got her file eight months ago. Standard referral, except nothing about Destiny’s situation was standard. Her mother, Kayla, had been with this man, Marcus Webb, for two years. The burns on Destiny’s arms were documented by her pediatrician in October. There were three prior calls to the hotline that went nowhere. Three. By the time the case landed on my desk, Destiny had been living in Brenda’s house for six weeks and still wouldn’t eat at the table. She’d take her plate to the corner of the kitchen and sit on the floor with her back against the wall.
Brenda told me that the first time she tried to hug Destiny goodnight, the girl flinched so hard she knocked a glass off the nightstand.
Six months of visits. Six months of building something that might eventually look like trust. Destiny started talking to me around February. Mostly about her rabbit, whose name is Gerald. Gerald has one ear, because the other one got torn off at some point and nobody knows how. She carries him everywhere.
So when I saw her in that booster seat, knuckles white around Gerald, silent, crying without making a sound – I wasn’t looking at a case file. I was looking at a kid I’d spent half a year trying to convince that the world had safe people in it.
And then fourteen of those safe people showed up in leather vests.
What Dale Didn’t Tell Me Until Later
Here’s the thing about the Guardians of the Innocent that I didn’t fully know until after all of this.
Most of those guys have their own history. Not all of them, but enough. Dale told me later, standing in the parking lot after it was over, that he got into this work because of his niece. He didn’t say more than that. He didn’t need to.
A man named Gary, who was the second-biggest guy there and had a long grey beard and a patch that said “Ride for the Kids,” told me he’d done 200 of these escorts. Two hundred. He knew exactly how to walk into a courthouse. Slow enough that a child can set the pace. Flanked but not crowding. He said they’d learned over the years to let the kid lead, because control is what these kids never had.
I watched him hang back half a step when Destiny hesitated at the courthouse doors. She stopped on the top step and looked at the big glass entrance and just stood there. Gary didn’t push. Didn’t say anything. Just waited. Dale crouched down and said something to her I couldn’t hear.
She pushed the door open herself.
I’ve been doing this job for nineteen years and I don’t have words for what that looked like.
Phil the bailiff was less moved. He was doing his job, and honestly, fair. He gave me a look that said you have genuinely lost your mind and went to make the call to the judge’s clerk. I stood there and watched fourteen bikers file quietly into the gallery and I thought: whatever happens to me, this was right.
The Testimony
I can’t share details of what Destiny said on the stand. That’s not mine to share.
What I can tell you is that she walked up to that witness chair like she’d decided something. She climbed up, smoothed Gerald’s remaining ear against her lap, and looked at the prosecutor.
Marcus Webb was at the defense table. His lawyer was a guy named Crenshaw who wore too much cologne and had a habit of sighing loudly during testimony he didn’t like. Webb himself kept his eyes down, mostly. When he did look up, Destiny was not looking at him.
She was looking at Dale.
Dale sat in the front row of the gallery, directly in her eyeline, and he did not move for the entire time she was on that stand. Just solid. Hands on his knees. Looking at her like she was the only person in the room that mattered.
The prosecutor, a woman named Cheryl Briggs who I’ve worked with before and trust completely, told me afterward that Destiny’s testimony was the clearest child witness account she’d heard in twelve years of trying these cases. No hedging. No trailing off. Direct.
Cheryl said, “That kid knew she was safe.”
Yeah. She did.
Phil Wasn’t Wrong
I want to be honest about the part where I was actually in the wrong, because I’ve been doing this long enough to know that rules in courtrooms aren’t arbitrary. Morrison’s standing order about gallery approval exists because of a case six years ago where a family member of a defendant showed up and intimidated a witness. The rule protects kids like Destiny. I knew that.
I also knew that I had maybe thirty seconds in that parking lot before the moment passed. Before Destiny’s window closed and she went back inside herself. Before Gerald’s ear got squeezed any tighter.
I didn’t have time to call the judge’s clerk. Didn’t have time to file anything. I made a call.
And I made it knowing I might not have a job on Thursday.
My supervisor, Carol, has been my supervisor for eleven years. She’s not a soft person. She doesn’t do a lot of hand-holding and she doesn’t like surprises. The voicemail she left me Tuesday night was four minutes long and I listened to it three times. Her voice shaking wasn’t fear. It was anger. Controlled, specific anger. She said the words “you put the whole program at risk” twice.
She wasn’t wrong about that either.
I drove home Tuesday night and sat in my car in my own driveway for a while. I thought about the 200-something kids I’ve walked through courthouses. I thought about whether I’d done them a disservice by potentially blowing up my ability to show up for the next 200. I thought about whether what I did was brave or just self-righteous.
I didn’t sleep great.
Wednesday Morning
Carol’s office smells like burnt coffee and the particular brand of air freshener that’s been in there since at least 2016. I’ve sat across from her desk in good circumstances and bad ones. I knew what her closed-door face looked like.
She slid the paper across without preamble.
It was on Judge Morrison’s official letterhead. His clerk’s signature at the bottom. I read the first line and then I read it again because I thought I’d misread it.
In the matter of the unauthorized gallery admission on April 15th, this office has reviewed the circumstances and declines to pursue formal disciplinary action against advocate Tamara Pruitt.
I looked up at Carol.
She was watching me read.
The second paragraph said that Judge Morrison had observed the conduct of the gallery during the testimony and found no disruption, no intimidation, and no compromise to the proceedings. It said that the advocate’s decision, while outside established protocol, appeared to have been made in the direct interest of the child witness. It said the court was formally requesting that the state’s child advocacy office review its emergency support protocols to determine whether provisions could be made for situations of this nature going forward.
The last line said: The court commends the commitment shown to the welfare of the child.
I put the paper down.
Carol looked at me for a long second and said, “You’re getting a written warning for the protocol violation. That goes in your file.”
I said okay.
She said, “And I’m pulling you onto the protocol review committee.”
Then she picked up her coffee and turned back to her computer, which is Carol’s version of a standing ovation.
Gerald Still Has One Ear
I saw Destiny last Friday for our regular visit. She’s still at Brenda’s. The trial is ongoing and I can’t say more than that.
But she came to the door when I knocked and she had Gerald under her arm, and she said, “Tammy, Dale said I can come see the motorcycles sometime.”
I said I thought that could probably be arranged.
She thought about it for a second and then she said, “Gerald would like that. He’s never seen a motorcycle.”
She went back inside to get her shoes and I stood on Brenda’s porch and looked at the street and the ordinary Tuesday afternoon of it all. A neighbor mowing. A dog barking two houses down. The sun doing nothing special.
Destiny came back with her shoes on the wrong feet and didn’t notice, and I didn’t say anything.
We went inside and she showed me a drawing she’d made at school. A group of stick figures in a line. Big ones and a small one in the middle.
She’d drawn them all with wings.
—
If this one got to you, pass it on. Some stories deserve more people in the room.
If you’re in the mood for more tales of courtroom drama and unexpected twists, you might enjoy reading about when I said his name out loud in a room full of people who trusted him or the time my seven-year-old stopped throwing up outside the courthouse, and now I’m the one on trial. And for another story about unintended consequences, check out the man I got fired sat down and said my neighbor’s name.
