Off The Record
My Mother’s Malevolence Was Revealed To Me In A Gray Prison Visitor’s Chamber… After The Sick Attack On Me As A Baby, I Had Hoped For Remorse
I had the same fear over and over again until I was ten years old.
As a child, I watched my dad Robert fall asleep on the couch. Melissa, my mother, picked me up and put me on the counter in the kitchen.
Then I would be in terrible pain and fear until all of a sudden I was in the hospital with a nurse standing over me.
Every time I woke up, I would scream, and my aunt Rhonda, who was living with me, would rush into my room to calm me.
I had dreams at the time, but I didn’t know it. That was a memory.
As it turned out, I spent a lot of my youth in the hospital. At 14 months, I had third-degree burns on more than 30% of my body, mostly on my arms and back. Up until I was five years old, I had many surgeries and skin patches.
About every six months, saline bags were put under my burn scars to help my new skin grow. The pain was terrible, but the wonderful nurses made me feel better.
I could play games with them at the nurses’ station.
They were like family to me since I didn’t see my mom or Courtney, my eight-year-old half-sister.
My dad came by sometimes, but he couldn’t stand to see me hurt. I remember that he would cry every time he came.
So, after I got out of the hospital, I moved in with my aunt Rhonda, who is my dad’s sister.
What was going on with my mom and why I wasn’t living with my dad? She would never answer.
I knew I wasn’t like other kids because of my angry-looking scars and the fact that I was in and out of the hospital all the time. I was teased a lot.
I would only feel normal when I went to a camp every year for kids with burns.
Because no one had ever told me the whole story, I became more interested in what had caused my burns as I got older.
Even though Rhonda would sigh and say, “Your mother is crazy,” she still wouldn’t talk about it.
It looked like a big secret.
I was pretty sure my burns weren’t from a house fire by the time I was a teenager, but I didn’t know what had happened.
I didn’t feel so alone when I became a peer counselor for younger kids at my yearly burns camp. It always helped to see my nurses, too.
At age 15, my last tissue expanders that made me look bad were taken out. It was my 72nd surgery.
Rhonda took me to see a lawyer a few months after I turned 15.
I thought it had something to do with my mom and the fire, but I had no idea what he was going to say.
“Ashley, there’s something I must tell you,” he said.
“I don’t know if you know this, but when you were a baby, your mother put you in the oven. That’s how you got your burns.”
My jaw dropped. I was put in the oven by my mom.
“She’s been in prison since then,” he continued.
“But there’s a parole hearing in two days and you’ve got to make a decision whether she gets out.”
I was shocked and trying to understand everything. That’s why no one ever told me anything.
He held up pictures of a little girl who was badly burned and scarred. It was me.
I started crying. It was too much to handle.
And now it was up to me to decide if my mother, the woman who hurt me, should get out of jail or stay locked up.
Before I could say anything, my aunt spread out a bunch of old newspaper pieces on the table and said, “These are stories about what your mom did.”
I looked at pictures of my mom.
I cried, “I look like her.” That was all I had to say. I ran to the bathroom. That was the end of the meeting. When I got home, I cried for a long time.
The news stories said that my mother took the racks out of the oven and put on the grill when I was 14 months old, in June 2002.
She set it to high, which is more than 300°C.
Then she would put my head first in the oven.
How could she?
Experts and lawyers at her trial said she was mentally competent. Her reason? She didn’t like how much attention my dad gave me.
Her guilty plea to attempted murder got her 25 years in prison in August 2003.
She could now get out of jail.
I didn’t agree with release, I thought. There were little kids in my extended family, and I couldn’t stand the thought of my mom being close to them.
Thank goodness she wasn’t at the meeting.
But my sister Courtney was there. I hadn’t seen her in years. She thought our mother should be set free because she had already served her time and was crazy when she put me in the oven.
I got up, shaking.
“I think Melissa should stay in prison a few more years,” I said with quiet determination. I then told the parole board I did not trust her around children.
“I do not hate Melissa, but I do not love her,” I added.
Parole was turned down.
I wrote to her afterward and asked why she had hurt me, but she never responded.
At school, everyone knew what was going on.
“You lied about being in a house fire,” some taunted. Others called me ‘scar face’ or said my mum didn’t want me.
I took too many pills because the teasing got so bad.
I had been depressed and anxious for a long time, but now it was really bad.
Rhonda let me move in with my dad because she was having a hard time with me.
At first, it seemed strange. We didn’t know each other.
He fixed things and was a plumber. He gave me jobs to keep my mind off of things. As I learned to tile, lay rugs, and fix up a house, we became close.
He talked about what had happened one day.
“Your mum had been acting strange. Saying crazy stuff about Jesus,” he revealed.
“I was thinking of leaving with you girls.”
He told us that he bathed us because we got dirty while playing outside.
“I put a movie on and fell asleep on the couch. I woke to you and Courtney screaming. I ran in the kitchen and saw you in the oven.”
Dad’s voice broke, and he started to cry.
“I scooped you out of the oven. Your skin was peeling off. Then I ran to the car, put you on my lap and drove as a fast as I could to the hospital.”
The terrible dreams I’d been having for years were just like what my dad told me.
I remembered parts of that day even though I was only 14 months old.
After the event, my dad was told he had PTSD.
“I couldn’t look after you. I’m so sorry,” he told me, breaking down in tears.
A few years went by. Things were getting better. I asked my dad if I could write to my mom who was in jail. I was not ready to forgive; I needed to know what happened.
“It’s up to you, but I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said.
As a youngster, I didn’t listen to his advice and wrote to her anyway.
“Why did you burn me? What were you thinking. Did you love me?” I asked. She didn’t reply.
As I thought about my future, I chose to become a pediatrician to honor the care I got as a toddler and throughout my childhood.
But these plans fell through when I found out I was pregnant with twins with the person I was dating at the time. Mason and Alana, my babies, were stillborn, which is sorrowful.
It broke my heart. My boyfriend and I broke up because our relationship couldn’t handle the loss.
Thereafter, I met Anthony, who is now my husband, and I decided that working as a pediatric nurse would benefit from a family, so I started a science degree.
I was still working as a peer counselor for kids who had been burned, and that year I met a six-year-old girl whose father had set her on fire.
I showed her how to keep her scars moist and got her ready for the bullying that was going to happen. It made me want to be a nurse and help other kids even more.
Anthony and I had a boy named Brooklyn in May 2021. In March 2022, our daughter Kaden came along.
After five months, my dad died at the age of 65. For years, he had been in pain because he could never forget seeing me scarred and burned in the oven.
“My dad was always honest with me,” I told Anthony as I cried.
It was another blow, but I had to get through my sadness because I had to study and take care of two kids.
In the same year, I wrote to my mom twice while I was in jail.
When she finally answered, I was pregnant again.
Once I saw the prison stamp on the package, I tore it open with a lot of fear. I was looking for a deep apology and an explanation that made sense.
I didn’t get it.
My mom started by saying, “Hey, my beautiful angel.”
“I’m really sorry.” “I tried too hard to be a great mom,” she wrote.
I was shocked. It was a lot more than just failing to be a good mother what she had done.
She asked to see pictures of my kids and me. She came back to be a mother to me and a grandmother to my children.
“No way!” I choked out loud as I read on.
She laughed and said that my kids would know their “gangsta granny.” She also said that when she got out of jail, she wanted to move in with me, get to know me better, and go shopping with me.
It wasn’t her fault that she did what she did. It was also completely unacceptable to call going to jail for trying to kill your child “gangsta.”
She thought, for some reason, that our connection as mother and daughter would be great.
“She’s deluded,” I told Anthony. “And there’s no way she’s coming anywhere near my kids.”
After putting me in the oven, I thought she must be crazy.
“I don’t want to see her, but prison is the wrong place. She should be released to a mental health unit,” I told my husband.
Jaylee was born on June 21, 2023. But our little bubble didn’t last long.
After a month, I woke up to find her having trouble breathing. Then she stopped breathing, and I started CPR right away.
“Please call an ambulance!” It was me yelling at Anthony.
I fought to keep my baby alive for 30 minutes by rubbing her tiny chest and giving her little breaths.
I failed to save her.
When she was born, she swallowed amniotic fluid, which gave her abdominal pneumonia.
It was too much for me when we put my baby to sleep. I had been through a lot: my mother had tried to kill me; I was in terrible pain from burns and surgeries; I was bullied; I was depressed and anxious; and I had tried to kill myself. Then I lost my dad and my twins.
I was still here, though.
“I’ve got two other kids who need me. I’ve got to carry on,” I told Anthony.
It’s not been simple. I often question why I have to carry such a heavy load.
I still have bad dreams. And my scars have become tighter lately. When I pick up the kids, my skin pulls. Soon, it will tear, and I’ll need more surgery.
But I made it through.
Marieh was my second daughter. She was born in December of last year.
It’s still my dream to become a pediatric nurse, even though I have quit school for now.
My mom unexpectedly called me from jail in January.
“I just wanted to see how you and the children are doing,” she said.
“We’re doing fine,” I replied, refusing to give her any details.
It’s okay with me if she doesn’t know how many kids I have or what their names are.
She told me she wanted to come live with me when she was finally free.
“We’ll be able to go shopping together,” she said, repeating her delusional hope we’ll one day have a normal mother-daughter relationship.
I quickly answered, “No, that’s not going to happen.”
That’s when she became mean. Right there in the area for visitors, where she could make a short phone call every day.
“You know what, I wish you would have died,” she snarled, her voice dripping with venom.
I hung up.
It was all a trick, her sweet notes and her attempt to be nice. That mean woman who had tried to kill me years before was still there.
Not long ago, I called Tutwiler Prison, where my mother is spending her time.
I wanted to know when she would be freed as of now.
I was shocked to learn that she would be sent to a halfway house in Birmingham, Alabama, in April 2026.
There, prisoners can spend the last part of their sentence while social workers help them get training, go to school, and find work.
Before the end of her term, she will be out in public, and she will be free in 2027.
As for my own safety, I’m not scared, but I am worried about her being around kids again.
She will not be able to be with children after she gets out of jail, but how can that be enforced?
It will be 25 years since she was last locked up before she gets out.
A prison officer told me that people who have been locked up for a long time, like my mom, almost always get out and then go back to jail.
What scares me the most is what she’ll do to get back there.
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