This story was told by Daryl Jackson in an interview to Kyonda Trass. It has been edited for length and clarity.
One day a couple of years ago, my oldest daughter, who studied psychology at Mills College in Oakland, came up to me and said, “I want to tell you something. Don’t take this the wrong way. I think you suffer from PTSD.”
I asked what that meant, and she explained it to me. I told her nothing was wrong with me, but she insisted. “You’ve been a great father, and you’re always there for us. But you need to talk to somebody.” I promised her that I would, and eventually I will.
I’m still coming to grips with a lot of things.
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I grew up in Richmond but was born in Boise, Idaho, where my parents had moved from Louisiana. My mother worked as a maid in a family home there, and my father worked as a janitor in a local hospital. The people in the home where my mother worked were named my godparents and they gave me my middle name, “Bernard.” I never met them and my mother doesn’t remember their family name. All I know is that they were white. I was just over a year old when we moved to Richmond.
My mother is one of 13 kids, including her half siblings, and when we came out to California the bulk of them were already living here. We moved in with one of my aunts for a while, on the south side. Then we moved to Easter Hill. Sometime after that, my mom and dad got government jobs, and we had to move to Stockton for a little while. We eventually moved back to the area, and I attended Juan Crespi Junior High School and then went to De Anza High School.
Growing up, my mother was always great. My mother is my hero. She would do anything to make sure my siblings and I didn’t want for anything. She even worked two jobs. My father was in the home, but not in the home. He spent a lot of time in the streets. He had a couple of girlfriends here and there, and there was a significant amount of domestic violence going on between my mom and dad. I have a lot of memories of my mom getting beaten by my dad. On one occasion, my mother thought she was going to die and called us into the room to support her.
When my father started drinking, he got that way; he would get violent. It was just our life. We accepted that was just the way things were. We never got counseling. We never spoke to anyone outside of our own little circle. That circle was really just me, my mom, my brother and sister. The police were never called; my mother never, ever thought about that at all. She would just accept it, heal, and keep going. And at no time did she ever, ever take it out on us. She was strong, a very strong person in her faith and beliefs.
College hoops dream is dashed by a car crash
My father finally moved out in 1979, the year I graduated from high school. By then, I had gotten about four or five letters of interest from colleges to play basketball. My mother kept those letters for a long time. But just before graduation, I got into a car accident on San Pablo Dam Road where there used to be the Pussycat Theater, and the Kitty Kat Club. I was driving a 1968 Mustang, heading to my girlfriend’s sister’s birthday party. This guy came out of the Kitty Kat and turned into our lane and hit us head-on. He was driving an old Delta ’88. My mom was in the front passenger seat, my brother was in the rear, and my sister, who was about 11 years old, was behind me.
If you know anything about the Mustangs at that time, the dashboard was metal. I hit my knees and ended up in the emergency room because they had swollen up so badly, I couldn’t walk. They were talking about possibly putting metal rods in my knees. I was like, “Dude, I’m 17 years old!” I thought I could still play basketball, but the doctor said, “Well, if we put rods in your knees, you can’t do that.” So I refused to have them put in. Rehabilitation took a long time and I couldn’t attend any of the colleges that had made me offers as a result.
I ended up going to Cal State Hayward. But I just wasn’t feeling it, and didn’t do too well. I left and went to junior college, then went back to Cal State, but ended up quitting; I just didn’t stick around for my senior year. The only good thing that I can say about me going to Cal State Hayward is, I met my wife, Terri. That was in 1982, and we were married in 1986.
The highs and lows of a 33-year policing career
By 1984 I’d made my way to public safety work, starting in Alameda County at the probation department. I left there after a couple of years and went to the Richmond Police Department. I’d been at RPD for three years, in 1991, when I was transferred from patrol to Personnel, Recruiting and Background Investigations. In January 1993 I transferred to the robbery and assault division. After 10 months there, I was transferred again to the Homicide Unit, and that’s where I stayed until ‘98. Finally, I went to the community policing unit where I worked out of De Anza High School, Parchester Village and Crescent Park Community Center.
The mid-1980s is when the crack cocaine thing really hit inner cities, including the city of Richmond. At that time, Richmond’s homicide rate was among the top in the nation per capita. Things were hectic from the late-’80s on into the ’90s in Richmond. I was doing a lot of domestic violence cases, at one point averaging about five cases a day, which was difficult because it brought back personal memories. The work was also initially overwhelming, I think, because I was from there.
Of my 33 years in law enforcement with RPD as well as the Contra Costa and San Francisco district attorney’s offices, 24 of them were spent dealing directly with homicides, officer-involved shootings, or some type of death investigation. I was involved in over 300 of these cases, unfortunately, and it wasn’t easy. Contra Costa County and RPD have a policy that for any death investigation, we had to make personal notifications to the family. We also had to sit through every autopsy. I have all those memories.
I’ve also felt good about a lot of cases that I’ve worked on. It’s especially good when you have a victim who is alive come back and thank you, crying because they’re so emotional. That makes you feel good. But there were other times, of course, when you felt bad because the victims were children. I’ve had victims, parents, who were just destroyed because they lost their child.
Navigating pain and loss, at work and at home
These experiences from my childhood and throughout my career in law enforcement, they took a toll. You wouldn’t see me get emotional. I walled myself off, beginning as a child with domestic violence. And it was to my own detriment, because I wasn’t emotionally responsive to my wife. It took a toll on our relationship. She’s since talked to me about it, what she was experiencing and what she didn’t feel like she was getting from me. She made an excuse for it because she knew some of the stuff that I’d gone through as a kid. But she didn’t know it all; I’ve only recently opened up entirely in the last few years.
Her being who she is — and I’ll say she had a better childhood than I did, much better than I did — even though there were some headaches and heartaches, she’s been my rock. She and my two daughters, they’re the ones I go to.
When my wife got pregnant again in 1994, I’d been in homicide for about a year. We learned that the child was probably going to be born with some disabilities. We came home from the hospital, and she said, “What do you think?” I said, “Terri, If God gave us this life, we can’t decide to take it because someone told us that we would have a lot of challenges.” We decided that she was going to go ahead and have the baby. But when it came time for her to deliver, they could not find the baby’s heartbeat. My wife ended up delivering the child stillborn.
“These experiences from my childhood and throughout my career in law enforcement, they took a toll… I’ve only recently opened up entirely in the last few years.”
I remember they came out and said, “Mr. Jackson, we need a name for the death certificate.” We hadn’t even named him at that point. I looked at my wife, and I said, “His name is Bernard.” That was my middle name. My wife had to stay in the hospital. I drove home with a death certificate that had my son’s footprint on it. That was the first time that I recall ever crying.
Thinking about my relationship with my own dad, I mean, he was my father, you know? Did we ever do anything that a father and son would do together, go to a baseball game and stuff like that? No. I remember he took my brother and I fishing once. As children, we went to Disneyland one time and it was my mother who took us.
It wasn’t until my mid-20s that he and I sat down and I kind of confronted him about all the memories that I had growing up. We came to an understanding, and in his own way, he apologized for what happened during that period in our lives. He lived with Parkinson’s for the last 20 years of his life, and I think it became very humbling for him. He couldn’t take care of himself any longer, so he lived with me for a short period of time.
In 2006, he had a medical episode and ended up at Kaiser in Vallejo. Three to four hours later, I get a phone call from the hospital: “Is this Daryl Jackson? Your father passed.” That was the closing chapter with him and I.
My wife used to ask me if my experience with my father was the reason for me getting into police work. My answer was no, it wasn’t. I said, “Baby, I got into police work because you and I had gotten married and I needed to make more money.” It was work, the most logical step to me at that time.
Retirement is providing more time for personal growth and family
I recently retired, and I’m still trying to adjust to that. I took up piano about a year and a half ago, and that’s been an outlet. I found a good instructor, his name is Sam. I go see him in Berkeley every week, and he’s helped me as an older learner; I’ll be 65 this year. He transcribes songs for me, measure by measure. I’ll just tell him a song that I like, like the one we’re currently finishing up, “If Only for One Night” by Luther Vandross.
Now my oldest is in school in North Carolina, and I pay her rent to make sure that she doesn’t have to work; I make sure she has everything she needs out there. My youngest is here with us, and she’ll be finishing up her master’s degree this spring. I’m just making sure they’re good.
My wife will retire soon too, and she wants to travel. We’ll have been married for 40 years in August. Once we’re both retired, we don’t want to be doing anything. We are moving from here and going overseas, and we’re looking forward to a new chapter in our lives. I’ll be learning a language; I’m gonna take Spanish because I think we’re going to Spain.
What I would tell people is, don’t be afraid to go after whatever your dreams may be, no matter what your prior background is. I remember telling young Black men that I encountered as a police officer, “Hey man, you need to get yourself out of Richmond. Go see something different. Go somewhere they don’t know you. Start fresh.” Because it’ll either make you more appreciative of your life here, or it’ll make you aware of how things could be. Don’t settle for a mundane life. Strive for it to be the best life possible, because when you get older, all you have to do is look back and say, damn, I wasted a lot of time.
