Yeah, that’s me, Earl Martin, sitting in court and charged with murder. Well, I ain’t guilty of murder, but I did kill one person and put two others in the hospital for life. Here is the story of what happened, but a little background is necessary.

I am an Army veteran from the last Iraq action where I earned a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart. I have a wonderful wife, Elizabeth, of 15 years and two children, Pamala who is 12, but looks older, and a son, Earl, Jr. who is 10. We run what I laughingly call a horse farm in central Texas. In fact, I run a stud service for thoroughbreds and quarter horses. I also train quarter horses and have already won some major events. I am starting to be recognized as an expert in the business, and I am drawing customers from all over the country.

Elizabeth teaches Dressage both to the horses and to the riders. She doesn’t put as much effort into it as I do with my business because she has so much else to do with running the house and raising the children. Nevertheless, she is as happy as I am with our activities.

We had what I suppose could be called an idyllic existence up until that fateful day in the late summer of 2026. Earl, Jr. and I were working in the paddock close behind the barn to prepare some of the horses for the Dressage class scheduled for that afternoon. I suddenly felt like kicking myself because I had forgotten to bring out the combs for dressing a horse’s tail.

I sent Earl, Jr. to fetch the combs while I did some other work. Dammit, he was gone a long time. The task should not have taken more than five minutes, but he was still not back after 15. I began to wonder if he had hurt himself, and that was the reason he was not back when I expected him. Shit! I figured that I had better take a look to be sure that he was okay.

I headed into the barn to look in the tool crib where all of those things were kept. That was actually a storeroom where I kept all of the handtools associated with the maintenance of the businesses. There was no sign of Earl as I walked into the barn, but I heard some unusual noises coming from the tool crib. The noises sounded like a girl screaming and crying and a boy yelling something like “Leave my sister alone!”

Uh-oh, I ran to the closed door of the tool crib, opened it, and saw a horrifying sight. My naked daughter was lying on her back on the floor of the crib with a man between her legs raping her. Another man was holding her arms over her head to keep them away from the rapist. A third man was holding my son with one arm while holding a large knife in the other hand. That man’s left arm was wrapped around the boy to keep him from attacking the rapist.

That must have been when my intense soldier’s training took over. Undoubtedly, there was a lot of a father’s instinct to protect his child throw in. I slammed the door of the crib fully open and dashed in. On my way, I grabbed a piece of steel rebar about three feet long to use as a weapon. That was a integral part of my training: never attack without a weapon if at all possible.

Anyway, I grabbed the bar with both hands like a club and made a hit across the shoulder blades of the rapist as hard as I could swing that bar. I must have put a lot of force into that swing because the bar was bent slightly. Anyway, the man collapsed to the side and not on top of my daughter. He came unplugged as he rolled to the side. I guess that I should have been happy that he had a small cock, even though it was still erect. Forcing in a larger cock could have seriously injured the young girl, and it would have been very painful in any case.

None of that registered with me during my attack. It was only after the fight that

such things occurred to me. I was too busy. My next target was the man holding my daughter’s arms. I must have caught him on my backswing with a sharp edge projecting from the sawed off end of the piece of rebar. Anyway, I managed to catch that man in the face with the bar, and he had a gash running from his lower jaw up into his left eye. His eye was ruined forever. That must have really hurt, because he let out with a scream of pain that had to be heard to be believed.

He was still holding on to Pam’s wrists, so I hit him as hard as I could with the rebar across his chest. He collapsed to the floor, and I noticed that he was having a hard time breathing.

Now I was ready to take care of the one with the knife. I didn’t expect any real difficulty doing that because the way he was holding the knife demonstrated that he had no training in the use of the weapon. He was so shocked by my treatment of his companions that he relaxed his hold on Earl. The boy wiggled out of the man’s hold on him and ran to check on his sister. That let me have easy access to the man.

He might know nothing about how to fight with a knife, but he could get lucky. I was not going to take a chance with him. I approached cautiously, and the man foolishly backed up until he was trapped in a corner. With no way to go except straight at me, the man began to cry. Uh-oh, that probably meant that the man had given up hope and was easily capable of doing any number of foolish things.

I slammed the end of the rebar down on the man’s wrist holding the knife. I am not sure what had me charged up so, but I hit him hard enough to crack many bones in his wrist. He screamed in pain and dropped the knife. That was what I was looking for and danced around him striking him in every one of his joints until he fell to the floor.

This was when Earl said to me, “I don’t know what is wrong with Pam, but she won’t stop crying.”

“Okay, I’ll look after her. You go find your mother and tell her that I need her in the barn as soon as she can get here. Tell her I said to grab her cellphone and come out right away. We need more than one ambulance. You come back, too.” I checked on Pam and found that she was hysterical. I didn’t blame her, but I thought that she had gone on long enough that way. I hoped that her mother could bring her out of it.

When Liz arrived with Earl, she immediately did what she could to comfort the girl. Meanwhile, I used her cellphone to call 911 for ambulances and the sheriff. Two ambulances with the EMTs (Emergency Medical Technicians) showed up within about 20 minutes; it took so long because we were that far from the nearest hospital.

The sheriff did not show up for another 10 minutes. She was busy schmoozing with some local politicians. Being sheriff was an elected position, and she was new on the job and wanted all of the help she could get. The way she came waltzing in made it look like she thought she was just being called out to clean up after a neighborhood fight.

The EMTs had already looked after my daughter and had called the Rape Assistance Dept. Liz had taken Pam into the house to wait for them to arrive. The EMTs woke the sheriff up when they said that one of the men had died and they were stabilizing the other two for transport to the hospital. They also reported that my son had a knife wound that would need sutures in the palm of his hand.

The large knife had blood on the blade, and one of the EMTs had dropped it into a plastic bag and sealed it against further contamination as soon as she arrived. She knew that was a job for the cops, but she was a fan of cop shows on TV and knew that the sheriff was such a klutz that it would probably be overlooked.

I told my story to the sheriff and she promptly arrested me for murder. It was at that point that I was glad that I had not voted for her. That was when I quit cooperating with her. Despite her objections, I called my lawyer. The sheriff had not even read me my Miranda rights, and I was really getting pissed off. My lawyer said that he would find a suitable lawyer for me and that I should not say anything else.

I did use the camera in the cellphone to photograph everything in the crib, including the “murder weapon.” I didn’t trust this clown of a politician masquerading as a sheriff as far as I could throw a horse. She didn’t know that she needed a warrant to arrest me for murder under these circumstances. At least, that was what my lawyer said, and I wanted to believe him.