Journalist
It was just after the back-to-back fatal shooting deaths by police of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile in 2016 that Vanessa McCullers realized her then-18-year-old son began refusing to leave the house.
I was a little over a year old when my parents divorced. As was the standard in the late 1960s, the courts automatically granted custody to my mother. But all that changed the day my dad visited me after work and found me in my crib covered in vomit. From then on, it would just be the two of us.
The only image I had of my half sister growing up was the photo of a girl about 8, standing in a backyard plastic pool with one hand on her hip, her head cocked to the side. Her hair was pulled into a high side-ponytail with a fat braid. She had on a blue-and-white polka-dot bathing suit with white frills around the collar, and a huge smile on her face.
