Anthony Dowell

I’m 56 years old & I grew up in Pontiac, Michigan.
During my childhood, I experienced verbal, mental & physical abuses as well as financial situations that affect my mind & emotional wellbeing from my parents choices to sell drugs during the 70’s & early 80’s.
These events included my being the victim of an attempted kidnapping at the age of 11.
And at the age of 15, I was grabbed coming home, force into my house while held with a gun to my head & my family was robbed.
I dropped out of high school after getting into fights over the next two years, then I joined the U.S. Marines at the age of 17.

Two years later, while stationed in Okinawa, Japan in Sept. 1983, during my first enlistment, a special brigade was formed & I was sent 6 1/2 miles from the DMZ in between N. & S. Korea after a Korean jet liner was shot down in Russian airspace.
Upon our arrival in S. Korea, my friend died while attempting to wire up our base camp with lights when a fast moving snow storm blew him off the light pole.

I sit there for the next several months waiting to see if the U.S. would go to war with N. Korea & wondering if I would live or die too.
I got hurt during a training exercise injuring both my knees during my second enlistment.
I was medically discharged in August 1987 at the age of 22 at the rank of Sargent/E-5 with a wife & child on the way.

During that time period, I drank a lot & I got divorced shortly afterwards from my first wife.
All though I was never evaluated, I’m sure I suffered from PTSD from those psychological traumas & my knee injuries have only gotten worse over time.
I did not speak to anyone prior to my arrest in 2002 for murder when I brutally took the life of my second wife after a custody confrontation that left me with epilepsy.
Nor did I speak about any of it for the next seven years as I struggled with the thoughts that were bottled up inside of me.

Even though I continued to get into fights & catch disciplinary tickets until 2009.
I finally told my parents even thought they were divorced & had both remarried other people living different lives because the dysfunction had now affection not just me, but my siblings & our children as well.
Since April 2009 I was, by the grace of God, able to get all that hurt & harm off my chest, to forgive others & to take responsibility for my actions as well.
I’ve been out of trouble & ticket free ever since.
That’s been almost 12 years now & NFTV helps me to remain focused to keep up that good work to which I’m truly grateful.

I now have a much better relationship with parents, step parents, two of three of my siblings, & two of three of my children today because I have learned to express my feelings today instead of reacting in anger!