“Eventually She Didn’t Want To Wake Up”

While researching my article on rape, I came across this heartbreaking story, pasted helter-skelter into some post at a on-line forum on Black crime. All the links were broken, even the photos failed to load, x’d-out from the Internet world. Eventually, I found another post that included the headline, author and two small, thumbnail images. It was written in 2003 [?] on Hilton Head Island, in South Carolina, and the link was to a website for a town called Bluffton. I have no idea what kind of place it is. The website, evidently, has archived the page that had the article and no searches could find it anywhere else. Here’s where I found it

I wanted to resurrect it for you to read, since it’s so sad and tells us somethings that we need to consider, plus it deserves to exist someplace on the Internet (besides some buried thread). – INCOG MAN

She called herself a survivor, but four years after her violent rape, Jacquelyn Moore reached her breaking point…

A life violated

By Stephanie Ingersoll
Carolina Morning News

Jacquelyn Moore didn’t die at the hands of her rapist.

As the big man’s fingers tightened around her throat, she thought about death. As he called her names and threatened to kill her, she thought of giving up, drifting away. As the hours crawled by her fantasies traveled from revenge to insanity to murder. His and her own.

Jacquelyn Moore, middle, spends time on a sailboat with her son, Pete Ovens, and daughter, Jennifer Green, about 10 years ago [1993?]. John Arnold Brinson, the Negro rapist responsible.

 ”Where are you God?” Moore asked as the attack continued. “Aren’t you supposed to be on my side? I’m a good woman. Please! My children and grandchildren need me still. Don’t let me die this way. Who will find me?”

Moore lived through that night. She faced her attacker at trial and put on a brave face as he was sentenced to life in prison.

But something inside her died in those hours she laid helpless in her own bed. She existed for the next four years, but she didn’t really survive.

On July 5, Jacquelyn Moore, 63, killed herself.

She left behind victims of her own – grown children who will forever blame themselves for not doing more to save her and other crime victims who looked up to Moore as a symbol of strength.

The rape that stunned a quiet North Forest Beach neighborhood shattered Moore’s life and brushed so many others.

The woman is a study in contradictions – a victim who demands that her name and story be heard only to go home and cower behind closed blinds. A mother who let her daughter find her lifeless body after all. A sister who delivered a harsh blow as her brother was suffering the loss of his wife.

She was many women, but she wasn’t the real Jacque Moore.

Jacque Moore died Dec. 2, 1999.

 Life, B.R. (before the rape)

Jacque Moore loved the spotlight.

It wasn’t easy raising five children alone while juggling two jobs and she didn’t see them as often as all would have liked.

“She was working all the time,” said her son, Dobbie Green, now a Hilton Head Island fireman. “We didn’t really have a curfew but she was happy. We were happy.”

Moore even found time to perform in community theater. She loved being a star. Eventually her children grew up and moved out.

The oldest, December, is a college professor. Whit moved to Dallas while his twin brother, Dobbie, settled in Bluffton and raised five children of his own. Jennifer became a nurse and the youngest, Pete, works for a hotel.

If there was a void in her empty nest, Moore’s grandchildren helped fill it when they visited her Hilton Head home. That was before she became obsessed with a topic unsuitable for young ears.

Before Moore learned to lock her door.

Violation

She wasn’t scared when the shadow first jumped on her bed.

That’s what children and grandchildren do — they play. But it was the middle of the night and Moore was supposed to be alone. She woke to a nightmare as a stranger crawled on top of her.

“You gonna die, b*tch,” he said in a scary yet oddly soft voice.

John Arnold Brinson, then 42, had raped before. Half his adult life had been spent in and out of prison for crimes involving sex and drugs. He was a convicted peeping tom, burglar, rapist and thief out on parole.

For the next six hours, Moore was his prisoner.

Three years later she recorded her memories of that night in a book about the rape. The words are brutal. Brutal and ugly because what Brinson did to her was brutal and ugly.

“I am passing out,” she writes. “Maybe I’m dying. I come to as he beats me and shrieks, ‘Don’t die yet, b*tch! Don’t you die on me yet! I’m not through wid you yet.’ I do whatever he says … “

Brinson is bigger than Moore but she soon realizes she is smarter. Still fully expecting to die, she puts on the performance of her life. “You need to leave. The sun is coming up,” she says. “You don’t want anyone to see you leave my house.”

She promised not to call the police. And then he did the unthinkable. He left.

Life, A.R. (after the rape)

Dobbie Green wrapped his arms around his mother as she sobbed and deputies searched her home for clues.

Despite her tears, Moore seemed strong. She described her attacker the best she could – his speech impediment, bald head and muscled body. Investigators immediately had a suspect in mind. They knew about Brinson’s history and compared a fingerprint found at Moore’s home to his sex offender registry. The prints matched.

Meanwhile, Moore’s family packed up her belongings. She would never spend another night at the Robin Street home where she’d been raped.

“She seemed strong and mad and (determined) to get the guy and do whatever it took” to convict him, Green said.

Moore’s family rallied beside her as she faced Brinson in court 10 months later. He was convicted of criminal sexual conduct, burglary and kidnapping. Under the state’s three-strikes law, he was sentenced to three terms of life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Moore’s family was ready to put the case behind them, ready for their mother to move on. But Moore couldn’t get on her with life. It had already been ruined.

Trapped

“I know the woman on the bed is me, but my mind still won’t accept it,” Moore wrote in her book.

“I want to shout, ‘No! No! I refuse for this to happen to me.’ People say I am lucky to be alive, but I am not sure. Did I live? Is this living? You see, my mind and body can’t let go of reliving this night over and over and over. I am trapped inside a nightmare. I pretend to live in the world, but I don’t do a very good job.”

Moore thought writing about her attack and speaking publicly would make her stronger, Green said.

“I thought the best thing for her was to move on, but she refused to,” he said. “She pretty much locked herself up in (her) apartment and was afraid to go outside.”

She became convinced that Brinson would get out of prison. She believed he belonged to a gang and members were stalking her in hopes of raping her again. She bought a gun for protection, kept her blinds closed and locked her door.

She visited her family less and slept more. A gulf opened between Moore and her children as she obsessed about the rape year after year, Green said. Her paranoia eventually led to depression, he said.

“We knew something was wrong but she didn’t want to hear us,” he said. “She said she was strong. She thought she was being strong for all rape victims. She thought she was their voice.”

About a year ago, Moore stopped working and decided to stay home and sleep, he said. She took medication for depression and anxiety, although her family isn’t sure if that helped her or made matters worse.

In May, two of Brinson’s convictions were overturned in the Moore case because of a simple trial error. The kidnapping conviction was upheld and he still faced life in prison with no possibility of parole.

Moore wasn’t so sure. She worried about having to go through another trial even though prosecutors said that would probably never be necessary.

And so she slept even more. Eventually she didn’t want to wake up.

Regrets

On July 4, Moore told one of her daughters that she had taken pills the night before in a failed suicide attempt. Instead of dying, she woke up to the news that her sister-in-law had died of cancer.

She said she wanted to go to the funeral and offer her brother support. She said she wouldn’t kill herself because he needed her at his side.

Moore’s daughter called Green in tears. Should they commit their mother to a hospital right away or wait until after the funeral? The trip might give them a chance to really talk to her, to set her straight.

“I didn’t think she was going to do it,” Green said. “I thought that bought us some time. …We were going to talk to her after the funeral.”

That night Moore sat down at her computer and wrote about the rape one last time. She finished her last suicide note at about 3:30 a.m., took her gun and went to bed.

The phone rang the next morning as her daughter rushed to Moore’s apartment after getting her mother’s e-mail. She found her mother in bed, a small revolver gripped in her right hand.

After four years of looking over her shoulder, four years of fear, Moore died with her door locked. Now it’s her family who suffers.

“My sister called me crying, saying that we needed to have her committed and I say no,” Green said. “Yeah, we blame ourselves.” Most of all, Green blames the man who took Moore’s soul, if not her life.

“I think John Brinson killed my mom,” Green said, even though Brinson remains imprisoned. “She was a happy, trusting, positive person (before the rape). I want my old mom back, smiling and happy.”

This Negro is dead: Brinson’s obit from 2006 But they are plenty more out there: Another Black Serial Rapist in Georgia/South Carolina area