On Sunday night, friends and supporters of Darryl Hunt gathered at Emmanuel Baptist Church to collectively grieve and honor Hunt’s life and legacy. Hunt’s body was found early Sunday morning, at the shopping center across from the Lawrence Joel Veterans Memorial Coliseum. The cause of death has not been publicly disclosed.
It was sad to be at Emmanuel Baptist, where Hunt’s supporters had gathered in the past to celebrate Hunt’s freedom, to morn his death. Speaker after speaker mentioned how much Darryl Hunt had touched their lives. The people who had helped Darryl the most, like his attorney Mark Rabil remembered how much he had helped them. Hunt was never bitter. His kind spirit in the face of almost 20 years of false imprisonment motivated others around him to become better people.
It’s hard to image walking a mile in Darryl Hunt’s shoes. People like to focus on the $1.65 million of compensation that he received from the city. Some people thought that Hunt was lucky to be financially set for life. Darryl Hunt was anything but lucky. In East Winston Hunt was viewed by some as a lottery winner.
In recent years Hunt had been frequenting Atlanta, a city where everyone didn’t know his name, a place where he wouldn’t be hounded. A couple years ago after a screening of The Trials of Darryl Hunt, Larry Little told the audience that Hunt had moved to Atlanta. Hunt had been staying with him. But when word got out that Darryl was there, folks were knocking night and day, asking to borrow money.
Nearly 20 years of incarceration is bound to leave scars, the kind that never fully heal. Hunt had a difficult upbringing. Hunt never knew his father, and his mother, Doris, was murdered when he was 10 years old, two weeks after he found out she was his mother (Richard Craver, from today’s W-S Journal). Combine a difficult childhood and nearly twenty years of incarceration and you have a receipt for depression. With Hunt’s marriage dissolved and battling cancer it looks like Darryl Hunt lost all hope.
But we don’t need to wait for the autopsy results, we know what killed Darryl Hunt. As his longtime attorney and friend Mark Rabil said, “Nineteen years of wrongful incarceration is what killed Darryl Hunt.” We shouldn’t mix words. There was no physical evidence tying Hunt to the rape and murder of Deborah Sykes. The WSPD and Forsyth County District Attorneys Office pinned the crime on Hunt while they ignored substantial evidence that lead to Willard Brown.
That’s what had to hurt Hunt, having two juries convict him of a crime that he didn’t commit. Having judge after judge refuse his appeals. Serving nine additional years in jail after DNA evidence proved his innocence. That’s injustice Winston-Salem style.
On the day that Hunt was finally freed from jail he announced that Kalvin Michael Smith was falsely imprisoned by the same people who put him behind bars; the WSPD and FCDA. Hunt never turned his back on the wrongly convicted. Just a few weeks ago Hunt was spoke at a rally on behalf of Kalvin Michael Smith. I think about the pain and powerlessness that Hunt must of felt at not being able to help get Kalvin his freedom,
Darryl Hunt’s legacy is justice. The men and women responsible for putting Hunt behind bars for nearly 20 years are some of the same people who put Kalvin Michael Smith behind bars, although neither of them ever had any credible evidence presented against them. The men and women who put Hunt and Smith behind bars have a very different legacy. These are the men who will be remembered unkindly by history, not Hunt.
titsay