By John Conroy
“I remember getting calls from police saying Aaron was gangbanging or Aaron was among several people standing in front of a grocery store and the owner asked them to move and he was the only one that caused a problem. And to show you how I was, I would not allow police officers to bother him. I went so far as to tell them that they had no reason to mess with my son. I made one of them bring him home one night. ‘You got my son? Well, bring him home.’ And then when he brought him home, I jumped all over the officer verbally, because I figured that they were harassing my son for no reason. I mean after all, ‘I am a sergeant of police, why are police officers out there messing with my son?’
“When he said that a little light went on–‘You’re talking about a tattoo.’ You think you know your kids, but how often do you really look at them? I mean up close. I went back to his room and told him, ‘Take your shirt off.’ Took his shirt off. Both sides, emblazoned there on his upper arms, ‘Apache Rangers.’ On one side it had his name, ‘Ranger.’”
In 1996, ten years after Aaron’s arrest, his father drove to Menard Correctional Center to see him. The lieutenant was by then an enlightened and sorrowful man. He’d concluded that Aaron’s wild claims of suffocation were mere statements of fact. He’d concluded that he had devoted his working life to an organization that could torture his son and protect the torturers. He’d concluded that detectives framed the wrong man, and that the man he believed to be the actual killer had recently stabbed another woman 25 times. And he’d realized that when his son’s need was greatest, he had abandoned him. Aaron had betrayed him, but he had in turn betrayed Aaron.
Aaron recalls that if he went to a party on the weekend, he had to be home by the time the city’s curfew took effect, lest he incur his father’s wrath, which he says was considerable. He recalls sneaking out of the house through the basement door after his parents thought he had gone to bed, a ploy that worked until he was 17 and had no curfew.
Patterson described himself as skinny, tall, and innocent in appearance in those days, and he said his “good boy image” protected him. Members of rival gangs might immediately recognize Patterson’s friends as trouble, but the policeman’s son looked different and went to a different school. “Even the police couldn’t figure out who I was. I always got away after fights or blended in with the crowd watching. I’d put my school jacket on and act like I didn’t know anything.
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Lieutenant Patterson recalls that he threw Aaron out of the house not long after discovering his tattoos. The lieutenant has no precise memory of the timetable of his confrontations with his son, but he has a vivid memory of a day–perhaps a year later–when Aaron paid a surprise call at his office. “He just came in and said, ‘Could I see you for a minute?’ I said, ‘Yeah, come on in.’ He showed me a letter from the city that said that he had taken the police test and he had scored in the 97th percentile. And I never knew that he had even taken the test. He is a very bright kid. He just sort of misdirected it. He was doing it, basically I think, to appease me. I doubt if he had any real interest in the police department. I was often angry with him because of his gangbanging career and constantly getting him out of jail and stuff like that. So I guess to appease me he went down without my knowledge and took the police test, and I guess he wanted to wait until he was sure that the results were favorable. Then he came over to see me, and he was proud.
