“When you see somebody get murdered, it just ain’t gonna go away overnight.”
Now a 17-year-old, 324-pound senior lineman for Thurgood Marshall High School, Muddy — and that’s how everyone at school knows him — was sitting on a bench on the edge of the Cougars football field after practice late one recent evening.
As the last light of day faded, he talked about a far darker time. It was July 27, 2000 and he said he and his dad, 28-year-old Dayomine “Mud” Owens Sr., had just dropped Muddy’s mom off at the beauty parlor. They were in a 1992 black Oldsmobile Delta 88 and soon pulled off the road on the ramp to US 35 just off Gettysburg Avenue.
Another car pulled up behind them and the driver of that vehicle entered the Delta 88.
“I was in the passenger seat and that man was sitting behind me talking to my father,” Muddy remembered. “There was an altercation and the man pulled out a gun and shot my dad. Then he just left. He never said a word.”
According to police reports Dayomine Sr. actually was shot twice, once in the chest, once in the back of the head. He was pronounced dead at Good Samaritan Hospital.
No one was ever charged in his murder. There was plenty of speculation back then.
Dayomine Sr. had just been released from a West Virginia federal prison three months earlier. His nearly four-year sentence for distributing crack cocaine had been cut in half after he had talked to prosecutors about a pair of murders in Mississippi that a fellow inmate had admitted committing. That guy — after Dayomine’s death — was later convicted of the murders.
Whether the shooting was retaliation, no one is sure.
Dayton Police Officer Leatha Savage was the first law enforcement person on the scene.
“I was dispatched to a person shot,’ she recalled Friday. “When I arrived, there was actually a nurse there who had stopped and she had this little boy, but he had a speech impediment, I believe, and it was very hard to understand him.
“We were at a loss. There was no identification there and we didn’t know where he belonged. I tried to keep him from seeing his father, so he and I ran up the ramp, just playing and acting silly. Finally, I decided to take him to McDonald’s right down at Germantown and Gettysburg.
“I asked him if he’d ever been there before and he said yes, so finally I decided to drive around the neighborhoods with him to see if anything connected. I must have been with him six hours that day, but we finally went down Nicholas Road and he pointed to a house and said something about his Nana.”
Savage radioed in, other officers checked the address and it turned out to be his grandmother’s house. Later, she said she returned there and found out “more of the back story.”
The more she learned, the more Savage worried about the boy’s future. And as it would turn out, the youngster would face even more challenges than she imagined.
Not only had the boy’s father been in and out of prison a couple of times before he was murdered, but his mother had her own issues and years later would go to federal prison herself for tax fraud. And just in the past year, with his mom back home, Muddy has had times where he’s lived with her and his younger brother in the St. Vincent de Paul homeless shelter.
“I know a lot of people expected me to fail,” Muddy said. “People thought I’d go crazy and end up in the streets. That I’d be like my father, that I’d be in trouble. But I wasn’t gonna give in. I wasn’t going to be a failure.”
For all her challenges, Muddy’s mom always has given him love and one unwavering directive.
“I told him failure for him wasn’t an option,” she said. “I’ve always tried to stress to Dayomine, ‘Your life was spared for a reason. It could have gone the other way that day. That guy could have shot you, too. There’s a reason you’re here. You’ve got a higher calling. You’ve got to use your story to help other people.”
And as Thurgood principal Sharon Goins put it: “Muddy has one heck of a story. He’s a special kid. Just an honest-to-God amazing young man.”
He’s a near straight-A student who already has amassed several hours of college credit.
A three-year starter on the Cougars offensive line and now a much-used defensive tackle, too, he won All-Ohio, Division III second team honors and first team All-City honors last season. He’s also the manager of the basketball team and wrestling coach Armiya Muhammed said he sometimes brings Muddy in to practice just to give his heavyweights a “real workout.”
During the summers he attends a college prep program at Central State and this year, his mom said, he also took part in a “behind-the-scenes camp” sponsored by the Montgomery County courts. “He fell in love with the federal U.S. Marshals and now he wants to be one,” she said.
In school, Muhammed said, Muddy is “a mediator, a problem solver” for other student’s disputes and, most noticeably, he’s a very hands-on mentor to his own 12-year-old brother, D’Larryun.
“He’s almost like my own son,” Muddy said. “I bring him along when we have films for football or when I’m at basketball practice. I want him around positive stuff, so he stays away from friends who don’t do so good. I want him to see nothing is holding me back, so he’s got no excuse not to do good, too.”
It takes a village
After witnessing his father’s murder, Muddy said he often struggled. He said there were times he cried a lot and times he was angry. He also was fearful the rest of his family might be hurt.
“When his dad got shot, he became very intrigued with guns,” his mom said. “He had BB guns and water guns — one under the couch, one in the kitchen, one in every bedroom. He felt he had to protect me and his older sister (Diamond) from the guy who killed his father.
“That’s why I put him in football. He had to learn that guns weren’t OK. He needed a positive outlet.”
Principal Goins said that’s one thing Muddy’s mom focused on: “School and sports were important to her. She put him in things where he was surrounded by adults — especially coaches — who were surrogate fathers.”
When his mom went to prison for 20 months, Muddy lived with his grandmother Joyce Childs, of whom he said, “I just love her so much.” She became especially active in her grandson’s life, whether it was going to each of his football games or taking him and his brother to the special $5 movie nights at a local theater once a week.
“Muddy embodies that age-old adage ‘it takes a village (to raise a child),’ ” Goins said. “So many people are vested in him being successful.
“From day one as a freshman, he came into school here with real high test scores and he lived up to that. He has a great personality, he works hard and he’s never gotten a referral for discipline, for being tardy, for anything … ever.
“He has gained and won — for real — the respect of adults and his peers here. There’s not a better-liked kid at this school. Everybody loves Muddy.”
Two of the Cougars’ assistant coaches — Daryl McCleskey and Dr. Travis Perry, a burn and wound specialist at Miami Valley Hospital — have been involved with Muddy since he was a peewee football player.
“They both treat me like I’m their own son,” he said. “Coach Dink (McCleskey) has taken me all around the country to camps with his own two sons. When he buys them stuff, he makes sure I get the same.
“Coach Perry has paid for my camps and bought me stuff like Under Armour (clothing). He’s got his own three sons too, but I can come over like I’m family, too.
“They both have been like fathers to me.
“And they’ve made me realize there’s always somebody who’s got it worse than me. One of them told me, ‘Man, some of those kids in Africa they don’t have no mom, no parent at all because they died of AIDS and stuff like that.’ I use that to motivate me.”
He said Principal Goins has “taken me under her wing” and has gone out of her way to be sure he has what he needs for school functions. Other teachers, coaches and some teammates’ parents have done similar things.
But just as he knows some other kids have it worse, he also realizes some don’t realize they have it better:
“Sometimes when some of my friends get mad at their dad, when they go on how they hate when he does this or that, I say, ‘Hey, man, I wish I could say that.’ That’s my No. 1 thing. I say, ‘You ought to be in my shoes one day, and never really have a father.’ ”
Do the right thing
It’s been 11 months since Muddy’s mom got home from prison. In a federal re-entry program, she’s going to college and is working a full-time job here. Most of all she said she’s drawing inspiration from her son.
“Dayomine is my inspiration. Every obstacle he’s had, even the incident with is dad, he’s come through it. He’s resilient. He’s an overcomer.”
As she talked about her son, her voice began to fill with emotion and tears streamed down her cheeks:
“He’s got friends his age who don’t go to school and are hanging out all night. Friends who are selling drugs, smoking weed, doing wrong. And he had every reason to do wrong, too — father dead, mother gone. But he chose a different path. He’s worked so hard to do the right thing.”
To make money when his mom was gone, Muddy did have one hustle for a while. He sold candy, chips and juice to classmates and teachers.
“He’d be like, ‘I know you want some candy. How ‘bout some gummy bears? Skittles? Starbursts? How ‘bout doughnuts?’” Muhammed said with a smile and shake of the head.
That knack for getting the most out of a situation has carried over to the football field, where, although undersized at 5-foot-10, he hopes to interest colleges with his low-center-of-gravity, bull-ahead power.
Already he’s drawn interest from some Division III schools in the state.
“He can play college football and I’m going to make it happen,” said Cougars new head coach Robert Brown. “He’s a good student, a super good kid. He’s the kind of kid you enjoy being around.”
The person to learn that just a week or so ago was Officer Savage.
She’d lost track of him for several years, but earlier this month Muddy’s mom contacted her, told her of his football and classroom success and asked if she’d come see him.
“I cried for a whole day when I found out where he was and how good he was doing,” Savage said. “When I got to the school, I had to get it together again. He was in the cafeteria and at first I just watched him interact with other students.”
Principal Goins said she approached him first: “I said, ‘Muddy, somebody wants to see you, but I don’t know how you’re gonna feel about it.’ He asked, ‘Who?’ And when I pointed her out, he said, ‘Yeah, she’s cool.’ and he went over and hugged her.”
Muddy said that’s the first he had seen Savage “in a long, long time. But I just knew who it was and we both just opened our arms and hugged.”
Savage was moved by the encounter: “Here I am a police officer and he just came and hugged me. He’s so polite, so personable and articulate. I didn’t expect the story to end up like this. With all that was happening to his family — to his dad, his mom, the struggles his grandma had — I didn’t see a positive outlook for him.
“That day his father was killed, I really didn’t want to let him go. I was so worried for that little boy.
“Now, to see what he’s become, it made me feel really good. He turned out to be better than anyone ever could have dreamed.”
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