toddg
12-05-2011, 05:18 PM
High school coach stands by former player in spite of horrific act
On Dec. 29, 2002, a Sunday, Fort Bend County deputies responded to calls about a man in blood-stained clothes, carrying a knife, walking a neighborhood west of Houston.
When officers approached, the man told them that he'd killed someone.
He said he killed his mother.
Jeff Dixon was at home with his family, putting away what was left of Christmas, when the story came on the local news. For Dixon, the horror was personal.
Anansi Flaherty had been a second-string fullback on Katy's 2000 state champion football team. Dixon coached the running backs. Troubled and separated from family, Anansi nevertheless had been one of Dixon's favorites; a happy, handsome kid who needed guidance like any teenager.
And now here Anansi was in jail, charged with first-degree murder and an unthinkable act.
Days went by, then weeks, and the coach couldn't get it out of his head.
"Here's a young man, 19 years old," Dixon said. "He did a horrible crime, and he's by himself."
Coaches forge relationships with players. Or at least the good ones do. They don't just ask more than any teacher may feel a right to. They demand it. No man or woman with a conscience can reach so deep into another without it becoming personal.
KYE R. LEE / DMN
Anansi Flaherty is serving a 40-year sentence in Huntsville's Estelle Unit. Even when he's no longer in your charge, and he's left behind the structured environment you helped create, he's still your player.
And you're still his coach.
Or that's how Jeff Dixon finally made peace with his decision, anyway.
"I was not wanting to get Anansi out of anything," he says. "If nothing else, I just wanted to see if he was all right.
"I had a burden on my heart to go visit him."
Over the next year, Dixon visited Anansi in jail at least once a week. He wrote letters and read them. He encouraged other Katy coaches to write. He talked to lawyers. He followed Anansi's guilty plea and subsequent migration through the state prison system from one unit to the next. In the five years since that awful day, he's prayed with him, cried with him, listened to him. He's raised money so Anansi could buy what the state won't provide. He's given him toothpaste and deodorant and boots and hope.
"It's a spiritual thing," is how Anansi puts it from behind the glass and steel of Huntsville's Estelle Unit. "Even though he's white and I'm black, there's no color between us.
"He's been down with me since Day One."
Seven years it's been. A lifetime to go.
•••
Jeff Dixon just finished his third season as head coach at Alvarado, a 4A school south of Fort Worth. Winning is difficult in a district that includes Everman, which made the state semifinals last month, and Stephenville, long a power. The company Alvarado keeps helps to explain a 10-21 record over the last three years.
Dixon wasn't used to losing. His first job out of Howard Payne was as an assistant under Bob Ledbetter at Southlake Carroll, where he coached on its 1988 state championship team. He also worked for Mike Johnston at Katy, Dixon's alma mater, when it won state titles in '00 and '03.
Working for the likes of Ledbetter and Johnston, Dixon's education in the business soon exceeded what he'd expected.
"When I first got into coaching, it was for the love of the game," he says. "I loved the competition, and I had good role models. But after I'd been in it for awhile, I realized it was not for the money and not for the winning.
"Bob Ledbetter told me one time, even when you go 16-0, it isn't all about the wins and losses. It's about the kids you coach and teach."
Once his career path led him back to Katy, Dixon made the back-up fullback his first case.
Anansi – Uh-NON-cy, named after the clever spider from African and West Indies folk tales – was 5-8 and 215 pounds with decent ability and a host of problems. Before he enrolled in Katy at 16, he'd spent time in a juvenile detention center. Before that, he'd lived with any relative his mother could find to handle him. His father lives in California. Anansi has only talked to him once.
When Anansi got out of juvy, his mother and stepfather put him up in an apartment in Katy, just west of Houston.
"They probably figured maybe I'd stay out of trouble out there," Anansi says.
For 2½ years, Anansi lived alone in the apartment behind the high school. Summers and holidays, he went back to Houston. The rest of the time, he essentially was on his own.
Dixon and Anansi didn't talk much about the arrangement. When the coach would ask Anansi's mother, Vanessa Sweetman, she'd say it was temporary while they built a house in Katy.
But no house ever was built. Coaches would stop by the apartment to check on Anansi. Occasionally, they'd buy him groceries.
"If it hadn't been for football and athletics, he'd have been in a lot of trouble," Dixon says. "I can't even imagine being by yourself like that."
Dixon and his wife, Mandy, also a teacher, tried to give Anansi some working concept of family life. Once a week, they'd have all the running backs over to the house for dinner. Anansi got to know Dixon's children, Tyler and Maggie.
Every day after school, Anansi sat on the other side of Dixon's desk and finished his homework. Dixon taught math, and Anansi needed tutoring.
"If it wasn't for Coach," Anansi says, "I wouldn't have graduated."
Dixon didn't go out of his way to help with Anansi's studies because Katy's football team needed him. He hardly played at all as a junior on the state championship team, not that it mattered to Anansi.
"It was still fun," he says. "I was more than happy to be a specialty back, a short-yardage back, on that team."
Anansi's mother came to see him play a few times. His senior year, she gave Dixon a restaurant gift card and thanked him for his help.
Dixon is sure that Anansi's mother cared for her son, a judgment only he and a handful of others could make. Maybe he's right. Maybe she simply didn't know what else to do with him.
Anansi had problems. If you listen to his side of the story, he'll tell you that he started drinking at 10 and smoking angel dust at 12 or 13. He was a member of a gang. Busted for assaults. Sold *********. When he went away to Texas A&M-Kingsville, where he walked on the football team, it only got worse. He got high every day.
His story is that he went home for Christmas the fall of his freshman year and stayed stoned. Three days before New Year's, his 9-year-old cousin told him that she'd been molested. Anansi blamed his mother for not stopping it. In a fog of drugs and anger, he simply snapped.
But that's not what Dixon or the lawyers say. Anansi was diagnosed with mental problems. He'd gone off his meds. He heard voices.
Listening to him from the other side of the glass, you hardly know what to think. He looks and sounds like the kid Dixon describes: polite, smiling, upbeat, a young man of potential.
Only when he talks about what happened five years ago last month does his mood change, and he takes a deep breath.
"I went into the room . . . ," he says, and stops, gathering himself. Outside the visitation room, steel doors clang and rattle. Anansi sits back and tries again. "I just remember glimpses of it. There isn't a day goes by that I don't think about it. Nothing anybody can do to me would be any worse than living with what I saw.
"I was looking at my mom, and it was like I watched her soul leave her body. I saw her life leave her.
"I was 19. I lost my mother by my own hands, and now I'm in prison."
His lawyer believes he probably saved his life by pleading out. He got 40 years instead. He's done the math.
When will you be eligible for parole?
"Twenty twenty-two."
How old will you be?
"Thirty-nine."
Every day, he gets up early, says his prayers and goes to work in the kitchen. He spends as little time as possible in his cell. When not working, he's in the day room. He works out. Watches TV. Reads philosophy, religion, poetry. He'd like a typewriter, maybe, so he can write his memoirs.
He says some of the older prisoners, the guys who will never get out, look after him.
And, of course, his old coach, too.
"I believe that Coach Dixon is a sign that God still has a hand on me," he says.
•••
Dixon keeps every one of the letters. Anansi is 24 now, separated from their shared past by years and a couple hundred miles and a double-row of razor wire, but the letters all start the same.
Dear coach
In a cramped, single-spaced scrawl, Anansi thanks Dixon for the latest items sent. He writes about his workouts, money, happiness, love and what it's like living, as he once put it, "in the belly of the fish."
A couple of years ago, Anansi, feeling philosophical, came as close to explaining himself as he probably could:
A lot of the time when we do not understand someone or something we as humans tend to lash out or even get scared of what we can't comprehend. I'm living proof . . .
In his Alvarado office, where, even with the door closed, you can hear the clang of steel weights and the shouts of kids, Dixon looks at the letter, then at the floor.
"I don't write him like I should," he says, softly. "I've got more family now, and the job's demanding, but that's no excuse."
He looks up. "Last Christmas, we sent him some money to buy a new pair of shoes. He called me. He was so grateful. He told me about his Thanksgiving meal. He said, how could he complain? He's got three meals and a place to sleep.
"He's just so thankful for what he has. That's hard for me to understand."
How does anyone comprehend the story of Anansi Flaherty? Dixon makes no attempt to justify it. But instead of asking what happened, he opts for, "What now?"
He hasn't seen Anansi in a couple of years, so he's thinking he needs to get down to Huntsville. He might even take his son, Tyler, who's 15 now. He says it would do Anansi good to see how much his son has grown.
He thinks it would do Tyler good, too, to see what it's like in the belly of the fish.
"It's tragic, what happened to Anansi," Dixon says. "I believe God placed him in our path. I'm glad I was able to be there for him.
"I'm glad I still am."
bigwood33
12-05-2011, 06:16 PM
I've know Jeff for almost 30 years I assure you he is a man of integrity, honor, and faith. He and his wife are truly nice people.
toddg
12-24-2013, 03:08 PM
Its coaches like this, and they are all over this great state, that make Texas high school football the best in the country!
Merry Christmas everybody!!
SouthTexas Lobo
12-25-2013, 10:28 AM
Wow, just tells you what a great person, Coach Dixon is. God Bless
refereedoc
12-28-2013, 10:53 AM
Like I have always said if we didn't live in Stephenville with Coach Gillespie, I would want my son to play for Coach Dixon!
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