A Mother's Tortured Journey

Mike Wise: HUNTSVILLE, Tex. — Gilreatha Stoltzfus fussed with the bandanna in her hair while she zigzagged across a patch of dried grass. Fidgety, annoyed, towing her cluttered purse over her left shoulder as if it were a backpack, the hard-featured woman of 43 stopped suddenly and slithered her fingers through the chain-link fence of the visitors' area at Huntsville Unit, a maximum-security prison featuring 30-foot red-brick walls, where she had come to see her son. "Fuzzy, I need the keys to the car," she muttered to her husband in a tired rasp. "I left somethin' in there. "Fuzzy!" The ruckus made an armed guard motion for someone to control the woman. Sitting on a wooden picnic table in the prison yard 15 yards away, Carlton Dotson looked up. "Is Mom coming in today?" he asked his stepfather. "I don't think so," Elmer Stoltzfus said quietly, looking at the ground. "Mom's havin' a hard time getting herself together today. Maybe tomorrow, Carlton."