Dear Steve Robinson’s Lynch Mob
Last month, Bollard editor Chris Busby wrote a powerful introduction to my letter to Gov. Janet Mills and her clemency board regarding my (still yet-to-be-approved) request for a clemency hearing (“Who’s Afraid of Leo Hylton?”), which was published along with my letter in the October issue of this magazine. In response, Steve Robinson, editor of the online news outlet The Maine Wire, posted a commentary on his website headlined, “Portland Newspaper Dubs Guy Who Hacked 10-Year-Old Girl with Machete ‘Maine’s foremost justice advocate.’”
Robinson’s editorial contained misinformation and false facts, but worse, The Maine Wire allowed its readers to respond with violent, hate-filled comments openly calling for me to be killed (lynched, if possible), castrated and caged for life. [See Chris’ Oct. 15 post, “Pro-Trump news outlet cheers Gov. Mills’ prison policy,” at bollardhead.substack.com.]
To anyone close or related to the Guerrette family who I hurt so terribly in 2008, please forgive me for publicly engaging in this horrific history. (I am legally prohibited from offering that preemptive apology to them directly.) I do this out of care, obligation, and hope of preventing further harm.
•••
Dear Steve Robinson’s Lynch Mob:
After this publishing, I will consider the matter closed and ask that you take care to minimize the collateral damage you cause in your attempts to will into existence my disfigurement, castration, and death. I need to address some falsehoods your leader has told you.
“The security alarm awoke [Mr. Guerrette] to the break-in,” Robinson told you, “but the firearm malfunctioned, which allowed Hylton to strike him several times.”
As the police reports deduce, Mr. Guerrette did not come out with a gun in his hand when I entered his home that night. I attacked an unarmed man. It was after I first struck him that he returned to the bedroom to get the gun. In the very first essay I wrote for The Bollard (then called Mainer), “The Awesome Power of Forgiveness” [June 202o], I clarified this.
“The plan had been to burglarize the home, but when the alarm sounded, my mind stopped making rational decisions and I attacked, with a machete, the man who emerged from the darkness,” I wrote. “I thought he had a gun. I later learned from the police that he had not had the weapon until I encountered him again, after assaulting his [then-10-year-old] daughter.”
Robinson wrote: “Hylton later stated that the younger daughter was a witness and that he kept swinging at her even after she ‘[went] down’ because he had to make sure there were no witnesses.”
As is now more commonly understood, people who inflict serious violence also traumatize themselves by the horror of the act. They (we) find themselves in a foggy mental state and have trouble remembering the timing and sequence of their violent actions. When I was first arrested, I did a walk-through of the crime scene with the police. I did not understand why I caused such extreme harm, so I tried to use TV crime-drama logic (e.g., CSI, Law & Order) to explain the illogical. When asked why I did it, I numbly said, “To get rid of witnesses.”
“Busby,” Robinson wrote, “like other writers who have taken up Hylton’s cause, never quite get around to explaining why earning a PhD means anything about anything.”
Earning a Ph.D. in Conflict Analysis and Resolution means I am dedicating innumerable hours to learning how to interrupt cycles of harm and facilitate the creation of new cycles of repair and healing. It means I will be a safe and supportive member of any community I enter upon my release.
“Do a couple of PhDs pay back that debt?” Robinson asks. “Will a couple thousand dollars to an ‘I’m Sorry I Tried to Murder You When You Were a Little Girl Fund’ make it all OK?”
Nothing, absolutely nothing, can “make it all OK.” The harm I caused is irreparable. That fact is not something I will ever try to minimize or dispute. Any harm repair work I do now is not in a futile effort to “make things okay.” All of it is to practice accountability in a healing-centered way that lessens the amount of suffering in the world and hopefully helps the Guerrette family and our shared community know that, if/when I leave this prison, there will be no need for fear. Rather, they can be assured my life is dedicated to preventing anyone else from enduring the pain I inflicted on them.
Now I implore you, Maine Wire readers: Please stop engaging in this violent rhetoric. Let the people I harmed continue in their healing journey without your inflammatory efforts to pull them back into the night I brought horror into their lives. Our only way out of violence is to work our way into healing. With this, I need your help.
Leo Hylton is a PhD student at George Mason University’s Jimmy and Rosalynn Carter School for Peace and Conflict Resolution, currently incarcerated at Maine State Prison. His education and work are focused on Social Justice Advocacy and Activism, with a vision toward an abolitionist future. You can reach him at: Leo Hylton #70199, 807 Cushing Rd., Warren, ME 04864, or leoshininglightonhumanity@gmail.com.
