old news itemhttp://www.concordmonitor.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20050828/REPOSITORY/508280304/1013/NEWS03To the visitors, they're just family Micki Blackstock prepared for her first visit with her imprisoned son with the worst in mind. "I thought it would be like in the movies," she said, "where there is glass between you and you can only talk by phone."
Micki was relieved to find it otherwise. "It's more like a cafeteria," she said.
For five years, Micki has traveled from Hollis to Concord each Wednesday to visit 50-year-old Gregg, who is serving a lengthy sentence for multiple sexual assaults against young girls, some of whom he met while attending a Jehovah's Witness church in Hillsborough County. Mother and son greet each other warmly, take opposite sides of a small table and talk.
Not about his offenses, which Gregg and Micki say didn't happen. And in that respect, they are not unlike the families around them. Eavesdrop in the visiting room, and you'll hear conversations about what the relatives are up to, how many fish the boys caught on vacation and how a wife is managing things alone. Soon it will be, "How the kids doing in school?"
To their victims and others, inmates remain forever rapists, murderers and pedophiles. But to their visitors, they never stop being sons, fathers, brothers and friends.
And so Micki tells her son what their friends and family are doing and about the latest repair needed on her old house, which she calls "a real fixer-upper." And he tells her about the science class he's taken or the literature, art and history classes he's finished. They imagine the day they will once again eat breakfast at Parker's Maple Barn in Mason.
Before he was imprisoned, Gregg helped his mother keep up with home repairs. "And I figured that when it got to be a burden, I'd go home again and take care of the house and take care of her," Gregg said.
It will be years before he's any help to his mother again. According to the prison, Gregg's earliest parole date is 2015, although Gregg and Micki predict a pending court case could reduce that by five years.