Beads of support

After the guilty verdict was read on Thursday, Aug. 19 in the 8th courtroom of the Kootenai County Courthouse, the victim’s mother rocked her head back an inch in relief, but did nothing else.

Minutes before, First District Judge John Mitchell told the room he would not tolerate outbursts once the decision came. Either in support or revolt.

“I will have you removed from the courtroom,” Mitchell said. “This jury deserves better than that.” 

Then the 12 jury members walked into the room and handed the verdict to Mitchell, who read it aloud at five minutes after noon, and the mother, Mary Noonan, rocked her head back while everyone else stayed silent.

The perpetrator turned to his family in the bench behind the defense table and nodded that he would be all right. 

His name is Randall Rothwell. He is 19, convicted of a lewd act with a child under 16, a felony, but that is not the story.

The story is about the 7-year-old girl who was not in the courtroom when the bailiffs handcuffed Rothwell and took him to jail. It’s about the fear she overcame in the year it took to bring the case to trial, and the support she and her mother received from a group of motorcyclists throughout the ordeal.

The girl is not scared of men, anymore. 

She was.

“When I first met her she was a little nervous, hiding behind her mother,” said Robert Hoyt, the 57-year-old nicknamed Daddy Rat, clad in a patched black leather vest with chains and headband. “Now, she runs and jumps up into my arms.”

•••

Hoyt is the founder of North Idaho’s first B.A.C.A. chapter — Bikers Against Child Abuse — a national organization that supports victims of child abuse and their families by empowering them with the ability to never fear or lose trust in spite of what’s been done to them.

The support, with its seven members, comes by being there. 

It’s the roar of their motorcycle engines as the riders come to the victim’s house to visit, or the rumble of the engines as the group just drives by.

That, the girl says now, is her favorite sound. 

“I want my own,” said the girl, the first North Idaho B.A.C.A. child. “A real motorcycle. And as soon as they come back over I’m going on another ride on a motorcycle, around the lake.”

B.A.C.A began in Salt Lake City in 1995 and has a charter in the southern part of the state, but began as an idea for North Idaho three years ago when Cruiser’s bar owner Sheri Herberholz introduced national members to Hoyt during the bar’s annual mini-Sturgis summer event.

During this year’s rally in July, Hoyt led 50 cyclists past the girl’s home near Hauser Lake. They threw hundreds of beads as a sign of support into her yard where she was waiting for them with a welcome sign, hundreds of beads like prayers on a rosary, red, green, and blue.

“Every color in the rainbow,” the girl said.

It’s teaching her to trust men again.

They gave her gifts, like a tiny pink motorcyclist’s vest, and a B.A.C.A. teddy bear. They sat in the courtroom during the weeklong trial, stood outside of it during the breaks, and ate hamburgers with the family at lunch.

But always there was the thunder of the engines, constantly going by her home, before the trial and after, and outside the courthouse.

“I remember hearing the engines when I was out back,” Noonan remembered of one of the rides, where she looked up too quickly in her excitement and crashed her head against the shed wall.

“I almost knocked myself out,” the single mother said.

She can laugh now.

“It gave me security,” she said. “Someone was watching out for us.”

•••

The group is not vigilante or about anger. 

It works through state coalitions against abuse, and will be used by local support groups such as Court Appointed Specialty Advocates, which helps put victims’ families in contact with the group. It will be officially chartered in North Idaho in May.

But it doesn’t focus on the perpetrator.

“It’s human nature to want five minutes with the guy,” Hoyt said. “But our focus is only the child.”

The Rothwells and Noonans are next-door neighbors.

The defendant invited the victim inside his room and told her she could play his video games if she did something for him. The girl testified on Aug. 17, corroborated by DNA, what that condition was.

And once there’s a verdict, it doesn’t just end. Lives change once they enter a courtroom and they change all over again once the verdict comes. It can be hard not to be angry.

But the focus is healing, building trust again.

“Some of that (stuff) you just don’t want to hear,” Hoyt said after the girl’s testimony. 

But she gave it. The mother wasn’t allowed in the courtroom then, and the girl had said beforehand that she was nervous.

But B.A.C.A. was there.

“It ate me to the core,” Noonan said about waiting outside with member Dan Wiltse, while the other members stayed in the courtroom with the girl, and waiting with them again while the jury deliberated over two days. “I don’t know what we would have done without them.”

And after the girl gave her testimony, she left the courtroom for the one and only time and picked a pink flower from the courthouse garden for member Chaplain Billy Bonthius, who put it behind his ear.

“Thank you,” Bonthius said. 

“You did great,” Hoyt said.

“I want to ride home on a motorcycle,” the girl said, and she laughed.

•••

There’s a saying and a story B.A.C.A. likes to share. The saying is once they’re a B.A.C.A child, they’re always a B.A.C.A child. 

Nothing ends with a verdict. The group will always stop by the Noonans’ house.

And the story they share is about the North Idaho chapter’s visit to McCall during the annual state conference recently.

 “Thank you,” a woman at the hotel registration desk told a southern chapter member as he was checking in for the night. 

“For what?” the motorcyclist asked, wearing the B.A.C.A. patch on his vest.

“I was a B.A.C.A. child when I was in kindergarten,” she said. “You guys helped me through.”

Now, Noonan said she and her daughter are just trying to heal, something that can take a lifetime.

It’s been more than a year since the April 2009 incident, and “everything has been on hold” since then, Noonan said.

But the healing can begin, and the girl, who loves to read and draw, begins second grade soon. She’ll always have the hundreds of beads like prayers as the process finally starts, and she’ll forever take comfort in the roar of an engine when the bikers stop by.

“Thank you for being so sweet and kind,” the girl wrote them after the trial. 

There’s a sign in Cruiser’s bar, too, for B.A.C.A. from their first North Idaho child. “I love you.”