A Father’s Story – Then and Now

January 17, 2015·25 min·2 clips

Steve reads a newspaper headline that his son Matthew killed another inmate in Twin Towers jail.

Leah Tao begins with an anniversary. After three years of making Strangers, she returns to the first story the show ever featured and checks back in with Stephen Rochelle. She gives the listener a warning. The story is sad, though there is some sweetness in it, and it turns on a parent watching his child become someone he can barely reach. Stephen starts with a photograph. He stops on Matt's face, his smile, and the eyes that remind him of Matt's mother. Then the story gets darker. Matthew is in a jail cell with another man. Both are mentally ill, both are without medication, and apparently no one is watching them the way the jail required. An altercation ends with one man dead. Stephen sees two people damaged by illness and by a system that could not, or would not, handle them. The charge is grave. The district attorney's office pursues aggravated murder. The public defender argues that the jail system belongs on trial too. Stephen and his wife keep coming back. They sit through hearings, jury selection, and each day in court, hoping Matthew will not be sent away for twenty-five years to life. Matthew is found guilty. Then comes the sanity phase, and the jury returns in less than an hour with a different verdict. Stephen breaks down outside. A juror tells him the family being there every day helped them see Matthew as more than the case. That stays with him. As a school principal, Stephen hears proud updates about other people's children and their college acceptances. His own weekends look different. The episode rests in that hard contrast: a father whose public life is full of young people's futures, while his private life keeps taking him back to institutions, courtrooms, and his son.

As heard by us

A father's grief, a son's illness, and a story that still cuts three years later.

Strangers returns to its first story and stays with Stephen Rochelle as he recounts his son Matthew moving through mental illness, jail, a murder charge, and a state hospital stay that keeps the story painfully current three years later.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

A father's love collides with a system that cannot hold his son.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify

Play clips from this episode More from Strangers