“He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away.”
—REVELATION 21:4
As Sabine Durden walked toward the car beneath the yellow hue of a glowing Waffle House sign, she suddenly lost all power in her body. Slumping forward, her fiancé, Anthony, came to her side and helped her into the rental vehicle.
What in the world is going on? I’ve never experienced jet lag like this, she thought.
It was 8:45 a.m. when Sabine’s body unexplainably collapsed in Atlanta, Georgia. Meanwhile, in Moreno Valley, California, the clock read 5:45 a.m.—a time that Sabine would never forget.
“My body knew, I didn’t,” she said to me as her big green eyes peered through a waterfall of tears.
Sabine and Anthony left the Waffle House to arrive at a soaring mansion. Eager to finally meet Anthony’s family, Sabine’s anticipation spiraled into an odd burdening achiness. She changed into her pajamas, expecting to be enveloped in restful slumber. But as Sabine relaxed, her phone buzzed.
I’m not going to answer, she thought. These are women from the gym wanting the late-night advice of their trainer. They can gain some weight and we’ll work it out when I get back. But her phone lit up again and again and again.
Sabine finally glanced at her illuminated device to find a flurry of frantic messages. “Please call me. This is Elaina, Dominic’s best friend.” An endless list of names with urgent pleas invaded her home screen—all the names of Dominic’s friends from the 911 dispatch office he worked at in Moreno Valley. Suddenly awake, Sabine attempted to play the voice mails, but none of them would play.
“God protected me. I know that,” she stated without hesitation. “If I would have heard those voice mails and what happened, I would have grabbed that rental car and taken off over a cliff.”
Bewildered and confused, she ran upstairs and through the unfamiliar halls of a home she had never been in to find Anthony, who still remembers the look of Sabine’s eyes, “huge and full of fear.”
“Something has happened to Dominic!” she cried. The couple called Dominic’s dispatch office, and when the woman on the other end heard it was Sabine, her voice abruptly changed.
“Ma’am, can you please hold.”
“Listen, just let me speak to Dominic,” Sabine urged.
“Just wait for the supervisor.”
Sabine looked at Anthony and quipped, “That boy done crashed his bike and is probably in the hospital in a body cast. I’m going to hurt him when I get home!”
“The supervisor got on,” Sabine recounted. “And that sentence that you hear on TV.” She paused as her voice took a painful, lower tone. “It’s forever engraved: I’m so sorry to inform you that Dominic was killed this morning.”
Sabine clutched the phone and screamed as members of Anthony’s family began flooding into the room. Sabine and Anthony both fell to the floor, wailing in despair, as Sabine tried to comprehend the death of “[her] only child, [her] best friend, and the love of [her] life.”1
“That’s the biggest bullshit I ever heard. It’s a lie . . . If that’s one of his pranks . . . I’m never going to talk to him again,” she stated in disbelief.
The phone let out another harrowing ring. This time it was the police chief.
Several of Dom’s friends had already identified the body, and Sabine needed to call the coroner. Panicked and in disbelief, Sabine and Anthony rushed back to the airport. The rental car agent casually remarked, “Hey, you guys were here this morning,” but then he saw the look on Sabine’s face. “Oh my God.”
Sabine and Anthony dragged their weary bodies onto the plane, and the stewardess brought the couple a big bottle of water and a towel. Their howling cries filled the entirety of the six-hour flight. “We cried loudly, and we didn’t care,” Sabine recalled.
When Sabine arrived at Ontario California International Airport, she had settled into confident denial. “We’re going to wake up. This did not happen. No way.”
Less than twenty-four hours earlier, Dominic, Anthony, and Sabine had eaten dinner together before Dom drove them to the airport. As Dom took Sabine’s bag out of his truck, Sabine fell forward, right into his arms. Like a big, warm teddy bear, Dom wrapped Sabine in his loving embrace, swirled her around, and kissed her.
“Now, we will be back in a week,” she joked. “I have hidden cameras all over the house, so watch out.”
“I took them down, don’t worry. Go have a party,” Anthony chimed in.
The three of them shared a final laugh together.
Sabine remembered, “He hugged me and kissed me, and I still see him walk to his truck. The one I drive now.” She paused for several seconds and her voice began to shake. “And he just stood there and smiled at me and said ‘I love you’ because we always [did] that. We knew we didn’t have to but we said and showed it.”
“Have a safe trip,” Dominic instructed her.
“You be safe too,” replied Sabine.
“Always, Mom.”
“And that was the last time I saw and heard him,” Sabine told me.
Less than a day earlier, Sabine had happily departed from the bustling San Bernardino County airport, anxiously prepared to meet new family. But now Sabine had returned to a nightmare.
As Sabine exited the terminal, she gazed down the stairs and saw the distressed faces of Dominic’s three best friends.
Sabine’s body hit the floor as she lost consciousness. It was real.
Just before 5:45 a.m. on July 12, 2012, Dominic left for work at the sheriff’s department on his black and chrome motorcycle as he did on any ordinary day. But on this July morning Dominic would cross paths with someone who was not even supposed to be here in the United States. The encounter would cost him his life.
Dominic had a booming laugh and a desire to help others. He worked as a 911 dispatcher and flew small planes in his spare time, but his dream was to become a helicopter pilot for the police department. As a dispatcher “he was the calming voice, the rock who everybody looked to for strength,” according to his coworker.2
Dom was the kind of guy who would volunteer to work on Thanksgiving and Christmas because he wanted the employees with children to be home with their kids. Beloved by all, he was “everyone’s plus-one.”3 In his spare time he worked tirelessly in service of other people. He worked as a volunteer firefighter and, in 2002, was named Moreno Valley Volunteer of the Year for performing more than one thousand service hours. In short, Dominic was a model citizen.
Dominic. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
Dom was also a prankster, known for his lighthearted jokes. He and his mom would exchange gag gifts at Christmas, aiming to outdo each other with silly wrapping paper and unpredictable shenanigans.
Dom always knew how to get a good laugh, like the time when he arranged for the police to pull him over with his friend in the car. He pulled out a big wad of money and had the officers pretend to arrest him as they proclaimed to Dom’s wide-eyed friend, “You didn’t know that Dom was the best-known male prostitute in town?” Sabine remembers Dom crawling into the house with his big, booming laugh as his friend looked white as a sheet. “I will never be able to hear my son laugh again,” Sabine lamented.
Dom called himself “a proud mama’s boy.” “We were never apart longer than two weeks,” Sabine proudly boasted. “People tell me now that he would always talk about his mom and how proud he was . . . and how much he enjoyed hanging out.” One time Sabine crashed her motorcycle, and Dom ran over to her with huge, tearful eyes.
“You almost made my worst nightmare come true,” he exclaimed.
“Nah, nah, nah. [The] worst nightmare would be something happening to you,” Sabine replied.
Six months later, something did happen to Dom.
Dom rode his motorcycle down Pigeon Pass Road on his familiar route to work through California’s sparse green foliage and red dirt mountains. He was sitting in the left lane while he waited at a light. As the light turned green, he moved forward and a red Toyota pickup suddenly took a fast left turn in front of him.4 Dom tried to swerve, but the truck hit him so hard that his body was launched into the air, hitting a wall near the sidewalk.
Two marines who happened to be trailing behind Dom witnessed the crash. They immediately sprinted out of their vehicle toward Dom, but one man noticed the driver of the pickup fleeing the scene, according to one of the marines. As one marine tended to Dom, talking to him and covering his lifeless body with his jacket, the other chased down the driver and detained him until police arrived.
One of the marines would tell Sabine that the driver, Juan Zacarias Lopez Tzun, not only tried to bolt from the scene, he also seemed entirely uninterested in the carnage his actions had caused. As Dom’s body lay motionless, Tzun, according to the marine, gazed into the sky with a “Can we get this over with? I have places to go” attitude.
As time passed and there was no sign of Dom at the dispatch office, Dom’s coworkers grew concerned. Dom was always a little late, bolting into the office with “boots untied and shirt untucked,” according to Sabine. He would cruise in just in time for the 6:00 a.m. briefing. Today, however, rather than receiving a reliably late Dom, the dispatch office received a concerning call: “Fatality on Pigeon Pass.”
Dom’s best friend was a motorcycle cop, who happened to arrive on the scene. He saw Dom’s black and chrome bike lying on the sidewalk and thought, No, no, no, that’s not him. The dispatcher ran the plate and a blocked identity signal popped up. She hit another button to uncover the owner of the bike: “Dominic Durden.” Law enforcement had lost a brother in blue.
Juan Zacarias Lopez Tzun, Dominic’s killer, had a long and ominous rap sheet: grand theft, robbery, drunken driving, violation of probation. But Tzun was not just a criminal: he was a criminal who had no legal right to be in the United States. Tzun had illegally crossed the border before, and after a felony conviction for grand theft in 2009 he had been deported to Guatemala.5 Undeterred, Tzun illegally crossed the border again. This time he earned a drunk-driving conviction and a penalty of three years’ probation, a $1,660 fine, and a mere ten days in jail.6 While on probation for his first DUI, Tzun was arrested for not having a license and a second suspicion of driving under the influence.7 Tzun had no license, registration, or insurance, and he had a criminal record, but, remarkably, no deportation proceedings were initiated.8 Instead, he was released on bail following his second DUI arrest, mere weeks before he crashed into Dominic.9
Sabine described it as a “drop-to-your-knees moment” when she found out about Juan’s legal status. Although Sabine had already suffered the greatest of injustices, more injustice was yet to come.
Authorities arrested Juan after his collision with Dominic, and days later he was charged with misdemeanor vehicular manslaughter without gross negligence and driving without a license.10 No gross negligence was charged despite the district attorney and judge acknowledging that Juan had made “an unsafe left turn,” in their words.11 As Juan awaited his trial, authorities eventually moved him from jail to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) detention.12 In the face of multiple previous criminal convictions, the immigration judge nevertheless offered Juan the option of bail, which he readily posted.13 At an early hearing, the judge also promised Juan a lenient nine-month jail sentence if he pleaded guilty, making this deal before Dominic’s grieving mother had the chance to make her victim-impact statement to the court.14
During trial, Sabine watched as Juan gave his statement, taking “little responsibility for his actions,” according to the Riverside Press-Enterprise’s Brian Rokos, who did extensive reporting on the case.15 Although Juan sucked up to the judge during the trial, saying “You’re the best” and “I so admire you,” he never once apologized to Sabine for his fatal actions.
When the judge asked Juan about his reaction to the accident, Sabine remembers Juan snidely replying, “God gives life. God takes life. I was only on my way to work.”16 Audible gasps filled the courtroom in reaction to his unapologetic, callous statement.
When Sabine gave her victim-impact statement, she wearily stood with the judge to her left and the audience to her right as her two friends propped up her exhausted body.
“Lean back, lean back,” her friends advised as Sabine tearfully faced her son’s killer.
“Why do I have to lean back?” Sabine whispered.
“Just trust us.”
Her friends tried to obstruct Sabine’s view. “What is going on?” Sabine asked again.
“Don’t look over there. They are mad-dogging you,” her friends said.
As Sabine poured her heart out to the courtroom, sharing the life and the death of her only son, she looked out at a sea of weeping faces. All of the courtroom staff was bawling. But in the midst of all that empathy sat some members of the killer’s family who seemed to smirk and sneer at Sabine in what she viewed as an effort to intimidate her. Undeterred, Sabine addressed Juan directly, “You had no license, no regard for anyone out there. You risked everyone’s life who shared the road with you . . . You didn’t just take Dominic’s future, you took mine as well.”17
While Juan was engaging in arrogant denial and evading justice, Sabine coped with inconceivable loss. Upon arriving back in California in the direct aftermath of Dom’s death, she asked to be taken to the scene. The blood was washed clean, but she stood at a marker, not realizing that she was standing on the very spot where Dom had died.
Dominic and Sabine. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
Sabine also had to make a heartbreaking phone call to her ninety-two-year-old mother in Germany to notify her that her favorite grandson had died. The family made sure a doctor was present, and when Sabine called, her sister could not even recognize her broken voice.
And then came the impossible task of laying her only child to eternal rest. “Thank God he had a helmet on,” she said. That meant they could have an open casket. “He looked like he was asleep with a smirk on his face, but I knew his legs were mangled.”
Sabine was forever changed, but Juan would walk away unscathed. Despite multiple convictions, a felony, two illegal border crossings, and an entitled, haughty attitude, Juan pled guilty, receiving only a nine-month jail sentence on a charge carrying up to a one-year sentence and five years’ probation, just as the judge had promised.18
When Sabine heard the sentence, she recalls, “Everything in me went numb.” Her two friends held her up and carried her out of the so-called River Hall of Justice, all three wearing “In Loving Memory of Dominic” T-shirts.19 As her friends guided her to a bench outside the courtroom, Sabine cried, “Not one time [did he say] ‘I’m sorry.’ ”20 In addition to his sentence, Juan was also ordered to pay $18,800 in restitution to Sabine.21 “That’s my son’s life,” she lamented. Sabine hasn’t received a dime from Juan, who had proved himself fully capable of paying his bail.
Even the judge seemed to acknowledge the injustice he had rendered. Rokos reported that the judge seemed “to question whether the charge against Tzun should have been a felony . . . [A]fter reading 16 victim-impact letters and hearing three tearful victim-impact statements, he appeared to regret promising that sentence.”22 The judge pointlessly told Tzun, “If I knew what I know now, I might have told the [prosecution] to find a way to charge you with a felony.”23 He even remarked to Brian Rokos, “This one [case] got to me.”24
For Sabine, no amount of remorse from the judge would rectify the wrong. “This guy [Juan], he took more than just my only child,” she told me. “He took his incredible future . . . He took away that I would never be a grandmother or a mother-in-law. So his friends are all getting married and having kids. And I’m happy for them, but inside it tears me up. I would have been them.”
And his penalty? Because of a deal, Tzun spent only thirty-five days in jail.25 Tzun’s judge decided that the convicted felon could spend as much as two-thirds of his jail sentence in a work release program or in home monitoring.26 Not only that, he gave Tzun credit for fifty-six days he had served in jail previously.27 Local reporter Brian Rokos noted the implications of this decision just one day after Juan’s conviction, writing a story headlined “Dispatcher’s Killer Could Serve Only 34 Days in Jail.”28 And that is almost exactly what happened.
“He had all these crimes. He paid a little here, a little there. A little inconvenience. And the end game is thirty-five days for killing a U.S. citizen,” said Sabine, who made it her mission to see Tzun leave the country.
Upon release, Juan was transferred to an immigration detention center, where he remained for just over ten months.29 An ICE agent at the facility had warned Sabine that sometimes the guards let illegal immigrants out the back door when the place gets full: “ ‘We get a note from “the top,” ’ he said, ‘and then we let some of the detainees go,’ ” according to Sabine. That same ICE agent promised to keep an eye on Tzun and inform Sabine each time he had a hearing.
Worried that Tzun might escape, Sabine and her fiancé, Anthony, visited the center weekly to fight for Tzun’s deportation. Although they were not permitted to attend the deportation hearings, Sabine and Anthony would sit for a few hours to let everyone know that they were not going away and would be watching. “I didn’t even have the right to sit in there while the murderer of my child talked to the judge,” Sabine noted. Sitting before a steel door with a small window, Sabine would watch Tzun escorted into the courtroom in shackles. “I wanted him to see me when he came out of that little courtroom and had to walk the corridor . . . he would turn and see me and then look away. I wanted him to know I’m not going away. I’m going to see you out of here.” She said he was shocked each time that he peered out the window and saw the face of the grieving mother whose life he had devastated.
In addition to fighting for Tzun’s deportation, Sabine and forty friends wrote letters to the judge, highlighting the injustice of the outcome.30 “Please Your Honor, don’t let this happen to another victim’s family,” Sabine wrote. “Those wounds stay forever and when you get victimized again in court, by a judge, you will find it hard to believe in justice.”31
The criminal justice system had failed Sabine, and now she worried that the federal government would too by failing to deport Juan. But in March of 2014, Sabine got the call: “He’s on his way to the airport being taken to Guatemala.” Juan was once again on board a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement air operations flight back to where he belonged.32
But Sabine knows this is not the end of Juan’s story: “He’s [going to come] back. He’s going to do it again because he didn’t learn anything.”
After suffering unimaginable grief and witnessing severe injustice, Sabine became resolute: “I can’t just go home. Be quiet. Not say anything.” The pain was still unbearable. “I was going to kill myself. I was looking for ways,” she said. Anthony knew it, which was why he would not even let her go to the bathroom alone.
Sabine felt hopeless until June 16, 2015, when a man came down an escalator and declared he was running for president. “I had planned my suicide to make it look like an accident,” she recalled. “I couldn’t take the pain. I’m going to end it. I’m going to join Dominic.”
No one wanted to hear her story. No one would listen. She had the television on as then candidate Trump announced his bid for the presidency: “I will terminate President Obama’s illegal executive order on immigration, immediately.”
Sabine stopped in her tracks. It was a sign that someone cared, but not only that: it was an early predictor of what was to come.
For years, Sabine had sought to share her stories with her leaders. In 2015, Sabine testified at a Senate Judiciary Hearing, sharing her tragic loss as several lawmakers actually fell asleep!33 In the same year Sabine wrote a letter to President Obama. “Why do you continue to invite ILLEGAL ALIENS into the White House? WHEN do legal citizens that have been deeply affected by this Immigration issue, get a chance to share their side of the story with you?” she asked.34
Obama never responded, prompting Sabine to write to First Lady Michelle Obama. “My only child Dominic Durden was the best [thing] that ever happened to me. He was my only child and the love of my life. He was also of mixed race,” Sabine wrote. “I told him that he could become any- and everything that he wanted to be. He corrected me and said: yes, anything but the President. That’s only for Caucasian people. When your Husband became President (Dominic and I proudly voted for him) I reminded him of our conversation years back and we both smiled. The election showed that you CAN become anything you set your mind to.” In the remainder of Sabine’s four-page letter to the first lady, Sabine shared who Dominic was and her story of tragic loss.
“I am simply a grieving Mother writing to another Mother . . . I know as a Mom you are trying to imagine the pain all of us have and I pray you will never have to feel this and know what it’s like to wake up and go to sleep knowing you will never get to hug and kiss your child,” Sabine wrote. This time Sabine received a response: a form letter. “Thank you for sharing your story with me,” it read, with a few other added pleasantries and the First Lady’s autopenned signature at the bottom. It was clearly a general letter sent to anyone who took the time to write to the First Lady’s office.
Sabine felt insulted at the lack of empathy, and so Sabine picked up her pen again: “On August 29, 2014, I sent a letter to you . . . My heart was poured out to you from mother to mother,” Sabine wrote. “On October 6, 2014, I received a reply letter from you. I do understand that you are very busy . . . May I suggest that one line may be added to letters that mentioned deceased loved ones. ‘I am sorry for your loss.’ ” Shortly after, Sabine received a call from someone in Michelle Obama’s office, apologizing for the mistake. Sabine then received a second letter written by Michelle Obama herself, recognizing her grief but not inviting her to share her story.
Sabine still felt betrayed by her leaders until July of 2015. That month Sabine received a call from a friend asking if she wanted to meet Donald Trump. “I thought it was one of Dom’s friends playing a prank,” she remembers. “I said, ‘Yeah, right!’ The friend instructed her to meet at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel in Beverly Hills, California. Sabine dressed up and arrived at the posh Italian Renaissance–style hotel to find a big room with a few families inside. Trump walked in and she remembers him having “such a presence.” There was no media, no huge staff, just Trump and the families. For an hour and a half, Trump let each of the families share their stories of loss—all at the hands of an illegal immigrant.
President Donald Trump and Sabine. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
Sabine said, “He listened. He cried with us. He laughed with us. And he said, ‘So the common denominator is no one listens to you guys. Nobody wants to share your story . . . We’re going to change that. Come with me.’ ”
Sabine speaking at the 2016 Republican National Convention. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
The families exited the quiet room and entered another bustling one filled with media. Sabine remembered, “We were right by his side, and he told them ‘These families suffered the biggest tragedy of losing their family to an illegal immigrant, and you guys are going to listen now.’ ” Someone had finally heard Sabine. Someone cared, and that was the soon-to-be president of the United States.
Sabine attended several Trump rallies—in Costa Mesa, San Diego, and Anaheim—and a town hall meeting in Austin. And then she got a call in the summer of 2016: “This is the RNC, and we would be honored to have you as one of our speakers.” Another one of those prank calls, she thought. But the request was indeed real, and on July 18, 2016, Sabine spoke to an audience of 35 million.
Sabine told me, “I was terrified of public speaking.” Dom had a part-time job at the local television station in Moreno Valley, and when he laughingly stuck the microphone in her face, she would sweat, start shaking, and basically forget English. But on the night of the RNC, boldness overtook her. Before she went on the stage, she and the other two family members who had lost loved ones hugged and looked up, saying, “OK, boys, all three of you. You’ve got us, right?”
On the first night of the RNC, I watched from the illuminated red, white, and blue CNN set as Sabine stood boldly and confidently proclaimed, “We need to secure our borders so no other person has to ever go through this kind of grief, pain, and agony knowing this could have been prevented . . . Americans need to come first.”
Sabine told me, “That was another moment with Dominic. He was right there with me. I felt him behind me. I couldn’t have done it otherwise.”
Trump continued to show Sabine that she was more than a prop to be used by a politician. When Moreno Valley, California, dedicated a portion of a rocky California hiking trail to Dominic’s memory, Trump wrote her: “I was so glad to hear that they are dedicating a memorial for your son, Dominic. Though he has left this world, he lives on in you and all who knew him and loved him. I will honor his memory by fighting to deliver justice on behalf of your family and all American families who have suffered from such loss. We will never forget.”
Sabine lost friends and family members because of her support for Trump. She even got death threats. Social media users and bystanders at rallies and demonstrations called her a Nazi, a xenophobe, and a racist, among many other smears. All absurd accusations. Some people even told her, “It’s good your son is dead.”
At a question-and-answer session at UCLA, a questioner asked her, “What would you say to someone that accuses you of racism?” Sabine replied, “Meet my son,” as she pulled out a picture of her mixed-race son.
With Sabine at Naaman’s Championship BBQ in Texarkana, Texas. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
And when she is accused of being anti-immigrant? She responds, “Meet me. I am a legal immigrant from Germany. I had to do it the legal way.”
Sabine recognizes the media effort to drown out the story of victims of illegal immigrant crime. Most networks cut away from her speech at the RNC. She says “It’s a scab on my heart” every time she sees a commentator who “has more compassion for illegals and their families than for us.”
I told Sabine about a particularly fiery debate that I had had on the set of Anderson Cooper 360. When discussing Trump’s executive order to curb illegal immigration, I pointed out to my Democratic colleague, Kirsten Powers, that there is a human face to the victims of illegal immigrant crime. Yes, most immigrants are good, hardworking people—as I said in the segment—and I appreciate their valued contributions, but what about the ones like Tzun, ending the life of an American citizen because our lawmakers didn’t enforce the law? I specifically mentioned Dominic Durden. Powers curtly replied that these were “anomalies” and “a few tragic, tragic incidents.”35 What Kirsten had missed, I told Sabine, was that even if one American died—and Sabine instinctively said in unison with me—“that’s one too many.”
“And that’s a few hundred too many,” Sabine continued. “But it’s that logic that is so twisted. Until it happens to them . . . On July 12, 2012, at 5:45 in the morning, if Juan Lopez [Tzun] would have been in Guatemala where he belonged, my son would be here today.”
Today, Sabine recognizes two versions of herself. “BD,” she says, was the person she was “Before Dominic.” The other is the person she is now.
“If you would have met me BD,” she said, “I was a completely different person. I didn’t want to rattle the boat . . . my best thing was Dominic. I just wanted to be Dom’s mom.”
Today, however, Sabine boldly shares her story with others. She’s used to the condemning, judgmental, unsympathetic eye of the media. During a segment on MSNBC where Sabine confronted an illegal immigrant, the host—who was comfortably seated in a New York studio and couldn’t even get Sabine’s first name correct—asked her, “Sabina [sic], Monica was talking about how she would feel if a wall was built. Monica, a woman who has been educated, pays taxes, [is] raising a family here in America. She’s been here since she was three years old. Sabina, when you look at people like Monica and other immigrants who might not be documented but haven’t committed any crimes, should they be deported?”36
Sabine reached into her purse and replied, “I believe so, and I wanted to ask Monica when she was talking about how she’s worried about her family being separated, this is my son,” Sabine said as she lifted out an urn. “This is what I have left of my family. His ashes. He was my only child. I would like to know what she would tell me. I’m a legal immigrant. I had to do it the right way, and yet this is all I have left of my family.”
A producer told Sabine that there were audible gasps in the Manhattan control room. The producers were astounded when Sabine presented her son’s ashes on television.
Sabine wishes she had the luxury of not being an advocate. “I would rather be home and just watching TV and saying ‘Why don’t they leave these poor illegals alone?’ Then I wouldn’t have to deal with this. But now that I do . . . [I’m glad] I have a voice.”
In the aftermath of her son’s death, Sabine has a newfound confidence. She explained, “I will never lose my composure . . . but I will hit you hard with facts and emotion . . . so you get a glimpse. Just a tiny glimpse of what my life is like every day when I drive in his truck, grasping the steering wheel and thinking, ‘He used to touch [this].’ ”
Sabine clutched her necklace as she showed me the little locket containing some of Dom’s ashes that she wears around her neck. And then she extended her wrist to display a tattoo that reads “Love Dominic” in her son’s handwriting, copied from his last Christmas card to her. “I used to tease him: ‘You write like a third grader.’ ” She smiled. “He’s everywhere I go. Pictures—here,” she said as she lifted up her phone to display a picture of Dom prominently displayed on the back.
Sabine holds hands with Anthony, displaying her “Love Dominic” tattoo. Courtesy of Tara Probst / Moment in Time Photography
Sabine is not only more confident, she has a new lease on life. She says Dom always lived in a way that showed he knew life was so precious. “So now I have that chance. I enjoy life differently. [Before Dominic] I could never be by myself.” Having been a victim of sexual and psychological abuse, Sabine “was frightened of the thought” of being alone. “But now I enjoy sitting anywhere by myself. Or I ride my motorcycle by myself and let my mind go to different places,” she explained. “I can enjoy a beautiful sunset or the new pond we have in our front yard or the new flower sprout. Things that I took for granted [when] life was too hectic. I was more worried about ‘O.K. I need the new Dooney & Bourke bag or new Gucci bag.’ Now I would take a paper bag as a purse. It just doesn’t matter anymore.”
I asked Sabine about her faith in God, to which she quickly replied, “My faith got stronger. Big-time. One hundred times over.” With excitement in her voice, she said, “I want to show you something.” Sabine picked up her phone and began to search for a video while she told me the story. In November 2013 she was asked to testify before Congress. Although she was nervous, she reluctantly agreed. On the night before she was set to fly out to Washington, she sat at a sushi restaurant with two of Dom’s friends. “I can’t go. I’m not going to do it,” she said. Dom’s friends said she had to. They had even made her business cards. “I’m going to freeze up. I’m not going to know what to say.” As she spoke about her fear, the teacup in front of her suddenly moved along the moistened tabletop. It moved again and again, and Sabine filmed what she knew was a reassuring sign from Dom.
Moved by her story, I said to Sabine, “There are so many stories like that from people who have lost children.” I shared with her the story of a young girl I grew up with: Megan Carpenter. Megan was a family friend who was diagnosed with cancer at the age of eleven. She battled it for nearly six years even though her doctors told her she only had a few months. Megan’s strength and Christian faith were an inspiration to all. Megan—a truly wise young angel—used to say to her family, “Don’t be mad at God. He’s watching after us.” And when a six-year-old boy passed from the same rare cancer, Megan cried for her young friend and prayed for his family before observing, “He is well now, sitting with Jesus and feeling no pain.” Our community used to collect feathers as a sign of hope for Megan. I would pick up a feather if I saw one throughout the course of my day and think of Megan.
Megan Carpenter. Courtesy of Dana Carpenter
On the last day of Megan’s life, after battling cancer for nearly a decade, Megan’s mom cried in the hospital bathroom because she knew that Megan’s short life was coming to an end. As she cried, a feather floated down from the roof. “Where does a feather come from in a hospital bathroom?” I asked Sabine. “That night Megan died, and that was God saying ‘I’ve got her. She’s going to be OK.’ ”
Sabine immediately replied, “Yep, yep. Right. That was her. Wow. You know, that doesn’t even surprise me.” After Dominic’s death, Sabine took a flight to Germany to visit her family. It was the first time that she would make the trip without Dominic. She had a pillow with her that was made from Dom’s sweatshirt. It read: FIRE DEPARTMENT. DOMINIC DURDEN. Sabine went to the bathroom, and when she returned, there was a white feather resting on Dom’s pillow. “Inside a plane!” she exclaimed. “That was the first big sign. He sends many.”
Sabine holds on to these moments and cherishes them in her heart as she deals with constant pain. “We put on a show. It’s a 24[-hour-a-day], 360[-day-a-year] . . . pain all the time. There’s never any relief. It’s just [that] we learn how to work with it. How to deal with it.” Sabine has dealt with it, in part, by moving from California to Arkansas. She no longer has to pass Dominic’s elementary school or the scene of his accident. “The triggers are no longer there,” she said. But she still cannot escape the horrors that now haunt her life. “The saddest part is every time a car turns in front of me, everything in me freezes up and [my] hair stands up because that’s the last thing he saw,” she said with a shaky voice.
In addition to driving Dom’s truck, she cares for his dog, Cyrus, who wouldn’t eat for weeks after Dom’s passing. He would hear the garage door and run out to the driver’s side of Dom’s truck in the weeks after his death. One day Sabine found him sitting on a stair with his head through the slats. She sat next to him to find that he was “looking dead at Dominic’s picture” hanging on the wall. “He did that until we moved,” she said. Now she has a picture of Dom by his dog bed.
Sabine has her fiancée, Anthony, to help her through. “[Dominic] didn’t like anyone I dated,” remarked Sabine. “[But] he chose Anthony. We have been going on eight years. He never left my side . . . Through Dominic, I met this incredibly supportive man who God placed in my life, because God knew what was coming, and that man was with me. And he told me in Atlanta, ‘I will never leave you.’ ”
Through her pain, though, Sabine said, “God showed me who I really am inside, that I am a fighter. Fierce. I am loyal to a fault.
“I’m still in control of my destiny, but this guy,” she continued as she pointed up at the roof, “had all this planned out for me . . . Because of Dominic’s strength and who he was, I became this woman.”
Four years after Dominic’s passing, Sabine mustered the will to return to the place where she watched her son learn to fly. She had waited so long because, in her words, “it carried too much pain,” and just the thought of it made her tear up.37
On her blog Dom Hugs, she described the experience this way: “The tears flowed freely as I walked into the airport and in Dominic’s footsteps. I could hear his laughter and see his smile as I walked past the buildings and towards the planes. My knees almost buckled, but as I was holding on to his old headphones, I started feeling his arms around me and whispering: enjoy this mom, fly and feel me up there with you.”38
Sabine seeks to hold government accountable for its failure to secure the border, a failure that cost her the life of her only son. She knows she will see Dom again, but in the meantime she keeps Dom’s memory alive as best she can: “A bittersweet morning. A flight that lifted me up towards the clouds and seeing the world from Dominic’s perspective one more time. Spread your angel wings, sweet son of mine. Soar and keep watch over us.”39
Sabine and Dominic at the airport with their motorcycles. Courtesy of Sabine Durden
