Interview with Dalton White, Seattle Community College, October 15, 2010

From Flight Risk: The Robert Jackson Kelley Story

“This part’s true. The whole thing’s on film. You can find it on YouTube, if you don’t believe me. Tennant was tryin’ to do a reality show.

“The first place Travis Tennant comes is here, because he can’t believe that Robert’s acting alone. He’s gotta have help. He figures it’s gotta be me, the old roommate. Criminal mastermind. And I was out of Sea Brook by this time, crashin’ at this other dude’s house out on Barrens Road. So Tennant comes around, trying to shake me up and get me to snitch on Robert. Now, I don’t know anything, but I flip him off and say I know exactly where Robert is, but I’m not going to tell him. And then the dude went completely nuts. Bam! He slams me on the floor, gets in my face, spits on me. Waves around a Taser. But I just laugh. I’m no snitch, I’m not talking no matter what, and finally Tennant gets tired of looking like an idiot, and shoves me one last time for good measure and storms off.

“So of course now I start thinking, just what the hell has Robert been up to? I’m not the type of dude who watches the news, and we don’t have the Internet. Half the time, we barely have the lights on. So I actually took a bus to the public library, which turned out to be kind of cool. Did you know they have movies? Anyway, I got on a computer, and bam! There’s Robert all over the place. He’s got like a million Facebook friends. There he is on the cover of the Seattle Times. There he is on CNN.

“I’m reading this and I actually start talking out loud like I’m completely tweaked. ‘Robert stole a plane? Are you serious? He stole two?’ And the best part was that he was getting away with it.

“Some band wrote a song about him. I started playing it, turning it up and up because I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Ballad of the Lollipop Kid,’ it was called.

“We represent the Lollipop Kid!

“That was when they kicked me out of the library. And that was when I started thinking about T-shirts.”