I hope it's Joe Wilkins Jr.
'I AM BECAUSE YOU ARE'
How a mother and a murder shaped Joe Wilkins Jr.'s path to Notre Dame
Before Joe Wilkins Jr. was born, his father was buried.
It was June 8, 1999, and Ondrey Charles pulled a red Cadillac into the parking lot of a Chinese restaurant on Kennedy Boulevard in Tampa, Fla.
In the middle of rush hour, surrounded by witnesses, a lanky 21-year-old named Daniel Harris sprung out of the passenger side and shot Joe Wilkins Sr. multiple times, gruesomely ending
what the Tampa Bay Times called “a continuing dispute.”
Charles and Harris sped away but were arrested shortly after. Wilkins Sr. died at the scene.
Nearly 19 years later, Harris continues to serve a life sentence without the possibility of parole. On his left arm, there is a tattoo that depicts a pair of praying hands, as well as an inscription:
“
God can you forgive me?"
At Lake Correctional Institution in Clermont, Fla.,
he is inmate No. 165994. Daniel E. Harris is 40 years old.
Joseph Wilkins Sr. is stuck on 21.
He’s a memory. A photo. A stack of yellowing letters.
A legacy and, in a few months, a name on a football locker at Notre Dame.
Turns out, Wilkins left behind a girlfriend who neither knew was pregnant.
On Jan. 22, 2000, more than seven months after the murder, Kristy Woodley gave birth to a son.
He already knew her name, even though he’d never met her.
He saw her, though, and for Joe Wilkins Sr., that was enough.
It was enough for the aspiring chef with the thick black hair and the baseball cap to beg his boss at Shells Great Casual Seafood in Tampa, Fla., to give that girl a job.
At least, that’s what Wilkins told her.
“My first night of work, he was cleaning the kitchen and I went back there to put something away and he started talking to me, and that’s where it all started,” Woodley said. “He even told me that he saw me the day I interviewed and he told our manager to hire me.”
She got the job, and he got the girl. She loved him.
She still loves him.
She loved him for his heart, for his sense of humor, for teaching her how to properly catch and cook a Chesapeake blue crab. She loved that he listened to OutKast and kept binders full of baseball cards he collected as a kid, despite the fact that he never earned the grades to play on his high school team.
She met his family and friends, including Daniel Harris — a lifelong friend he called his cousin.
Wilkins and Woodley were inseparable, whether in the kitchen at Shells or watching movies on the couch. She dragged him off the streets and helped him earn his GED. Joe juggled a second job at an Italian restaurant, and when he could, he wrote her letters.
Woodley became his life — and she sensed that Harris didn't like it.
“They grew up together. Daniel was a kid who relied on Joe to give him his identity," Woodley said. "They rode together. They hung together. They did everything together for the longest time, for years and years and years. They got into the streets together.