Nick Yarris - The Fear Of 13: Surviving Death Row

I am truly grateful to Penguin Random House for allowing me to share my writing with you, as I recognise that the message offered from my story is so important to anyone who has felt trounced in life. I love that. I love that I can connect with people in this way. That thought takes away so much of the pain and hurt done to me.

I have some wonderful friends in this life. My grandmother used to tell me as a child that if I showed her who my friends were, then she could tell me who I was. I love to remember those words as I have found myself surrounded with really remarkable and soulfully open people. The many people I have befriended after they found me on Facebook or Twitter are much the same. They saw the film The Fear of 13 or they read this book and they went out of their way to write to me and say hello I really appreciate that.

My mother, Jayne, passed away in 2011. My father, Michael, is still going at eighty-two years of age as I write this. My parents were together through fifty-six years of marriage. The remarkable ability they both had for love-filled endurance is deeply within me now, and so this book is dedicated to them.

Nicholas Yarris was sentenced to death for a crime he didnt commit and ended up serving twenty-two years on Death Row, this harrowing experience shaping the rest of his life inexorably. After finally being released Nicholas has now moved away from his homeland of Philadelphia, USA and now lives with his family in the UK.

Found guilty of the rape and murder of a woman he had never met, Nick Yarris was sentenced to death.

With appeal after appeal failing, he spent twenty-two years waiting to die.

This is the true and amazing story of how he survived death row.

If I had only known what was waiting for me I would never have gone down that path that day when I was seven years old. Yet if I had really known what was being offered to me in my life right now, then Id like to think that maybe, just maybe, I would have had the courage to go through it all again...

Until the age of seven, I had a really normal life, I guess. I was a happy, contented little boy, growing up with my mom and dad and my five siblings on a friendly little street in a family neighbourhood on the edge of south-west Philadelphia.

My father, Michael Yarris Senior, met and fell in love with my mother, Harriet Jayne Shaw, in 1957 when they were both living in an area of old Philadelphia called The Meadows. My father was a second-generation Russian-American and my mother third-generation Irish-English. Together they raised our family in one of the three-bedroom row homes that made up many of the mostly new immigrant neighbourhoods sown throughout Philadelphia.

At the time my life changed for ever, my eldest sister Nettie was twelve, Anna Marie was ten and Mabel Sissy was nine; then there were my brothers, Michael Mikey Yarris Jr who was eight and Martin Marty, aged four. Our family dog at the time was a 14 lb black poodle named Jocko who had decided that I was his best friend in the whole world and I agreed. Wherever I went, he shadowed my every move. It really was as blissful as that, with Jocko and me innocently discovering life together, and finding that it was wonderful.

Although I can no longer exactly recall the child that I was before the attack, I do have some clear memories of those early years. They also provided me with something tangible to hold on to through the really dark days of what was to come; they became a sort of beacon for me to home in on as I fought my way back to becoming once again that person I had begun my life as.

In particular I have a wonderful photograph from this time, taken during a family vacation. It is a picture of my big brother Mikey and me. We were so close then, I swear he was the greatest big brother to have. There I am, wearing these Chuck Taylor low-top basketball trainers which he had given me and which I prized above anything else. They were all frayed and washed out from having been put through the laundry so many times, and even the rivets on the sides were gone. They were also too big for me. But I was so pleased because I was no longer wearing Pro-keds, which were for babies.

But these werent just hand-me-downs; Mikey had given me these shoes of his as a form of protection, to stop me being teased by some of the other children. He saw them as his chance to step in and do what a great older brother does: stand up for me.

The events that were to change my life for ever began in the spring of 1968, which was one really wild year in Americas history. From the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr in April to the assassination of Vice-President Robert F. Kennedy in June, and on through to the summer riots in cities all over America, it was a very scary year for us all. The country was in the middle of the Vietnam War and also the Apollo space race against Russia. As a child just waking up to all that was going on in the world, it really was an important time to witness.

To me, it seemed as if each new day brought some earth-shattering news of ever bigger and scarier things that were changing the world. I wonder how many other people my age remember being shown how to curl up under our desks in class each morning in order to practise our protection manoeuvres in the event of nuclear war. Every day at Patterson Elementary School, having pledged our allegiance to our country, we had to put our hands over our heads and curl up real small under our desks in case the Cubans fired nuclear missiles at us. We were told that the metal desks would protect us from falling debris and that we had to stay there until they sounded the safety note over the emergency public address system. The adult world was crazy.

This particular day, though, started like any other. I was just a little boy in third grade whod been given an unexpected day off school and my imagination was filled with all the fun and freedom that such freedom brings. It all began when my black poodle Jocko and I were walking along a footpath in the woods near our home. I think I had gone to a dental appointment that morning and had returned home with my mother, rather than going back to school, and I was filled with that sweet boyish feeling of bursting free.

I still recall how my mother shouted at me not to get my school clothes dirty and to stay away from the creek which ran behind our home as I sped out of the front door with Jocko yipping happily at my heels.

Paying no heed to my mothers customary warnings, I was off on one of the many adventures I shared with Jocko. We were on our way from the creek towards the open field where we both knew there were rabbits for Jocko to chase and places for me to hide and pretend to be a hunter on the loose.

That was when I saw him, sitting on the roof of a small wooden structure made by some local teenagers out of scrap wood. We were only about fifty yards from some houses but this home-made fort was half hidden among some small shrubs and trees. I knew I wasnt supposed to be here, as it was out of sight of the adults, but once I noticed hed seen me I tried to act brave and continue on my way past the boy sitting on the fort.

He waited for me to get right up to the small clearing in the path leading up to where he was perched, then he jumped down easily from his position and stood in front of me, a lit cigarette hanging from the corner of his mouth. I knew who he was because he lived in the street adjoining mine and I had watched as he earned his place in the local pecking order for his street fighting. He was a member of a gang of boys ten or twelve years older than me who hung around the neighbourhood drinking beer. He had a reputation for violence and I was really intimidated by him as Id previously seen him assault grown-ups as well as other children. Why would he waste his time talking to me? I wondered.