Undefeatable
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When Chase was young, Coleman and her husband had tried enrolling him in camps for soccer, baseball, flag football, basketball. Nothing seemed to hold Chase’s interest until he attended a children’s running clinic.
“At the end of that day, he was smiling from ear to ear, and I said, ‘Do you like this sport?’ And he said yes,” Coleman said. She was overjoyed, knowing how much even a single-word response meant. “I found an outlet for him. He spends so much time in his own mind.”
He was never competitive — and in fact often finished last — but that never mattered to him, Coleman said.
“With cross-country, it’s something that he could do at his own pace and still be a part of the team,” she said. “I just thought it was wonderful.”
In seventh grade, Chase joined the cross-country team, and it became his family; many of his teammates had come up through the same school system and had been classmates with Chase since kindergarten. When Chase turned 13, Coleman threw him a “bro mitzvah.”
“His whole team, boys and girls, they all showed up,” she remembers.
“[MacDonald] snatched a joy out of my child that took a long time to establish,” Coleman said. “He needs to face the music. … This is still a child and it was unprovoked. He needs to wear some handcuffs and go through that whole process.”
Still, Coleman knows that the attack has traumatized her son, even if he cannot verbalize how. He has frequently put his head down since the incident, and she worries he has lost one of the few passions that gave him a sense of pride and belonging.
“We just keep telling him, ‘You didn’t do anything wrong. Chase is good. There are mean people and there are nice people and this person was just a mean person,’ ” Coleman said. “We just keep apologizing to him that happened. Especially me. I kept apologizing to him that I couldn’t keep him safe.”
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news...d-getting-mugged/?wpisrc=nl_most-draw8&wpmm=1
