Jason Vukovich had a full schedule of religious activities, two or three a week. What his family didn’t know was that the nightly prayer sessions were an excuse for his adoptive father, Larry Lee Fulton, to abuse him.
The abuse continued until he was 14. When Fulton was finally found guilty, he received a suspended three-year sentence and didn’t spend a single day in a cell. The family moved, but no one offered Jason help dealing with what he had been through. At 16, he ran away from home, without ID or a job, and began stealing to eat. That marked the beginning of a long criminal record across Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana, and California. “I felt worthless”, he wrote years later. “Many, many nights I just wanted to die”.
In 2016, fresh out of prison, this Alaska man wrote down in a notebook the names of sex offenders he found in Anchorage’s public registry and went looking for them with a hammer. There were three attacks in just a few days. In the last one, 67-year-old Wesley Demarest was struck five times in the head with a hammer: “I am a vengeful angel”, the attacker repeated. Today, he is serving a 25-year sentence. His sister Angelina gathered more than 10.000 signatures calling for his release, while Demarest suffers from a permanent brain injury and says Jason “destroyed his life”.
