Trucker who killed 7 kids tries to find peace
MALONE (AP) _ A few days after Jacksonville trucker Alvin Wilkerson went to prison in June, a guard asked if it was his first time there.
“No, sir, this is my last,” Wilkerson replied.
Wilkerson is doing seven years after pleading no contest in a horrific crash that killed seven children from one family on a remote Union County roadway. Prosecutors said he fell asleep at the wheel.
Housed at the Graceville Work Camp, a far-flung outpost on the Alabama line, he is the unlikeliest of inmates.
In an exclusive interview with the Times-Union, Wilkerson, 34, gave no hint of the bitterness or anger that characterizes so many Florida prisoners. His biggest concerns aren’t the years of incarceration that lay ahead but his wife and three kids, the families of the dead children and keeping positive.
A deeply religious man, he still carries the worn Bible that was in his cab the day of the 2006 crash. And though he maintains he shouldn’t be in prison for an accident, Wilkerson said he doesn’t spend his days dwelling on that.
“The way that I was brought up, you’re content in whatever and wherever,” he said. “I consider this God’s chastisement, so I’ve got to be content. I can’t be negative.
“Sometimes God puts you in situations where you’re able to do work for him.”
Not everyone is as accepting of Wilkerson’s fate.
The victims’ relatives don’t think he got nearly enough time. Some truckers, on the other hand, wondered in numerous e-mails and calls to the Times-Union how an accident became criminal at all, notwithstanding the enormous loss of life.
Friends worry how the simple, naive man they know will survive in prison – and how his family will survive without him. Tyra Wilkerson wrote her husband’s lawyers, questioning whether they did everything they could to defend him.
“Society took a hardworking man out of his home and placed him into a prison system which has never been utilized for an accident,” she said. “Not only does he have to worry about how his family is surviving, he also has to learn how to survive in a system in which he is not accustomed.”
At least twice a day, Wilkerson crisscrossed Union County delivering bottled water to Jacksonville from the Coca-Cola plant in High Springs.
The county, Florida’s smallest, is a place of traditional values, where most folks know each other. Its crime index is the fourth-lowest in Florida. Just one robbery was reported the first six months of 2008.
The biggest news in town is usually how the Union High Tigers, four-time state football champs, fared Friday night.