A Boy's Life

On December 2, 2003, oral arguments at the Kansas Court of Appeals began, with the ACLU's Tamara Lange representing Limon. Two of the three judges hearing the arguments, Pierron and Henry Green, had been on the panel that had upheld Limon's conviction and sentence in his first appeal. But this time, Kansas v. Limon was a different drama.

Matthew Limon was born on February 9, 1982, in Satanta, an agricultural town of around 1,200 people in southwest Kansas. His father, Mike Limon, worked in the former Old Santa Fe stockyards and feedlot. His mother, Debby Limon, stayed home with Matthew and his older sister. (Mike and Debby Limon declined to speak with the Pitch.)

Generations earlier, the Limon family had come to Satanta from Mexico to work for the Santa Fe Railroad.

"There was A.P. Limon and E.P. Limon, those were the old-timers, and Gilbert Limon, that was Mike's dad," recalls Hank Kisker, who is in his seventies. He and his wife lived down the street from Mike and Debby Limon. Sharon Kisker says the Limons were among the best-regarded families in town.

"In Satanta, we have some old Mexican families. They've been here seems like forever," Sharon Kisker says. "Those people are very respected in our community, and Mike's family was one of them. They're good people, Mike and Deb, the type to mind their own business."

Sharon describes them as "very devout Christian people, more active than the average churchgoer." Mike played music and sang in church, and Deb sometimes sang with him. "It's a small-town Baptist church, so they were active in anything that needed to be done. They'd be the first to help with a funeral, and I think they even taught a Sunday-school class," she says.

"Mike is a cowboy, but don't give people the wrong impression," Sharon warns. "He has a lot of class. He is not just knowledgeable about horses and cattle and livestock. He spent time with my grandkids, teaching them how to ride, and if they had a problem, anything particular to horses he could help with. It wasn't something we paid him to do. He did it out of kindness."

One of Mike Limon's six sisters, Blanche Hayden, lives next door to the Kiskers. When Mike was twelve, Hayden says, their father bought Mike a horse and a guitar.

But Matthew inherited only one of Mike's avocations. "Matt just isn't a cowboy," Hayden says. "Fathers wish that their sons have the same interests as them, and some just don't."

Music, however, became an important part of Matthew's life. His aunt and neighbors say he never took a piano lesson but picked up music by ear and played beautifully, mostly church hymns and sometimes songs he wrote himself. But he could never get the hang of reading music.

"It seemed when he was real small, they determined maybe he had a hearing problem," Sharon recalls. "As time went on, it was evident that he had learning problems. They put him in a special Christian school, sometime before sixth grade, and drove him to Liberal, 35 miles every day and back so he could have the help he needed."

Eventually, his parents decided to send him to a residential facility. (Lakemary evaluations would later show that Matthew had an IQ between 50 and 84.) One of Mike Limon's former coworkers at the stockyards (who asked not to be named for this story) thinks that the move might have had something to do with the death of one of Matthew's friends, a girl, in a car accident before he turned eighteen.

"They'd gone to church school together," the coworker says. "[The girl's death] upset him. I considered him a normal teenager other than that. He didn't have a lot of friends, I knew he had developmental problems, and he did not do the sports thing. His parents were concerned, worried about him ending up in psychiatric counseling for depression and stuff.

"I was regretful myself that they [put Matthew in a group home], but they did what they thought was best at the time," the coworker adds. "In my opinion, the family was overbusy in church sometimes, and his depression and the family's financial and emotional reasons made them think he'd be better off in a group home. You think they go to group homes for counseling, for stability, to help a person be more stable as an adult. Maybe he had homosexual tendencies, and his parents aren't proud of that. His first group homes were all-boys' homes, where the boys are troubled anyway. I would think that things like that would happen."

In 1999, Matthew moved to the Lakemary Center in Paola. The center is private and nonprofit, but two-thirds of its 64 residents are in the custody of Kansas Social and Rehabilitation Services, and their fees are paid by the state. Matthew was among its private clients.

"Mike said at one time that he wished he could get him out of that home," the coworker says. "He said he thought the other boys were aggressive, troublemakers. Matt's a follower, not a leader."