Pearline Burton received a standing ovation in St. Louis during the August 29 celebration of her son's one-year anniversary of freedom. She was praised for her strength and her faith during the years that Burton spent locked up in the Jefferson City Correctional Center, convicted of a murder he didn't commit.
I visited with Pearline a few hours before the celebration to talk about the 24 years Darryl was away.
"He missed a lot," she says. He couldn't attend one of his brothers' weddings, and he missed the funerals of both of Pearline's parents. Pearline thinks that the stress of being without Darryl hastened his grandmother's passing after a gradual decline in her health.
Did she lose any friends over Darryl's incarceration, who perhaps doubted his innocence?
"No, I didn't, honestly I didn't," Pearline says, "because I didn't do a lot of discussing it. (People) never brought up their opinions on whether he was guilty or not."
The time without Darryl was hard on her. "I had my bad days where I did
worry about him, whether he'd ever come up out of there," she says,
"but you know, I had my faith. I'm a Christian person, and I just
prayed about it. Some days I felt really bad about it, and some days
I'd hardly think about it. I just knew it had to happen, he had to come
up out of there."
Pearline says that since Darryl's been on the
news in the year he's been free, he's become a bit of a local
celebrity, and so has she. "People who have seen me on t.v. walk up to
me in the grocery store and say, 'I'm so happy for you,' you know,
things like that."
The day Darryl was freed, she'd been
preparing to throw a birthday party for a friend at her home, which his
homecoming upstaged. "We gave the party, and Darryl was here, and his
friends came and people came from all around to see him," she laughs.
"But it was a (birthday) party for an older person anyway, so nobody
was interested in that. They just came to see Darryl."
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