Prison bars couldn't break the bond between father and son

GOSHEN — You might suspect that Dominique "Dom" Bolden might have plenty of reasons to be bitter.

After all, his father, Eddie Bolden, spent 22 years in an Illinois prison after being convicted of killing two men and seriously injuring another, and his sentence started shortly after his son was born.

Though the elder Bolden consistently maintained his innocence, it took until this year for him to finally be exonerated, thanks to the tireless efforts of a commercial photographer turned private investigator named Susan Carlson, who died in 2013.

And when he finally walked out of the Cook County Jail, he walked into the loving embrace of family members including Dom, a basketball player at Goshen College, who will graduate from the school Sunday with a bachelor's degree in physical education.

Father and son hugged and spoke to each other as if Dom had spent a lifetime telling his father about his classroom accomplishments and basketball exploits while Eddie dispensed fatherly advice like Derek Rose dishing out assists — because that's exactly what they did.

"We talk on the phone every week — sometimes, twice a week and sometimes twice a day," Dom said. "We've always had a relationship, and I would go to visit him as much as I could, so it wasn't like we didn't know each other."

Dom said the story of the bond between a father and his son began with his mother, who took her son to visit his dad when he was a preschool student. And with the fathers of his friends who also served as his mentors.

"I remember, my mom bought me a pack of zebra-striped bubble gum, and I remember eating the whole pack," Dom said, thinking back to the first time he can remember visiting his father in prison. "I remember the prison guard lady being real nice to me and that I was in preschool."

Dom, who grew up in Chicago, also said he remembered his mother made it a priority to ensure her son had the kind of relationship with his father that his friends had with their dads.

"She always told me that even though my father is not here that he is being the best father that he can be where he is," Dom recalled. "And that helped a lot."

Meanwhile, the family also had the help of a strong village.

"To be honest, I can’t think of one of my friends who did not have their father in their lives," Dom recalled. "I think I was the only one and their fathers and families treated me as their own.

"The fathers played a father figure role for me, (and) they would just give me advice and not so much tell me how to do something, but would tell me what would be the best way and let me make decisions on my own."

It also helped that Eddie Bolden desperately wanted to maintain a relationship with his son. "He just gave me a lot of advice," Dom said. "We just talked about life, and he told me that no matter what to just keep going and keep pushing.

"To never give up."

Still, 22 years is a long time to be in prison for a crime that he did not commit, and it would have been easy for Eddie and his son to give up. That never happened, according to Dom.

"He always told me from the beginning that he was innocent, and from the things he told me, I believed him."

Dom played high school basketball at Whitney M. Young Magnet School in Chicago and started his college career at Parkland College, a junior college in Champaign, Ill., before transferring to Goshen in 2014. Men's basketball coach Neal Young said it took a while for player and coach to become acclimated to each other.

"It was a learning process, and you can’t trust somebody until you get to know them," said Young. "It took Dom some time before he trusted me, and it took me time to get to know him before I trusted him. But once we established that trust level, it was really good."

Young said he soon realized that Dom was a player who always had questions because he wanted to learn and grow. Young added that those qualities also made him a better coach, and he soon learned how to get the most out Dom's penchant for coming up big in big games.

"The last five or six minutes of the game, that Dom's time," Young said. "We have a package of sets that we go to (in order) to get him the ball in the spots that he liked and he delivered for us. That's why we were able to have the season that we had."

The Goshen Maple Leafs finished 19-13, losing in the quarterfinal round of the Crossroad League tournament. Dom was the team's leading scorer at 15.8 points per game, even though he wasn't the shots leader.

• • •

By the time Dom arrived in Goshen, the gumshoe detective work that Carlson and her team completed before her death was bearing fruit.

Carlson discovered three witnesses who were not interviewed by Eddie's defense team, and those witnesses testified that Dom's father was in another location at the time of the murders. The judge ruled that the evidence provided by one of those witnesses was credible enough that it would have led to Eddie's acquittal if jurors had heard it at the original trial.

Now, Eddie will get the chance to see his son graduate from college on Sunday.

Dom searches for a way to describe what will now be a family event and simply says: "It's going to be an interesting experience."

hdukes@sbtinfo.com

574-235-6369