Jason and Daniel: where are they now?

(If this is your first time here, read this first.)

In a play, the characters' story stops when the curtain comes down. But history makes bad theater, and the real story never ends. Jason and Daniel are still around. So what are they doing now?

Both boys spent a year in the Smith County jail before being transferred to their current locations. Daniel is incarcerated at the Alfred Hughes Unit near Gatesville, serving five concurrent life sentences and two concurrent twenty-year sentences. He's a model inmate: well-behaved, hard-working, and earnestly repentant of his crimes. He never graduated from high school, so he's been taking classes to get his GED. After his mother's death, a dark cloud had descended over Daniel's life, transforming this once warmhearted young man into a brooding, withdrawn drug addict. But after the arrest, he sobered up. His sister Chisty told me about the first time she visited Daniel in the Smith County jail. When she sat down to talk to him, he asked if she was okay--he was more concerned with how his actions had affected her than with himself. "And that," she said, "was when I knew my baby brother had come back." He's eligible for parole in 2016. I think he'll get it.

Jason is serving out ten concurrent life sentences and three concurrent twenty-year sentences at the Robertson unit near Abilene. He blames his actions on Chantix, an anti-smoking medication he was taking that's been known to cause severe psychological problems. He says he can't even remember setting the fires. But he says he's turned his life around since his arrest, accepting God back into heart and reading the Bible every day. When he gets out, he wants to do something great with his life, like maybe become a minister.

If that sounds like bullshit, it's because it is. According to his lawyer, Jason wasn't even taking Chantix when the fires started. And he's been far from well-behaved: one routine search of his cell at Smith County turned up seizure medication and bootleg alcohol, and guards there intercepted a note in which he told his mother how to sneak contraband into the prison. And he refuses to accept responsibility for his actions. His grandparents tell me that every time they go to visit him now, he asks the same question: "Why would they do this to me?" He thinks he's been unfairly punished. He won't be eligible for parole until 2024, and at the rate he's going, he won't get it.

Draw your own conclusions.

The Story of Midnight Cross

On January 1, 2010, at about 8 AM, Bill Parr, pastor of Little Hope Baptist Church in Canton, TX, got a call from a member. “Brother Bill,” she said, “have you seen the church building? There’s smoke coming from it.” Bill stepped outside just in time to see the flames leap up. Soon, dozens of congregants had gathered outside to watch and pray as the educational wing of the church, built in 1954 by some of those same congregants, was destroyed by flames. At about nine, the firefighters arrived. Then the second call came in.

Faith Church in Athens, twenty-six miles away, was burning.

It was the beginning of a spree that would last for six weeks and claim ten church buildings total. This in a tri-county area with an estimated twelve to thirteen hundred churches. People were scared. They felt violated. At the forefront of their minds was the question: who the hell would do something like this? Skinheads? Satanists? Atheists?

Meet Jason and Daniel.

Jason Robert Bourque, Age 19, and Daniel George McAllister, age 21. Two local boys, baptized at Frist Baptist Church of Ben Wheeler where they met. Not skinheads or Satanists. Not atheists either.

Jason had actually been a devout Christian, one of those kids with two Bibles: one for school and one for home. He quoted from both often. His home Bible was so worn from use he had to hold it together with duct tape. He was a brilliant kid and very articulate, a state champion in high school debate. If you disagreed with him about anything, he would argue you down until he was blue in the face—and win. He had no tolerance for grey areas: things were either black or white, right or wrong. He also came from a broken home: both of his parents were tangled up in drugs, and his wealthy grandparents raised him from age four. Though he was a hyperactive kid, his grandmother Brenda says that after he got saved at Bible camp, he seemed to calm down and focus more in school. Church for him meant safety. Stability.

For Daniel, church meant love. Specifically the love of his mother. Wanda McAllister was a paragon of Christian virtue: despite a debilitating heart condition, she devoted herself wholly to working in the church, working in the nursery and running a donated clothing exchange for the poor, even though her own family was dirt-poor. She was also responsible for homeschooling Daniel, who was severely dyslexic and would likely not have done well at a public school. By all accounts, he never left her side. One woman at First Baptist Ben Wheeler told me of a birthday party for Wanda where, when she was too weak to walk, Daniel carried her outside, sat her down, served her the birthday cake, then carried her back inside when she was done.

Jason was a spoiled rich kid, a little too smart and a little too awkward to fit in. Daniel was a natural introvert, and hardly talked to anyone. They became friends because they were both outsiders. To everyone at First Baptist Ben Wheeler, it seemed that they were just like any other boys. Certainly not the kind of boys who would burn a church down.

But life has a way of throwing curve balls. In 2007, when Daniel was nineteen, Wanda McAllister died of a stroke. Whatever he had believed about the love of a benevolent God died with her. It was about then, too, that, Jason began to doubt the reality of a God who never shows Himself. Then in 2009, the hammer fell for him: his longtime girlfriend, whom he was certain God had told him he would marry, dumped him, and he was rejected from his dream school, UT Austin. He made a 180-degree turn, falling into a deep depression and experimenting with drugs. Around that time, Daniel's father tried to commit suicide by hanging himself. The boys began to hang out more, getting high on whatever was available. They were alone. Adrift.

Then, on New Year's Eve 2009, after being kicked out of UT Tyler, Jason went to a pasture party with some old friends from high school, friends who had managed to move on with their lives. Early the next morning he drove to Little Hope Baptist in Canton, stacked the choir's sheet music under the piano, lit it, then drove to Faith Church in Athens and set another fire. A week and a half later, he met Daniel at a party, told him what he was doing, and invited him to come along, and so it began.

In an area where the church and the community are one, the destruction of a church is symbolic. It’s an act of rebellion. Rebellion against the community, against the Church, against God. The God who said He’d take care of you. The Church that taught you about Him. The community that told you to go to church and believe in God. Jason and Daniel weren’t atheists; they believed with all their hearts and souls. At least, they wanted to. But life makes believing hard. Would I have done what they did? No. But I understand.

Here’s the thing: Jason was the ringleader. He was emotionally unstable and used to things going his way. He lived his life at the extremes: first, he was 100% all-in for God, and when that failed him, he turned on God completely. His rebellion, like everything in his life, was intense and grandiose, but really, it’s the same rebellion that takes place in every human heart that rails at the injustice of a world supposedly governed by a just, loving God. Daniel felt the stirrings of the same rebellion in his heart, but (like most of us) did not act on it. Yet, when Jason came to him and invited him to come along, he was willing.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: as extreme as the church burnings seem, they are only a magnification of the war that rages in every human heart every day, and will until the last human being draws his dying breath. What Jason and Daniel did is not right, but it happened, and it happened for a reason, and if we search deep within our souls, we will all find that we know the reason all too well.

In Christian mythology, the cross represents sacrifice. Just as the ancient Jews offered up burnt sacrifices on an altar to atone for their sins, Christ died on the cross as a final sacrifice for the sins of all mankind. The cross is an altar. But there’s another altar, a place in the darkest corners of the heart, where we go when we lose faith, and there we place everything we once believed in—all our hopes, our dreams, and our wishes—and set it ablaze. That place is where we make an angry, wounded sacrifice to a God who isn’t there, desperately trying to atone for the sin of our unbelief as we berate Him and curse Him and beg Him to please please please come back.

That place is the Midnight Cross.