Where Mercy Is Shown, Mercy Is Given - Duane Dog Chapman [37]
Even though I couldn’t fully explain the dream at the time, seeing the Reverend Jackson, a man I respect and admire, standing in front of me told me to be bold and confront my mistake. As far as I knew, no one had faced their public lashing for something like this head-on. The world was watching my every move. I had two choices. I could go underground until the dust settled, or I could own up to my wrongdoing, become a role model for others, and take whatever the Lord had planned for me like a man. The Bible says “the unsaved watch us all the time.” They’re judging everything we say, do, and whether or not we will live up to the standards they’ve set for us. I have tried to live by my convictions, my morals and values. If you are willing to sacrifice yourself for what you believe in, God will be there, and so I finally had my answer and knew what I had to do.
My survival instincts kicked in right there and then. I asked God if His plan was to brand me “N-Dog” for the rest of my life. Was this going to be my burden forever?
His answers to both questions came back “Yes.”
How can you argue with the Lord and His almighty plan? That’s simple. You can’t. The only thing I could do was speak my peace, apologize, and hope America would take mercy on my ignorance.
And while it took me some time to buck up, Beth had already shifted into doing whatever damage control needed to be done. One of the first things she did outside of juggling the media was send Baby Lyssa up to the house where Tucker lived to get Travis out. Tucker would have to weather this storm on his own. When she got there, Tucker and Lyssa almost got into a physical fight as she delivered the news. He ended up calling the police on her and then contacted photographers from the National Enquirer so they could come over and capture the confrontation. Ka-ching! More money for Tucker if they got the shot. It was clear he wasn’t going to leave without a struggle.
Luckily, Baby Lyssa got away by the skin of her teeth and without harm. The cops showed up just as she was leaving, and the photographers were too late to capture the exchange.
Someone told me Tucker had gone to work that very same day saying, “Ain’t gonna be no more Dog the Bounty Hunter.” He was gloating. My own son was basking in the hurt he had brought upon his own family.
Mutiny, by definition, is “a rebellion against legal authority, especially by soldiers or sailors refusing to obey an order and, often, attacking their officers.” While my children have made lots of mistakes over the years, I never once believed any of them would knowingly and purposefully try to destroy me. Sell me out? Yeah. It had happened once before this incident with my son Christopher. But he was just chasing money, not catastrophic retribution. The tabloids make it so easy for someone to make a few bucks by selling information—whether that information is true or not. But this time they had gone too far. They waved more money in my son’s face than he had ever dreamed of making. All he had to do was throw his old man to the wolves. He never looked back. What Tucker did was a mutiny of disastrous proportion, the depth and impact of which was painfully becoming more clear with every passing hour.
And if I had any hope about my son feeling remorse or guilt at the time over what he’d done, it was put to rest later that night after Tucker