Demaryius Thomas wants to successfully reunite his broken family
HE AWOKE TO the blast of the front door flying off its hinges, and Demaryius Thomas peeked out his bedroom window and saw six unmarked cars and a dozen police officers with their guns drawn. A pack of drug dogs roamed the front yard. The spotlight from a police cruiser cut through the predawn darkness of rural Montrose, Georgia, and shined into his single-story house. "Don't move!" Thomas remembers hearing one of the officers yell, so he ducked back into bed and hid under the sheets.
He was 11 years old on that March morning in 1999, but he already knew enough to understand what these policemen had come looking for. He already knew they would find it.
An officer in black tactical gear entered his room without knocking, pulled him from bed and led him to the kitchen table, where the rest of his family was already waiting. During the many lonely milestones still to come in Thomas' life -- at the NFL draft, the Pro Bowl, the Super Bowl -- he would think back to this moment and remember it as the last time his family sat together: his stepfather, cursing, blood running down his face from a cut suffered during the chaos of the raid; his 3-year-old sister, hysterically crying; his 9-year-old sister, shivering in her pajamas; and his mother, Katina Smith, seated in her chair, praying and sobbing and swearing that she had done nothing wrong.
They sat at the table for an hour as the police officers searched through their house. The dogs paced across the backyard where Thomas had just started learning to play football. Officers inspected his basketball uniforms and his trophies and tore open the cases of his video games. Finally their search led them to a closet in the master bedroom, where they found a purple coat with hot-pink lining. Inside one pocket were two gigantic rolls of cash: 30 $100 bills and more than 60 $20 bills, totaling more than $5,000.
http://espn.go.com/espn/feature/story/_/id/11830457/denver-broncos-demaryius-thomas-dreams-reuniting-estranged-family
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