Part 2: A News Channel Called My Biker Dad A “Dangerous Criminal” On TV — My 6-Year-Old Daughter Cried On Camera Defending Him, And 30 Bikers Watched The Video And Made A Plan
PART 2
I want to tell you who Rex was before he was Ivy’s father.
Rex Maddox grew up in a town called Indianola, south of Des Moines, in the 1990s. His father drove long-haul for ConAgra. His mother worked the front desk at a vet clinic. He had a younger brother named Cole who is now an electrician living in Cedar Rapids, and an older sister named Gwen who teaches third grade in Council Bluffs.
He went into the Iowa state correctional system at twenty-three for a possession-with-intent charge. He did eighteen months at Anamosa State Penitentiary. He came out at twenty-five and went to work for a man named Big Bill at a transmission shop off I-80, who had been told by Rex’s sister Gwen that Rex needed somebody to give him a real job, and Big Bill had said, in his own words, “Send him over. I’ll see what he can do.”
That was 2010.
Rex has worked at that transmission shop for fourteen years. He is the head mechanic now. Big Bill retired three years ago. Rex bought a minority share of the shop in 2022 with the down payment from a small loan I co-signed.
He prospected for our charter in 2012. He earned his patch in 2013. He has been the Secretary of the charter for six years.
I want to tell you what the charter actually is.
The charter is twenty-eight men. Twelve of them are Iraq or Afghanistan veterans. Four of them are firefighters with the Des Moines Fire Department. Three of them are teachers. One is a pediatric ICU nurse named Otis who works the night shift at Blank Children’s Hospital and rides with us on the weekends. One is an accountant at a firm downtown. One is the manager of a Lowe’s. One is a chef at a barbecue place off Ingersoll Avenue. Three are mechanics like Rex. One is a Catholic deacon who serves communion every Sunday at Saint Augustin’s. One is a software engineer at Principal Financial. One is the head of the apprenticeship program at the IBEW Local 347.
The President of our charter is named Trapper. He is fifty-six years old. He is a project manager for a road-construction company. He has been a patched brother for twenty-four years.
I want you to understand this. The men in my husband’s charter are not, by any honest accounting, “a group of dangerous criminals.” They are men with mortgages and kids and 401(k)s and dental insurance who happen to ride motorcycles on the weekends and wear leather cuts at charter meetings.
Some of them have done time. Rex has done time. Two others I know of have done time. The rest have not. The patches on their backs do not, in our specific charter, signify anything that would interest a federal investigator.
The small embroidered patch on the inside of Rex’s cut, over his heart — the pale yellow square with the letter I in white thread that I made for him in October of 2019 the week Ivy was born — that patch is what my husband touches at the end of every workday in the parking lot of the transmission shop before he gets on his bike to ride home.
He has touched it every workday for almost six years.
He had touched it that morning, in our kitchen, on his way out the door at five forty-five, before Ivy was even awake and before Bryce Halloran sat down behind the news desk at Channel 9.
He did not know, when he kissed me on the temple and walked out to his truck at five forty-five that Tuesday morning, that fourteen seconds of footage of his face in profile was about to be on the screen of a TV my daughter was eating Cheerios in front of.
I did not know either.
We found out at six-sixteen.
PART 3
I want to tell you what happened to the video.
I posted it on Facebook at six forty-eight Tuesday morning. The caption was three sentences. I wrote:
“This is my six-year-old. She just saw her father’s face on the news under a chyron that said ‘dangerous criminals.’ Her father is the secretary of an independent motorcycle club and the head mechanic at a transmission shop. He has not been in any kind of trouble in fifteen years. Please be careful what you put on television when six-year-olds are watching.”
I did not name the news station.
I did not name Bryce Halloran.
I did not tag anybody.
I had three hundred and twelve Facebook followers.
By eight a.m. the video had two thousand views.
By noon it had forty thousand.
By Tuesday night it had four hundred thousand.
By Wednesday morning it had cleared two million views.
I want to be honest. I did not expect any of this. I am thirty-six years old. I work part-time as a dental hygienist in West Des Moines. I have a Facebook because I have a kid and a grandmother who likes to see pictures. I did not have any idea what I had filmed until my sister called me at eight-thirty Tuesday morning and asked me if I had checked the post.
I checked the post.
I sat down on the kitchen floor.
By the time my husband Rex came home from the transmission shop at six-fifteen that Tuesday evening, the video had been shared seventeen thousand times.
Rex did not know.
Rex did not have a Facebook. Rex did not have an Instagram. Rex has — by his own preference — exactly one social media presence in his life, which is a Yelp account he uses to leave reviews of motorcycle parts vendors.
He walked in through the kitchen door at six-fifteen.
He set his lunch cooler on the counter.
He kissed me on the temple.
He looked at me. He said: “Honey. Why are you crying?”
I had been crying for forty minutes by then. Ivy was at her grandmother’s. I had not figured out how to explain to my husband what had happened.
I picked up my phone. I opened the post. I handed it to him.
Rex read the caption.
He watched the video of our daughter on the rug.
He watched it twice.
Then he picked up his lunch cooler again. He walked out of the kitchen. He walked out the back door. He walked out to the garage. He shut the garage door.
He did not come back inside for forty-five minutes.
When he came back in, his eyes were red and his cheeks were dry and he sat down at the kitchen table and he said one sentence.
He said: “Honey. I have to call Trapper.”
He called Trapper at seven-oh-eight Tuesday evening.
He told him what was on the news.
He told him about the video.
He sent him the link.
Trapper called an emergency charter meeting for the next night.
PART 4
I want to tell you what happened at the meeting.
The meeting was at our clubhouse — which is a small concrete-block building off the south side of Des Moines that the charter has rented since 2003 — on a Wednesday night in February at seven p.m. Twenty-six of the twenty-eight patched brothers were there. The two who could not be there were Otis, who was working the night shift at the pediatric ICU, and a brother named Holcomb, whose wife was in labor with their second kid at the time.
Rex told the room what had happened.
The room watched the video of my daughter on the rug.
The room was quiet for a long time afterward.
Trapper — fifty-six years old, twenty-four years patched, road-construction project manager, the man who patched Rex in 2013 — Trapper stood up at the head of the long folding table.
He looked at Rex.
He said: “Brother. Your six-year-old just defended this charter on the internet to two million people. That kid earned something tonight. We owe her something back.”
Rex said: “Trap. I don’t know what.”
Trapper said: “I do. I been thinking about it since you called me last night.”
He looked at the room.
He said: “Brothers. Hear me out. That kid’s school does a Career Day every spring. Ivy told Rex about it at dinner last week. Two hundred kids, thirty grown-ups, every grown-up gets fifteen minutes to talk about what they do for a living. They invite parents. They invite community members. It’s open.”
He paused.
He said: “I want to call her school tomorrow morning. I want to ask if we — thirty patched brothers in this charter — can come do Career Day. Not as bikers. As what we actually do for a living. Electricians. Mechanics. Teachers. Nurses. Engineers. The whole charter. We come in plain clothes. No cuts. No patches. We tell those kids what we do all week.”
He looked at Rex.
He said: “At the end. After every brother has spoken. I get up in front of those two hundred kids and I tell them the truth. I say — and these are my words — Kids. We are all bikers. The vests are how we relax on the weekends. But this is who we are. And then we go home. And Ivy Maddox goes home with the answer she was looking for at six in the morning two days ago. And so do a hundred and ninety-nine other kids. And maybe their parents.”
The room was quiet.
Then Otis — who was not there, but who Trapper had called at six o’clock in the ICU to ask if he was in — Otis had said yes from a pediatric ICU break room before the meeting even started.
The room said yes.
Twenty-six patched brothers said yes one after another around the folding table.
Trapper called Ivy’s school the next morning.
PART 5
I want to tell you what Career Day looked like.
It was on the second Wednesday of March, three weeks after my daughter cried on a Facebook video that was, by then, sitting at seven million views and counting. Ivy’s elementary school principal — a woman named Mrs. Cordero, who has run that school for nineteen years and who has a son who is a Des Moines firefighter and rides a Harley — Mrs. Cordero had agreed to the whole thing in one phone call with Trapper that had lasted four minutes.
The school was Hubbell Elementary on the east side of Des Moines.
Two hundred and eleven kids assembled in the gym at one o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon. Two hundred kindergartners through fifth graders. The teachers had set up thirty folding chairs in a long row along the front of the gym. Each chair had a small index-card name tag taped to the back. The name tags read:
ELECTRICIAN. FIREFIGHTER. ICU NURSE. MECHANIC. TEACHER. CHEF. ACCOUNTANT. BANK MANAGER. DEACON. SOFTWARE ENGINEER. APPRENTICE COORDINATOR.
And so on.
Thirty grown men walked into that gym at one-oh-five p.m.
Not one of them was in a leather cut.
Not one of them was in patches.
They were wearing what their jobs ask them to wear. The four firefighters wore their station polos. Otis the ICU nurse wore his hospital scrubs. The chef wore his white kitchen jacket. Rex wore his work shirt with REX embroidered over the right chest pocket and MADDOX TRANSMISSION embroidered over the left. Trapper wore khaki Carhartts and a yellow road-crew safety vest. The deacon wore his black shirt and clerical collar. The IBEW guy wore his electrician’s coveralls. The accountant wore a button-down and slacks. The software engineer wore a fleece pullover with the Principal Financial logo embroidered on the chest.
They sat down in their thirty folding chairs.
Two hundred and eleven kids sat on the gym floor in front of them.
My daughter Ivy sat front row, center, with her two missing top front teeth and her father’s reddish-brown hair pulled into two crooked pigtails and her hands flat on her crossed legs.
Mrs. Cordero introduced them.
Each man stood up. Each man walked to the small portable microphone at the center of the gym. Each man talked for two minutes about what he does for a living, why he does it, and what a kindergartener or a third-grader or a fifth-grader could do if they wanted to do that same job when they grew up.
Otis the pediatric ICU nurse talked about how, on a night shift, sometimes a baby who is very sick gets better while he is holding her hand. He said: “That is why I work nights, kids. That is the reason.”
The chef talked about how brisket is made.
The deacon talked about the history of the Catholic Mass.
The IBEW guy showed the kids how a circuit breaker works using a flashlight he had brought.
Rex talked about transmissions. He brought a small cutaway model of a manual gearbox he had made in the shop on his lunch breaks for three days. He showed the kids how the gears moved. He let three of them — including Ivy — come up and turn the input shaft with their hands.
At the end of the thirty introductions, Trapper stood up.
He walked to the microphone.
He looked at two hundred and eleven kids on the gym floor.
He said:
“Kids. We didn’t tell you something today. All thirty of us. We are all in the same motorcycle club. We ride together on the weekends. We wear leather vests. We have patches. We have beards and tattoos and loud bikes. On the weekends, that’s how we relax.”
“During the week — this is who we are.”
He gestured down the row of folding chairs.
“We are your firefighters. Your nurse. Your teachers. Your mechanics. Your accountants. Your electricians. Your chef. Your deacon.”
“On the news last month, somebody called us ‘dangerous criminals.’ We are not. We are this.”
He paused.
He looked directly at Ivy in the front row.
He said: “Ivy Maddox. Your dad is the secretary of our club. He is a mechanic. He is a good man. He is not what the news said. You were right. Thank you for sticking up for him.”
Ivy stood up in the front row.
She started clapping.
Two hundred and ten other kids started clapping with her.
A hundred and twelve teachers and parent volunteers in the back of the gym started clapping.
Mrs. Cordero, by her own admission to me afterward, was crying with both hands over her mouth.
PART 6
I want to tell you what happened in the comments.
Two hundred parents took two hundred kids home from Hubbell Elementary that Wednesday afternoon. Those two hundred kids told two hundred sets of parents what had happened in the gym.
One hundred and forty-three of those parents — by Mrs. Cordero’s count, which she shared with me a year later — posted to the school’s Facebook page about it within seventy-two hours.
The top comment on that thread, by a woman named Tara Henderson whose third-grader Bryce had been in the gym, has eleven hundred likes. It says:
“I was wrong about bikers. My son’s pediatric ICU nurse is one of them. I owe him an apology I cannot find the words for. I am also going to bake him cookies.”
The second top comment, by a man named Marcus Boyd whose kindergartener had been in the gym next to Ivy: “I have spent thirty-eight years assuming every man in a leather vest was a man I should not have my kid near. My kid’s electrician is one of them. My electrician is wonderful. I am sorry.”
There are a hundred and forty more comments like that.
Bryce Halloran of Channel 9 — the news anchor who had read the chyron — Bryce called the station’s general manager after his producers showed him the Hubbell Elementary story. He went on the air, on his own segment, eleven days after the original chyron, and he apologized by name. He apologized to my husband. He apologized to my charter. He apologized to my daughter.
He did not say her name on air.
But he held up, on camera, a hand-drawn card.
It was a small folded piece of construction paper.
On the front it said, in marker, I AM SORRY, MR. MADDOX.
Bryce Halloran had asked his producer to drive that card to my husband’s transmission shop two days after the apology aired.
The producer had handed it to Rex at the front desk.
Rex took it home in his lunch cooler.
He set it on the kitchen counter.
He did not say anything about it until the next morning.
Then he picked it up, and he walked it into Ivy’s room, and he taped it to her wall over her dresser.
It is still there.
PART 7
Ivy is eight years old now.
The Career Day at Hubbell Elementary has happened every year since. Mrs. Cordero invites our charter back every March. The thirty patched brothers go in their work clothes. They talk for two minutes each. Trapper still stands up at the end. He still says the same thing.
“On the weekends, that is how we relax. During the week, this is who we are.”
The card from Bryce Halloran is still taped over Ivy’s dresser.
Rex still wears the small pale yellow patch with the letter I on the inside of his cut.
The Harley still rolls out on Saturday mornings.
She is right about him.
She always was.
Follow the page for more stories about the bikers America thinks it knows — and the six-year-olds in pink pajamas who set the record straight.
