Part 2: A 7-Year-Old Cop’s Son Hid Behind His Mom’s Leg from a Biker in a Supermarket — 10 Years Later, He Asked That Same Biker to Sit Next to His Father at His Police Academy Graduation.
I am Wyatt’s aunt. My name is Sarah Rhodes-Webb. I am forty-six years old, Marcus’s younger sister, a paralegal at a small family-law firm in Lebanon, Indiana, and I have known both the man in the kitchen and the man on the supermarket floor — my brother and Pastor Mullins — for the entire ten years and four months since the produce aisle.
I want to tell you who Marcus was before Wyatt asked him the question at the dinner table.
Marcus is my older brother. He was forty years old that summer of 2014. He had been with the Lebanon Police Department for fifteen years by then. He had started as a patrol officer at twenty-five, had made detective at thirty-one, had been promoted to sergeant at thirty-six. He had been one of the youngest sergeants in the department’s history.
He is, by every honest sister’s assessment, an extraordinary cop. He is the kind of cop who knows the first names of the convenience store clerks on his beat. He is the kind of cop who buys school supplies in August out of his own salary for kids in the trailer park off Indianapolis Avenue. He is, in the eleven Lebanon County child-welfare cases I have personally worked on as a paralegal in the last decade, the responding officer I have most often requested by name when calls come in involving children, because Marcus is the officer who actually sits on the floor with a frightened 5-year-old and waits for the child to come to him.
Marcus is also, for reasons I am about to explain, a man who spent the first fifteen years of his career genuinely believing that the patched biker community was a public-safety problem.
In November of 1999, Marcus’s first year on the force, he had been the responding patrol officer at a particularly bad outlaw-motorcycle-gang-related shooting at a roadhouse outside Crawfordsville, Indiana. Two members of one club had shot two members of a different club over a territorial dispute. One of the victims had died in the parking lot before EMS arrived. Marcus, twenty-five years old, three months out of the academy, had performed compression on the victim’s chest for fourteen minutes alone in that parking lot waiting for backup.
The shooter, when finally arrested forty-eight hours later, had been wearing a patched cut.
Marcus had spent the next fifteen years professionally cautious of every patched motorcycle club he encountered in Boone County. He did not — and I want to be honest about this — actively harass innocent biker community members. He was not that kind of cop. He simply, by his own honest acknowledgment to me later, had developed a fifteen-year reflex that said patched cut equals potential problem.
He had passed that reflex on to his son.
He had been telling Wyatt — kindly, gently, the way a careful father teaches a small son about strangers — for three years, that bikers were not our friends.
He had genuinely believed he was protecting Wyatt.
He had not yet learned about the existence of BACA.
I want to seed something here that matters.
BACA — Bikers Against Child Abuse — is a real international nonprofit organization. It was founded in Utah in 1995 by a 41-year-old social worker named John Paul Lilly. It has chapters in every U.S. state and twenty-six foreign countries. Its mission is, in its own published language, to empower children to not feel afraid of the world in which they live. The way it does this is by sending patched biker chapter members — in cuts, on Harleys, in formation — to provide emotional and physical presence for child abuse victims during court testimony, home visits, school transitions, and other moments when a child is asked to face the world from which they have been harmed.
BACA members are vetted through formal background checks, child-safety training, and a 12-month minimum probationary period before they earn the patch.
The 52-year-old man in the produce aisle of the Kroger on Mount Holly Road in Lebanon, Indiana on that August afternoon in 2014 was Ray “Pastor” Mullins — eight years a patched member of the Central Indiana BACA chapter, twenty-two combat-mission veterans of court escorts for children in Boone County, and the father of four grown adopted daughters who had each, in their own time and in their own way, come to Ray’s family through the foster-care system after histories I will not write down here.
Pastor had been at the Kroger that afternoon to pick up a carton of organic milk for his 4-year-old granddaughter, who was at his house for the weekend, who only drank that one specific brand because of a small food sensitivity Pastor’s daughter had figured out the previous year.
He had not been looking for anything else.
He had turned the corner near the bananas. He had seen a 7-year-old white boy in a Captain America t-shirt grab two fistfuls of his mother’s jeans and dive behind her right leg.
He had recognized the fear immediately.
Pastor, by his own quiet admission to me three years later on his back porch in Whitestown, had not had to think for one second about what to do. He had been training for that exact moment for eight years.
What Pastor Mullins did in the next eleven seconds in the produce aisle of that Kroger, Caroline Rhodes told me over coffee at my kitchen table the following Saturday, was one of the most carefully executed pieces of de-escalation she had ever watched a grown man perform in her life — and Caroline has been a kindergarten teacher for twelve years, which means she has watched, by her own count, a lot of carefully executed pieces of de-escalation.
Pastor did not approach. He did not lean down. He did not extend his hand.
He went down — slowly, deliberately, with both his enormous tattooed hands visible at his sides palms-half-open — to one knee on the polished supermarket linoleum at a distance of about eight feet from Caroline and Wyatt.
His shopping cart sat motionless beside him with one carton of organic milk visible.
He was, on one knee, exactly at Wyatt’s eye level.
He said, in a low careful rumble that was deliberately calmed down for the situation: “Hey, partner. I see you. My name is Ray. I know I look kinda big and kinda scary. That’s okay. Lots of people think that. Can I tell you somethin’ real quick? You don’t have to come out from behind your mama. Just listen, okay?”
Wyatt, from behind his mother’s leg, watched.
He did not say anything.
Pastor said: “Partner. I know who your daddy is. I don’t know him personal — but you got that look. Police family. Am I right?”
Wyatt nodded once, very small, from behind the leg.
Pastor said: “Yeah. I figured. Now listen. Your daddy is a real good man. He catches bad guys. That’s a real important job. He keeps you and your mama safe. That’s why he wears his uniform. Right?”
Wyatt nodded again. A little bigger this time.
Pastor said: “Partner. I catch bad guys too. Just in a different kind of way. I wear different clothes. But same team. I catch bad guys who try to hurt little kids. That’s what this patch on my chest means.”
He very slowly turned his enormous shoulder so Wyatt could see the small purple-and-white BACA shield patch over his heart.
He said: “Partner. I’m not gonna come closer. You’re safe. Your mama’s right there. I just wanted you to know that. I figured it might help you sleep better tonight to know that the guy in produce was on the same side as your dad.”
Wyatt — by every account Caroline gave me, by every account Pastor confirmed later — slowly let go of one fistful of his mother’s jeans.
He stepped one half-step out from behind her leg.
His blue eyes were wide and round.
He said, in his small 7-year-old voice: “Mister. Do you really catch bad guys?”
Pastor said: “Yes, partner. I do.”
Wyatt said: “Do you catch the bad guys who hurt kids?”
Pastor said: “Yes, sir. That’s exactly the kind of bad guys I catch.”
Wyatt thought about it for one full second.
He said: “Like my dad!”
Pastor smiled slowly and said: “Yeah, partner. Like your dad.”
He kept his hands visible. He did not stand up. He stayed on the one knee for about ten more seconds while Wyatt looked at him with the kind of bright recalibrating attention only a 7-year-old can bring to a brand-new fact.
Then Pastor stood up — slowly, carefully — and he said: “Ma’am. Thank you for letting me say that to your boy. I’m gonna go finish my shopping now. You both have a real nice afternoon.”
Caroline could not speak for a second.
She finally said: “Sir. Thank you.”
Pastor said: “My pleasure, ma’am.”
He pushed his red shopping cart down the produce aisle toward the dairy case. He did not look back.
Caroline stood there with her hand on top of Wyatt’s blond head for a full minute before she could remember why she had come to the Kroger.
She finished her shopping in a kind of daze. She drove home. She got the groceries out of the trunk. She put dinner on the stove. She set the table.
Marcus came home from his shift at 6:14 p.m., took off his duty belt at the front closet the way he had done every weeknight of Wyatt’s life, kissed Caroline on the cheek, and sat down at the dinner table.
That was when Wyatt — seven years old, halfway through his macaroni and cheese — looked across the table at his father and asked the question that changed everything.
He said: “Daddy. Is it true that some bikers catch bad guys too?”
Marcus, by his own honest description to me three months later in his garage on a Saturday morning over coffee, did not at first understand what Wyatt was asking.
He said: “Bud. What do you mean?”
Wyatt, with the absolute serious 7-year-old earnestness of a child reporting field intelligence, told his father what had happened in the produce aisle at the Kroger that afternoon.
He told him about Pastor Mullins’s purple-and-white patch.
He told him about the catch the bad guys who hurt kids part.
He told him that the biker had said he was on the same side as Daddy.
He told him that Mommy had said it was okay.
Marcus listened to the whole thing without interrupting.
When Wyatt was done, Marcus looked at Caroline.
Caroline, very gently, nodded once. Yes, Marcus. It was a real thing. It was a kind thing. It was not what you’ve been telling him.
Marcus was quiet for a long full minute at his own dinner table.
Then he said: “Bud. Hold on a second. Daddy needs to make a phone call after dinner. I want to learn more about that guy you met today.”
That night, after Wyatt was in bed, Marcus sat at his home computer in his small den and he did exactly what a fifteen-year-veteran police sergeant does when something has been brought to his attention.
He looked it up.
He looked up BACA. He read the organization’s mission statement. He read its operational protocols. He read its safety procedures. He read its background-check requirements. He read about the John Paul Lilly founding and the international expansion and the case studies of child witnesses who had been able to testify in court because patched bikers had escorted them through it.
He read for almost four hours.
He came to bed at 1:14 a.m.
He told Caroline, sitting on the edge of the bed in his t-shirt and his boxers, with the kind of careful honesty he uses when he is admitting something difficult: “Sweetheart. I’ve been wrong about something for fifteen years. I owe a man an apology.”
Three days later — on a Saturday morning, in his civilian clothes, off duty, alone — Marcus Rhodes drove his personal Ford F-150 to the Central Indiana BACA chapter clubhouse in Whitestown, ten miles south of Lebanon.
He knocked on the front door at 10:00 a.m.
The chapter president — a 61-year-old retired union electrician named Hank “Hammer” Doherty, who had been the local BACA chapter president for nine years — opened the door in his cut and his boots and his clean black t-shirt and looked, for a second, mildly startled to see a man he did not recognize on the porch.
Marcus said: “Sir. My name is Marcus Rhodes. I’m a sergeant with the Lebanon Police Department, off duty, here alone. May I come in and speak with you for a few minutes? I’d also like to know if you can put me in touch with one of your members — a man my son met this past Wednesday at a Kroger.”
Hammer let him in.
Marcus sat at the wooden meeting table at the back of the Whitestown clubhouse with Hammer and four other on-site patched chapter members — including, by coincidence, Pastor Mullins himself, who was at the clubhouse that Saturday morning helping the chapter’s wood-carver fix a chair.
Marcus took off his Lebanon PD cap. He set it on the wooden table.
He looked at the five men.
He said, in the careful clear voice of a man who has rehearsed this on a drive: “Gentlemen. I want to apologize. I have spent fifteen years on the Lebanon Police Department treating every patched biker I encountered with professional suspicion. I have, until this past Wednesday, taught my seven-year-old son that bikers were not our friends. I did not know about BACA. I did not know about your specific work. I did not know that there was a chapter eight miles from my own front door.”
He paused.
He said: “Mr. Mullins. I owe you a particular apology. My son came home from the Kroger on Wednesday and asked me at dinner if it was true that some bikers catch bad guys too. That is the first time in seven years he has not been scared of someone like you. I have been wrong. I am sorry.”
He extended his hand across the wooden table.
Pastor Mullins, on the other side of the table — 52 years old, 260 pounds, salt-and-pepper beard, HOLD FAST on his knuckles — stood up.
He took Marcus’s hand.
He said, in his low rumbling voice: “Sergeant Rhodes. Apology accepted. Welcome to the team.”
Hammer Doherty, at the head of the table, smiled slowly and said: “Sergeant. Now that the introductions are over. Let’s talk about how the Lebanon Police Department and the Central Indiana BACA chapter can start working together for the kids in your county.”
The seeds were everywhere, and I have spent the last ten years and four months putting them together for myself.
The fifteen years Marcus had spent professionally cautious of the patched biker community had come from one bad night in November of 1999 — the roadhouse shooting outside Crawfordsville, the dying man on the asphalt, the fourteen minutes of compressions in a parking lot, the patched cut on the eventual arrestee. Marcus had been twenty-five. He had been three months out of the academy. He had taken that night home with him for the next decade and a half.
He had not, in those fifteen years, ever encountered a patched biker community organization whose specific organizational purpose was to protect children.
He had not known they existed.
He had been wrong, but he had been wrong in the particular way that fifteen-year-old career reflexes are wrong. Mostly accurate. Occasionally catastrophic. In need of one good piece of new information to update the model.
Wyatt Rhodes — 7 years old, in a Captain America t-shirt, hiding behind his mother’s leg in the produce aisle of a Kroger — had been the new piece of information.
Pastor Mullins’s eight years as a patched BACA member, his twenty-two completed child-court-escort missions, his four adopted daughters, his nineteen sober years — every part of him had been, by the time he turned the corner near the bananas that Wednesday afternoon, exactly the right man on exactly the right knee at exactly the right eye level.
The Saturday morning meeting at the Whitestown clubhouse, by Hammer Doherty’s own account to me at a chapter picnic two years later, had been the start of something nobody at that table had quite expected.
Within six months, Marcus Rhodes — with the approval of the Lebanon Police Chief — had brokered a formal informal cooperation agreement between the Lebanon PD and the Central Indiana BACA chapter. The agreement was simple. When the Lebanon PD encountered a child-abuse case where the child needed emotional or physical accompaniment to court, to a forensic interview, to a custody hearing, the Lebanon PD would offer the family the option of BACA escort, with full chain-of-custody legal protocols protected.
The chapter would handle the escort.
The PD would handle the legal.
In the ten years and four months since, the Lebanon PD and the Central Indiana BACA chapter have, by my own paralegal count, escorted forty-seven Boone County children through court proceedings.
The chapter has, in those ten years, never lost a court engagement. Never had a complaint filed. Never had a child too scared to testify with a patched biker sitting in the front row of the gallery in his cut, on the family side, watching.
Marcus Rhodes was promoted to lieutenant in 2018.
He was promoted to captain in 2022.
He is currently, at forty-nine years old, the Lebanon PD Captain of Detectives.
He has — at every single one of the forty-seven BACA escort engagements over the last ten years — found a reason to be at the courthouse, in his uniform, in the back of the gallery, on his lunch break or off-shift, watching the chapter work.
He does not interfere.
He just shows up.
Pastor Mullins, at his last chapter meeting in November, told me that Marcus has become, over the last decade, the Lebanon PD officer the chapter trusts most in Boone County.
Pastor said: “Sis. Your brother showed up to my clubhouse with his hat in his hand and his apology rehearsed. I have been working with cops for nineteen years. Most of them never get there. Marcus got there in three days because his 7-year-old asked him a question he could not lie about. That’s the kind of man your brother is.”
That was ten years and four months ago.
Wyatt is seventeen now.
He has, since he was about eleven, been telling everybody who asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up that he was going to be a police officer.
He had also, by the time he was fourteen, been spending Saturday mornings at the Whitestown BACA clubhouse helping the chapter’s wood-carver fix old chairs and clean motorcycle parts and sand wooden picture frames for the small annual fundraising auction. He was, by Hammer Doherty’s official statement at the chapter’s December banquet last year, the unofficial junior mascot of the Central Indiana BACA chapter.
He had — at fifteen — applied for and been accepted into the Lebanon Police Department’s Explorer Program, the official youth program for teenagers interested in law-enforcement careers.
He had — at seventeen, this past spring — completed his application to the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy in Plainfield, Indiana, where Indiana state troopers and many municipal officers are trained.
He had been accepted to the Cadet Program — a special pre-academy program for 17-and-18-year-olds — in February of last year.
He had graduated from that cadet program in a formal ceremony at the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy on Friday morning, May 23rd of this year, at 10:14 a.m., with his father Marcus in his Lebanon PD captain’s dress uniform sitting in the front row of the family section.
And in the chair directly next to Marcus, also in the front row of the family section, by the personal written request of Cadet Wyatt Rhodes himself, was a 62-year-old gray-bearded patched BACA member named Ray “Pastor” Mullins, in a clean white button-down shirt and a freshly-pressed black sport jacket and his Sunday boots, with his patched BACA cut folded carefully across his lap because he had been told he could not wear it on the academy floor — and who had agreed, at Wyatt’s request, to wear his small purple-and-white BACA shield patch pinned to the lapel of his jacket instead.
Wyatt had given the cadet-class speech at his graduation.
He had spoken for four minutes and seventeen seconds. He had spoken about his father. He had spoken about the Boone County kids the chapter and the PD had escorted through court. He had spoken about his Captain America t-shirt and his small fistfuls of his mother’s jeans at the produce aisle of the Kroger on Mount Holly Road when he was seven years old.
He had ended his speech with two sentences that Marcus and Pastor — sitting beside each other in the front row of the family section — both told me later they have been trying to keep in their heads ever since.
The two sentences were: “I learned from my father that the law protects everyone. And I learned from a stranger in a supermarket that heroes do not all wear the same uniform.”
He had stepped down off the small academy stage.
He had walked across the carpet to the front row.
He had hugged his father first.
Then he had turned to Pastor Mullins.
Pastor had stood up.
The 17-year-old cadet, in his pressed navy uniform with the gold cadet pin on the chest, had hugged the 62-year-old patched BACA biker on the front row of the family section of the Indiana Law Enforcement Academy graduation, and he had not let go for almost forty seconds.
Marcus Rhodes, in his Lebanon PD captain’s dress uniform on Pastor’s other side, had reached across and put his hand on Pastor’s shoulder.
The three of them — the captain, the BACA brother, the new cadet — had stood there for thirty more seconds in front of a hall of three hundred and forty graduating cadets and their families.
Then Pastor had said, quietly: “Son. Your daddy and me are gonna sit down now. You go back up there and let them take your picture. We’re not going anywhere.”
I drove past the Whitestown BACA clubhouse last Saturday at 10:00 a.m.
There were eleven Harleys in the lot, chrome catching the autumn morning sun.
Through the open front door I could see them at the wooden meeting table — Pastor Mullins in his cut, Hammer Doherty in his, three other patched brothers, and a 49-year-old Lebanon PD captain in civilian clothes with his cap on the table beside him.
In the chair pulled up at the corner of that meeting table sat a 17-year-old cadet in a clean cadet sweatshirt, listening, taking notes, learning.
Some uniforms aren’t the same.
Some teams are.
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