Just after four in the morning on August 2, 2017, Thornton’s mother, Natalie Wilson, laid asleep on the couch in her father’s low-slung, three-bedroom home on Banks Street in Coushatta, Louisiana, part of Red River Parish. She was visiting for a few days from Shreveport, an hour north. Thornton ran across the yard from the trailer where he was temporarily living, a salmon-colored single-wide in the backyard of his grandfather’s house, and jolted her awake. “Mama! Come on! They’re in my car!” he said in his soupy drawl, shaking her by the shoulders. “Let’s go!”
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