Aaron's story

When Aaron found the gun, he knew it wasn’t a dream anymore. If only it were.

As the woman he married in prison years later describes, “He was a train wreck going somewhere to happen.” At 20, Aaron had created his own collision course, and there was no turning back.

One Ruinous Evening

On April 5, 1986, 20-year-old Aaron Cosar went to church. Despite 10 years of running as far as he could from the faith of his father—a church deacon at a Native American Baptist church—something made this apostate son flirt with religion on an Oklahoma evening. The romance was short-lived.

A girl was waiting for him in the church parking lot.

“Come on, a couple of beers won’t hurt anything,” she enticed. For someone who had been an alcoholic since childhood, it was a proposition Aaron couldn’t refuse.

Eight hours and several rounds of alcohol and LSD later, Aaron found himself in a house with two girls and a guy who owned a 9 millimeter handgun that Aaron believed was calling his name. When the guy stepped out to buy more beer, Aaron took the gun. When the man returned, Aaron pulled the trigger that would tear away his freedom and change the course of his life—as well as the lives of everyone he knew, even those he hadn’t yet met.

Waking Up

He awoke the next morning in a drunken stupor. The events of the night before ran together as a chimera in his befuddled mind.

“I thought it was a dream, really. I thought what I had done wasn’t real.”

And then he found the gun.

A week later, the police picked up a belligerent Aaron on a tip from his younger brother. They drove him to the Pontotoc County jail in Ada, Oklahoma, and put him in “the bullpen,” a cement room with a single hole to urinate through.

That’s when he received his first visitors, Christians who came to the jail to share Christ’s love with inmates like Aaron. But this Native American wasn’t interested in “white man’s religion.” One volunteer he turned away with a cup of urine in the face.

But one petite woman kept coming back. And then one day, Aaron clasped the lady’s white hands through the jail bars and prayed the sinner’s prayer, finally surrendering to the God he’d been avoiding his whole life.