Mother's Motivation

To understand how Derrius Mullins became such a heavily recruited athlete in such a physical, violent, and demanding sport, you first have to understand where he comes from.

The 6-foot-4, 320-pound defensive tackle from Columbus (Ohio) St. Francis DeSales is soft spoken, perhaps even shy, but he doesn't have to search very hard for the motivation he needs.

That motivation comes from right under his own roof. It is true that most athletes will point towards their parents as big influences in their development both on the playing field and off of it, but rarely to the extent of what you'll see in the Mullins household.

Miss Mullins, mother of the Top-20 Ohio prospect, is a constant reminder to her son that whatever is going on on the football field or on the track, it is nothing compared to what she has faced and the obstacles that she has overcome.

Domestic violence is an issue that has come front and center in the football world in recent years, and few know the horrors of being a victim of domestic violence like Miss Mullins. Mullins, an excellent high school athlete in her own right, had her college volleyball career cut short after she found out she was pregnant with twins.

Her life now taking a different path than she initially intended, Mullins would meet her future husband, Derrick Mason.

"It wasn't really a physically abusive relationship (at first)," Mullins recalled. "It was a classic case of abuse because it took me a long time to realize that I was in an abusive relationship, because there wasn't really hitting."

Mason was a basketball player at Central State at the time. Mullins was always into sports for as long as she could remember, something instilled in her by her father. With a shared passion for athletics, it seemed like a good match.

"I got into the relationship for all of the wrong reasons," she explained. "I was a single mom with two-year old twins when we met. When we met, he was everybody else's idea of who I should be with and I just kind of went with it. I'm not saying I didn't love him, but I don't think I ever got to the point where a wife should love a husband."

Many of the typical early warning signs were there. Jealousy, smothering, and a general distrust of Mullins' male friends.

"At first it was flattering," she said. "I've always had male friends. I would be the one at the table talking about the game the night before so I've always had male best friends and he didn't want me hanging out with other men."

After a stint playing basketball overseas, Mason returned and proposed to Mullins who was now pregnant with Derrius. However, the marriage plans fell through, though they stayed engaged. Mason was having second thoughts and later Mullins would discover that she wasn't the only woman in his life.

"I remember when Derrius was about five weeks old, a young lady called the house," she explained. "I didn't think much about it because he managed a hotel and he would take keys with him and things like that, so that's why I didn't think much of it. People were always calling him about (work) stuff and I just figured she was calling from the hotel."

"Then when I told him who called, his voice gave it away. So I called her back and asked her. I think that was one of the things that bothered him because I've never been the jealous type. I called her and I asked her how they had met. They had met at Northland Mall and she told me about how he had brought Derrius with him when they met."

The anger of being cheated on was substantial, but even more than that was the betrayal of dragging their infant son into the equation. After letting so much slide over the years, this was something that Mullins couldn't come to terms with.

"I went after him that day," she recalled. "I ended up missing a step going out the front door and I flew off the front porch and ended up breaking my leg. I crushed the tibia and had to have surgery on it. They put in six screws and it wasn't healing right so I had to go in for another surgery and they put in nine screws and three plates to try to repair it. I was in a brace for six months and on crutches, trying to take care of a newborn and two eight-year olds."

Yet Mullins' ties to Mason would only grow deeper. Another baby was on the way. Despite all of the ups and downs and warning signs, Mullins provided Mason with yet another chance to make things right.

"After recovery, I went to the doctor and I was told that I was now pregnant with my daughter," she said. "We're still not married, but we had been together for about six years. I finally told him, 'I'm going to be a single mom or a married mom' and so we decided to get married. On February 26th, 2000 we got married."

But marriage didn't change anything. The common theme of ups and downs continued and the infidelity returned.

"Everything started out good, I gave it a clean slate and put everything in the past," she said. "About a year into it, I found out that the same things were going on. We had been married about a year and his cell phone rang and it was sitting in his truck and I was already outside because it was a nice day and so I went to answer it and he came busting out of the house trying to get to the phone before I did."

"This young lady told me that she had met him months prior. She had been going out to his job regularly to spend time with him. She had asked him if he was married, apparently one time he had forgotten to take his wedding band off, so I found out that he wasn't wearing his wedding band to work all of the time."

The couple went to counseling, but Mullins simply had no desire to continue the relationship, at least on an emotional level.

"I think it's time to focus on me," she recalled thinking. "I spent the next few years doing just that. I started coaching again. I was working a good job."

Mullins would spend the next few years getting back to her roots of being around sports while also building a career for herself in the hopes of not only finding personal happiness but bettering the lives of her children.

"I loved the job I had but it was stressful and I was on the road a lot. It was like a sister agency with the supreme court and so I had to work with all of the judges in Ohio, to go to their association meetings, planning meetings. I loved the job but I had to figure out how I was going to be able to do all of this on my own. With four kids, I needed something a little more stationary. In 2002, I left that job and actually started working at the Ohio State Alumni Assocation. I loved it there, it was exciting, but I missed the legislature so I only stayed there a little over a year and I came back to the job that I'm currently in in 2003. I'm the office manager for the IT agency for the Ohio legislature."

Mason remained in the picture, however. While Mullins was checked out emotionally, the task of juggling her job and four kids couldn't be done alone.

"I started that job in 2003 and we were still together but I kept on telling him that I needed my space," she said. "He was completely hovering over me. It sounds really bad, but I needed his income at the time to maintain the house that I had bought and to take care of the four kids. I was physically in the relationship but not emotionally. I was trying to build myself until I thought I could do it on my own."

It was during this time that Mason's behavior became more aggressive, morphing from jealousy into stalking.

"Then he started hovering over me. I couldn't go anywhere by myself," she said. "When I started the new job, I did have some more time, and he started calling me at work 20 times per day, showing up at my job. Was just showing up in the middle of the day, bringing me lunch, when he knew I didn't really eat lunch or bringing me flowers when he knew I didn't really like flowers."

As uncomfortable as it was sometimes at her job, it was worse at home.

"He was essentially stalking me in my own house. My best friend lived in Nashville at the time and she and I would have long conversations on the phone and he would repeat back some of those conversations to me. There were times when I thought he was leaving for work but he was actually listening in on my conversations. I was living in my own little hell."

Dreading leaving work to go home each day, Mullins' relationship with her children began to decline.

"I started distancing myself from my kids at the time. He would use them to get closer to me, because we had to do "family things". I found myself coming home from work and I'd go into my room and stay there until he went to work since he was working third shift. My relationship with my older two children suffered during this time. The younger two were still very young, Derrius and Aliyah, but I'm sure they could sense the stress that I was under."

Once again Mason's behavior grew more aggressive. Emotional abuse turned physical.

"My girlfriend from Nashville was in town," Mullins recalled. "Me and her decided to go out for drinks. We were bar hopping and next thing I know, he shows up at one of the clubs that we were at with my cousin. While we were there we also ran into a former classmate so we exchanged numbers and everything and caught up. So we just danced for a while and got home and the four of us are sitting in our living room, reminiscing about the night and everything. My cell phone rings and I take the call out in the hallway. It was my classmate that we had just run into and he was calling to make sure that we got home alright. The phone call may have lasted 10 seconds. I hung up, set the phone back down and rejoined the conversation. Eventually my cousin leaves and my friend decided to stay the night so I set up the couch for her. Derrick had went on back to the bedroom.

"Once I walked into the bedroom, he just came at me. Hands around my throat and everything. I finally got my balance and it was like a WWF match. I can vaguely hear him yelling about some guy calling me at 3 in the morning. It spills out into the dining room and my friend hears it and wakes up, all of the children wake up. They called my Dad and my stepmom and then they called the police. The police show up, and I am the one that they put in handcuffs. I'm sitting in the back of the police car, still cuffed, and they bring my dad over to let him talk to me. My dad starts berating me about some man calling me at 3 in the morning. (Derrick) had taken my phone back into the bedroom and called the number and heard a man's voice, didn't even ask who it was. And that is why he came after me that night."

Usually the life of the party, Mullins began to re-evaluate her life. Being miserable most days, getting into fights in front of her children, this was not her.

"I scared myself because I never thought I could get to such a dark place," she said. "I have always been the person who got along with everyone. I really scared myself."

So in March 2005, the relationship ended for all intents and purposes and Mason moved back to Chicago where he was originally from to be close to his family. Mason's physical absence provided little relief, however.

"I had gave up my house and me and the kids had moved in with my mom," she said. "So I was feeling defeated."

Even from Chicago, Mason didn't stay out of the picture. Begging to be allowed to come watch the boys play football in the fall. Mullins went through the internal struggle of balancing her own well being with allowing her children to see their father.

"I finally let him start coming to see the boys play football," she said. "He was coming about every other weekend. My mom had got us all cell phones on her plan. He would come by mom's house and look at the bill to see the numbers that I was calling and he would start calling them. So my mom just started having her bill emailed to her."

Yet during this time, the two were still legally married and Mullins continued to reciprocate communication, and trouble kept finding her.

"I got a new car (minivan) and within a few weeks someone had spray painted all over it, 'stop f'ing messing with my man'," she said. "I remember thinking to myself, 'I'm not trying to take anyone's man, I'm trying to get rid of one'. I remember calling some of my friends and asking them if they have some crazy chick messing with my car and trying to find out who it was."

Then a couple of weeks later, the same van was mysteriously set on fire. At that point, Mullins moved in with her dad. Mullins, her four children, her father and step-mother and her younger brother and his wife and child, all sharing one roof.

In June of 2006, Mullins finally had Mason sign a legal separation agreement, though she did not file it. By August, she had once again acquired a new vehicle, a van to help drive her kids to and from football, and again it wasn't long before it was vandalized. This time, the word "bitch" written all over the car. A letter written and left under the windshield wiper.

"I opened it up, read it, folded it back and gave it back to my dad," she recalled. "I asked him if he could take the kids to school because I needed to go to the store to get something to take the writing off my new van. I had become an expert of cleaning things off my van at this point.

"When I got to work, my dad called me and said, 'you know who did this, don't you?' I said yeah daddy, it's Derrick. He's been doing this. I knew it was him because he left the letter at my dad's house and I hadn't told anyone about the move (from her mother's house to her father's). Just him and a friend from work who would sometimes follow me home to make sure I was OK."

So many second chances, so many times when she went against her instinct to keep him away, but this would prove to be the last straw.

"I finally told him it's time to file divorce papers," she said. "We've been separated for a year and a half now. It's just that time. So the next weekend he comes into town and he's begging and pleading with me. I told him that this marriage as it is is over. We can try and figure out how to get along, but I need you to stop coming down here. Then he pretty much gave himself up by saying, 'well, I hope nothing happens to this van'. I told him I was going to file the papers after my first paycheck in September."

After approximately a dozen years of emotional and physical abuse, things finally came to a head the night of September 10th, 2006. Mullins, still living with her father along with her children, would have her life changed drastically.

"I was doing laundry, watching TV, all of that stuff," she recalled. "I remember Derrick calling me, and I just told him that I needed to call him back. He had asked me if I was going out that night and I told him that I didn't know, I was just trying to get through this laundry."

Mullins' decision to stay home that night would end up being a costly one.

"I dozed off to sleep on the couch," she said. "I woke up and I couldn't see anything. I couldn't tell if I was dreaming or not because all I saw were these red and orange flashes. I got up and started moving and there was this one small step to step into the hallway and then into the kitchen. It wasn't until I hit that step that I realized, this is not a dream, and I started screaming."

Her two youngest children, Derrius and Aliyah, had a bed setup in the family room, they were there sleeping. Her oldest son Jahleel was in the front living room.

"Jahleel said he heard me scream the first time, but he thought I was screaming at the TV," she recalled. "It wasn't until I screamed the second time, that's when he saw the flames reflecting off the wall."

Mullins had been set on fire by her husband while she slept on the couch, their children sleeping just a few feet away.

"Jahleel pushed me through the hallway, out the front door, past my daughter, and rolled me around on the ground trying to get the flames out," she said. "He got the garden hose to try and put the rest of the flames out. (oldest daughter) Kiani is screaming. At this point my brother had run down the stairs and he was kneeling next to me. I could hear Kiani calling 9-1-1 and it wasn't until I heard her say, 'my mom is on fire' that I even realized what was going on."

About a week earlier, Mason had taken the locks off the window behind the seldom-used hot tub in the Florida room so that he could return later and sneak into the house.

"My hair was gone. My brother is kneeling next to me and he's crying and screaming and I remember seeing Jahleel run back into the house. I remember them putting a wet sheet on me, that was what 9-1-1 told them to do. I screamed at them to take it off of me because it was so painful. I remember seeing my sister-in-law bringing the kids out of the house because I had set little fires throughout the house from touching stuff, including the bed of where Derrius and Aliyah were sleeping. I had touched that bed, and it left a stain, I didn't set the mattress on fire."

The pain was unbearable, third degree burns over one-third of her body. Basically all of the skin that wasn't covered by the tank top she was wearing that evening was burned off her body.

"The last words that I remembered uttering to my brother was that I couldn't see," she said. "I blacked out before the paramedics ever got to me."

The fight for her life had begun.

"I flat-lined on the way to the hospital in the ambulance. I flat-lined again in the hospital on the way to the emergency room. They could smell the lighter fluid on me. No one could figure out how the fire had started, but everyone had also noticed that nothing else was damaged, not even the leather couch that I was sitting on."

Mullins would lay in the hospital in a coma for nearly a month and with poor odds of ultimately surviving the terrible burns she received.

"I was in a coma for 27 days, they induced me into that coma," she said. "When they brought me out of the coma, the investigators asked me if I remembered what happened. I thought I had set myself on fire. One of the last things I could remember was leaning up against a lamp and I thought maybe somehow the lamp caught my clothes on fire which in turn caught me on fire. That was my belief."

But the truth was much more horrifying.

"I wondered why everybody was in the room with me at this point," she said. "My mom and dad and step mom were there, the head nurse and my burn doctor and these two investigators were all there. I remember looking at their faces and telling them what I remember and everyone has this confused look on their face, so then the investigators tell me what happened. 'No, that's not what happened. You were set on fire and we're about to go arrest your husband for this'."

Out of her coma didn't mean out of the woods. Now it was time for surgeries, surgeries that she may not wake up from.

"That Thursday I had my first surgery and I got a really toxic infection that my nurse said only about five-percent survive," she said. "I flatlined again."

Once again, Mullins would beat the odds and pull through. She would ultimately go through 31 surgeries in the years that followed, six of them on her eyes. But it wasn't just the surgeries that she had survived. The days in which she laid in a coma were tenuous.

With one attempt on her life already, her family was concerned that Mason would return to finish the job. They hired private security and her father sat by her bedside in the days following the incident.

"Legally they couldn't keep him away from me because we were still married, he was my next of kin," she said. "So my dad filed a protection order that he had to stay away from my dad. So as long as my dad was near me, he couldn't be near me. And from there, everybody took shifts, so he was never alone with me."

Recovery was a painful process, both physically and emotionally. Simply taking a shower was like torture.

"The pain when I (a few years earlier) broke my leg was probably a 10," she said. "The burns were off the scale. I remember the first shower that they gave me. When that shower hit my back, I screamed and cussed out that nurse. I cussed him out so bad, I know he went down to the chapel to pray for my soul after that."

Simple tasks that we all take for granted were now a major struggle.

"I had to learn how to feed myself again," she said. "I lost the use of most of my left hand because I can't really bend my fingers."

Surgeons began reconstructing Mullins' face. It had to be nearly completely rebuilt.

"The only thing that is original is my chin," she said. "They had to create my upper lip. My ears are implants. I lost most of my hearing in my right ear. I can hear the bass in a song or I can tell if someone is talking but I can't understand the words."

Not only did doctors have to reconstruct Mullins physically, but she needed to build herself back up emotionally. Very noticeably scarred, it took a while to get the confidence back to go out in public.

"It was hard," she said. "I still get the stares. Kids grabbing on to their parents, not knowing what happened to me. Sometimes it bothers me."

Mullins would miss approximately two years of work during her struggle to recover. Her father and mother took the lead on many of the important tasks that come with raising children. But just as she was getting to the top of the mountain of her recovery, she took another tough hit.

"My dad passed away in February 2008," she said. "That was a huge blow for me. I found myself probably more angry at Derrick after my dad passed away. My dad had already had two strokes before all of this happened and I blamed myself for a long time that the stress of what happened to me was just too much. He was doing everything. Derrius and the other kids were always around him."

The loss was taken particularly hard by Derrius who had developed a special relationship with his grandfather, with football being one of the things they shared a passion for.

"Derrius and my dad were very close, my dad finally had his football player in Derrius," she said. "He used to say that Derrius was bred for it. From the moment Derrius was four, he told him to get in that three-point stance because he was never going to be a running back."

The only challenge for the prosecutors in Mullins' case, and it was a big one, was going to be the lack of an eyewitness.

"Since nobody had saw him do it, he acted like he was coming from Chicago to the hospital," Mullins recalled. "He actually called my oldest daughter right after it happened and she told him that 'mommy was on fire' so he acted like he was on his way from Chicago.

"It had all happened at about 11 PM on a Sunday night. He showed up at the hospital at about 6 AM the next morning. I got to the hospital after midnight so all of my records say September 11th so September 11th is kind of its own personal hell for my family."

But one person wasn't fooled.

"The moment (Mason) walked into the hospital room, my dad went after him," Mullins said. "My dad knew. But nobody else wanted to believe it was him. But my dad was the only one who knew from the jump that he had done it."

Mason's behavior in the days after was erratic and suspicious.

"After about a week, to avoid the police questioning, he checked himself into a psych unit at OSU," she said. "The police couldn't talk to him, but they could impound his car and they found all sorts of incriminating evidence in his car."

The family cell phone plan brought forth more damaging evidence to Mason's case.

"So the kids could be able to call him locally, I had given him Jahleel's phone that my mom had gave us," Mullins explained. "So he had a line on my mom's plan. So my mom was able to get permission to run her phone records because it was on her plan. From the phone records, it showed that when he called my daughter asking where I was (on the night of the crime), it showed that he was six minutes from a tower in Gahanna which was only about another six minutes to my dad's house, so he was right there in Columbus."

Mason spent the hours after setting Mullins on fire driving all over Central Ohio to make it appear as though he was racing from Chicago to see her at the hospital.

"They said he drove around I-270 (The Columbus outer belt) probably about 10 times, drove all the way out to Dayton, and then drove back (to make it look like he was coming from Chicago)," she said.

Not long after Mullins was brought out of her coma, Mason was arrested in Chicago. He had returned to Chicago to be close with his family after checking himself out of psychiatric care.

"After he checked himself out, he went back to Chicago with his parents. He was arrested about a month (after the incident)," she recalled. "But he never went back to work. His supervisor at work actually helped them arrest him, he called him and told him that he needed to come in to the store to fill out some paperwork since he's been off for so long. That is where they arrested him."

It wasn't long before the evidence became pretty overwhelming. But there still was no eyewitness in the case.

"There was a lot of damning circumstantial evidence," she said. "The phone records that placed him near my dad's house (on the night of the attack). The flask that he carried the lighter fluid in was his roommates. His roommate was military and very meticulous about where his stuff was so when they showed him a picture and asked him about it, he turned and realized it was not where he had left it. The receipts from Menard's (where Mason was working at the time) to show that he used his employee discount to buy everything. But nobody could put him in the house and of course I couldn't testify saying that I knew for sure that he did it. All it would have taken was one sympathetic juror and he could have got off."

So Mullins accepted a plea agreement that was offered to Mason. 18 years. Less than two decades for coming oh so close to murdering her.

"He got 18 years so he basically has eight left," she said. "I told people that I was OK with that. He was never looking at life, even though he got convicted of attempted murder, aggravated arson, and aggravated burglary. The most he was looking at was 32 years. The prosecutors told me that if we start with anything above 20 years, his lawyer is going to tell him to go with the jury and go with the trial. He could have got off with as little as three years for assault."

Mullins' experience both on juries and with a background in working in the legal field was a major factor in her decision to accept the plea.

"I didn't trust juries," she said. "I had been a jury foreman. I had jury duty twice and was the foreman on both cases. I didn't trust juries. It was also a he said/she said thing. Nobody saw him do it, I was asleep. Even though the house had 10 people in it, nobody saw him sneak in and out."

There was also the thought of her children having to go through a trial.

"Plus I didn't want to drag the kids into it," she said. "It was enough to have to go through everything with the investigation but I didn't want them to have to sit through a trial against their dad. As much as I tried to wish that he wasn't, he's still their dad."

It was the children's well being, or lack thereof, the night of the crime that still infuriates Mullins to this day.

"He showed no regard for the kids," she said. "He walked right past them when he set me on fire and right past them again when he walked out of the room. I could have hurt them, I could have set them on fire."

Mason has admitted to the crime and apologized to Mullins. There is currently no communication between Mason and the children, though that wasn't always the case early on in the prison sentence.

"He's apologized to me multiple times," she said. "I let him talk on the phone with Derrius and the kids maybe a couple of times about a year after it happened and I remember Derrius asking him, 'why did you burn my mommy?'. He was eight at the time."

Due to the circumstances of the last 20 years, most notably the night she was attacked and the aftermath of losing her own father, Miss Mullins takes on all possible roles as both a football mom and football dad. She drove Derrius all over the Midwest on recruiting visits, she sat down and helped evaluate everything about the schools that have recruited him.

From academics, to scheme fit, to personalities of the coaches recruiting him, to depth charts, everything is looked at. That research ultimately resulted in a summer commitment to Indiana University.

"She's been very important since the beginning of this recruiting process," Derrius said. "She takes me all around on the visits and she looks at my hudl film and looks at all of the schools that have offered me or have interest in me. She and my Uncle do everything for me, the things that I shouldn't have to worry about, they take care of that for me."

She also now coaches him in track as well, where Derrius is an all-area thrower.

"She was my coach in 7th and 8th grade for track and I thought I was finally not going to have her as my coach," Derrius joked. "Then after my sophomore year DeSales wanted her to come on as a coach."

Out on the track, it's a tough love approach. Mullins catches no breaks from his mother. In fact, quite the opposite.

"She might say she's not harder on me than the other kids, but she is," he said. "She thinks I'm supposed to lead by example. She's just on me a lot because she cares and wants the best for me."

Miss knows she isn't always easy on her son, but she views it as helping him accomplish the things that he has told her are important to him as an athlete.

"It is hard sometimes to turn off the coach mode and be mom," she said. "I'm not the cuddly type of mom. I'm always in that athlete frame of mind, but they know that everything I do and everything that I have done has been for their benefit. I have to remind all of my players that these are the dreams that you told me that you wanted, so it is my job to push you. So when Derrius doesn't want to get out there and run those laps, I tell him, 'you told me that you wanted to be a Division I football player, so get out there and run those laps'."

Derrius understands better than anyone where his mother is coming from. She is a constant reminder and source of motivation to him to grab every opportunity he is given.

"Because she got a second life, I don't take life for granted," he said. "Everyone knows that life is short and you have to try and live your life the way you want to live it. I wouldn't be here without her. I don't think I'd be as motivated to play football without her."

Miss Mullins isn't just a motivator on the field. The DeSales High School football staff asked her to speak at the staff/teacher retreat. She also does motivational speaking engagements.

"I try to talk to people about moving past tragedy," she said. "Part of moving past tragedy is finding what motivates you. That is what people lose sight of a lot of times when they are going through that storm. My kids are that motivation for me and with them being athletes, it was through them. Not just my kids either, other kids I've coached that I've thought about."

Miss Mullins is currently planning to author a book based on her experiences.