He turned his life around — until Harvey
Joseph Dowell desperately struggled to get to work early two Sundays ago.
The 48-year-old did not want to let down the people who a couple of months earlier had helped him land a job with the Houston Public Works Department.
Dowell drove to work around 1 a.m. Aug. 27, but many homes and streets already were flooding across the Houston area from the downpour caused by Harvey.
In the storm, he hit high water on Wayside Drive and urgently called his supervisor.
“Man, OK, be careful,” Jesse Eleby warned him.
No one knows what Dowell did next. But on Thursday, authorities confirmed his body has been found in a wooded area in the 3500 block of North Wayside Drive.
“This is the not the outcome we were looking for, but we’re grateful we can finally start our healing process,” the family said in a statement on Thursday.
As Eleby and Dowell spoke over the phone, the supervisor urged Dowell to pull over at a nearby Whataburger and said he would try to pick Dowell up when the rain eased.
“I’m too close,” Dowell said. “I’m going to try to walk.”
That was the last time Eleby heard from him.
Gwen Bossett got a sinking feeling as she repeatedly tried to reach Dowell every day since the storm hit but got no answer.
It was out of character for him, she said. She knew him well after serving as his counselor for an innovative re-entry program called Freedom Project at the Harris County Jail.
She watched as he transformed from a guy using and selling drugs to someone who couldn’t wait to get to his construction job with the city.
In a crisis like the storm, Bossett said, “He would be checking on everybody.”
Starting over
Before his body was located, Dowell’s vehicle was found, abandoned and flooded, off North Wayside Drive and Texarkana, a few miles from his job.
After they realized the outgoing and longtime Houstonian was missing, they checked jails and shelters, printed missing flyers and posted updates on Facebook, but they had no idea what happened to Dowell.
“How (we) wish he could’ve enjoyed this new found life he had begun just a little longer but God saw different,” stated the family.
His fate stings for friends and family because he was starting over.
He graduated in May from the re-entry program sponsored by the city’s health department for those recently released from jail. Through the program, he landed his job with the city.
Dowell had been in and out of jail for more than 20 years, but last October he was given a fresh start.
He was facing up to life in prison for drug possession, but Judge Marc Carter granted him five years’ probation.
His light sentence had a lot to do with the time he spent inside the Freedom Project learning from Bossett and other leaders at the county jail.
“These ladies had faith in me when I didn’t have faith in myself,” he said at his graduation.
‘Trying to get to work’
In the Freedom Project, he learned to deal with the anger and bitterness he felt toward his own parents for being addicted to drugs. He spent part of his childhood cycling in and out of Child Protective Services, where he was abused mentally, physically and emotionally.
He also coped with the death of his 6-year-old son, Jamal, who was killed in a drive-by shooting while Dowell was in prison.
The past 10 months he’d spent out of jail hadn’t been easy because of his wife Yolanda’s sudden death in January from a brain aneurysm. But he was pushing through. He was going to work. He was trying to provide for his family, including his sister and father. He was staying off drugs.
“He’s been through so much and accomplished so much for it to be just over that fast,” Lataisha Campbell, his former girlfriend, said Wednesday. “He didn’t get to really reap the benefits of the happiness he was experiencing.”
Bossett had been with Dowell since the beginning, rooting and cheering for him as he experienced highs and lows, so she deeply feels the pain of his passing.
“I miss y’all but I’m glad to be on this side,” he had told her in a recent text message.
Even with the bad news, Bossett finds some hope. The guy who started out addicted to drugs was attempting to do one thing on Sunday.
“He was trying to get to work,” she said. “That’s the greatest thing we could hear.”