Amos Decker's Hyperthymesia Syndrome

The structure of one’s brain is routed from birth. Traumatic events may cause the routing of the brain to alter or change completely. Amos Decker was a professional football player for the Cleveland Browns for one play. During this play he was running down the field to tackle the kick returner when Dwayne LeCroix blindsided him. Decker died twice on that football field during the opening game. When he awoke in a hospital the next day, his brain had been completely rewired. He now suffers from Hyperthymesia Syndrome. Hyperthymesia is the condition of possessing an superior autobiographical memory. The disease affected many aspects of his life negatively, but it did give a magnificent advantage at taking tests for the police academy and later

The next tragic event occurs at Mansfield High School, where eight people are viciously murdered using a shotgun and .45 pistol. These two traumatic events foreshadow the rest of the tale. A transsexual is gang raped, beaten, and left for dead in a high school dumpster. A cop, assistant principle, football coach, and four football players are the males who raped her. After this event she was sent to a rehabilitation center in Chicago to help her understand how to cope with hyperthymesia. Decker was sent to the same rehabilitation center as the young transsexual. During their stay at the center, group counseling meetings were held to help rebuild social skills. Decker explained that his goals in life were to become a cop. “I wanted to become a cop because I wanted to help people. Not hurt them like Evers did you” (320). The killings involved the exact same weapon in order to draw a connection between all the murders connecting to Decker. After the forensic team identified the matching bullets, other messages were revealed in different locations. The messages were cleverly designed for Decker to solve the case. Once he solved the case it would lead him right to the serial killers and maybe his own death. The technique of foreshadowing allowed the reader to become curious about how to clues could be perceived, thus keeping the story