Sunday, January 14, 2001
Brother says he once wondered if youth
minister disappeared on purpose
SAN ANTONIO (AP) — Nearly 17 years ago, as George Cox looked
for clues along a West Texas country road where his brother's
abandoned and ransacked car was found, he wondered if Church of
Christ youth minister Wesley Barrett “Barre” Cox had
vanished on purpose.
It appeared that Cox, then 31, had met up with foul play. But
there were things bothering his brother, said Cox, a girls basketball
coach in Frankston, a town of about 1,200 people in the piney
woods of East Texas.
“I thought maybe he had snapped,” Cox said.
“He and Beth had just had a baby six months earlier. His
folks had pressured him into getting a doctorate, which he didn't
really want to do. They'd just moved to San Antonio, he'd just
started a new job. It was a textbook case,” the brother told
the San Antonio Express-News.
Barre Cox, now known as James Simmons, has become the focus of
intense media scrutiny again, after being recognized last month
while preaching at White Rock Community Church, a predominantly
gay church in Dallas, where he was auditioning for the vacant
job of pastor.
He has since spoken with his wife and daughter by telephone five
times and on Jan. 1 was reunited with his mother and brother in
Frankston. He told them he suffers from amnesia after being beaten
unconscious and left for dead and remembers nothing prior to waking
up in a hospital bed in Memphis, Tenn., in late July 1984.
He said he was found beaten and comatose in the trunk of a car
in a Memphis wrecking yard.
Memphis police said they have been unable to find any record of
a man comatose in a Memphis hospital and awakening with a rare
form of amnesia.
Since 1984, Cox has been going under the name of James Simmons.
In a copyright story, the Express News reported that his name,
birthdate and Social Security number are the same as those of
a rancher in the Texas Panhandle town of Clarendon. Cox grew up
in Canyon, about 100 miles north of Lubbock and 50 miles west
of Clarendon.
The real James Simmons, who goes by the name of “Jem,”
told the Express-News that the IRS audited him in 1987 and 1989
and that he got calls from the FBI. He said he was told to put
a notice in his credit file explaining that someone was using
his Social Security number.
Cox said he was given a new Social Security number about 10 years
ago after he submitted his fingerprints to the FBI and told his
story of amnesia.
It was July 12, 1984, that authorities were called after Cox's
car was found with several windows knocked out, about 7:30 p.m.,
on Farm Road 1661 about 31/2 miles north of the Tuxedo community,
40 miles northwest of Abilene.
The night before, Cox had called his wife in San Antonio, saying
he would be leaving Lubbock after attending church and would drive
to Abilene, then on to San Antonio the next day
At 3:45 a.m. on July 12, Cox walked up to an Allsup's convenience
store in Rotan, about 100 miles southeast of Lubbock and off the
route one would normally take to go from Lubbock to Abilene. He
had run out of gas about two miles out of Rotan on State Highway
92.
Rotan police Officer Floyd Bankston drove Cox back to his stranded
car with a can of gasoline, and Cox then returned to Rotan to
fill his car up. Bankston said he last saw Cox driving east toward
Hamlin.
The car was found about 35 miles farther east, its front and rear
windshields broken out and the keys inside the locked trunk. Cox's
wallet was nearby with its remains scattered about. But a motorbike
that Bankston saw in the truck was not there. Clothes that Cox
packed for his trip were intact in the back seat.
Authorities said they feared foul play, but in the days after
Cox's disappearance, reports began to surface that he had been
seen on a motorbike in small towns to the north — in Electra,
Crowell, Vernon.
After a week, Texas Ranger Sid Merchant said: “My best intuition
is he's alive. He's hidden because he wants to be.”
Eventually Cox was declared dead and his marriage was dissolved.
Officials at the Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary, just
across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco, said the man
they knew as James Simmons freely acknowledged that he didn't
know his past when he applied in 1991 for admission.
William O. Crews, president of the Southern Baptist institution,
said Simmons was elected student body president, and the seminary
made him its director of housing and later director of student
life. He worked as a chaplain at a hospital, where he did AIDS
counseling, and was a pastoral intern at a nearby Baptist church.
His brother says now that he's seen his brother again, he believes
his story, unconditionally. He is aware, he said, of the skepticism
by some about his brother's story of being beaten unconscious,
left for dead, awakening without his memory, and finally acquiring
a new life don't matter.
All those questions don't matter, he said.
“I don't think my brother has a deceitful bone in his body,”
George Cox told the Abilene Reporter-News.
“My mother, she now has a wonderful peace of mind, knowing
her son is alive. It's really awesome. I spent 16 years thinking
I would someday see him in an airport or shopping mall. He still
has that same gregarious personality that people like to be around,”
the brother said.
“If I had died on that New Year's Day he came back into our
lives, it would have taken the undertaker two years to wipe the
smile off my face, I was so happy.”
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Copyright ©2001, Abilene
Reporter-News / Texnews / E.W. Scripps. Publications
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