Fighting Time

Summary

The evening of April 12, 1979, was clear and warm. Unaware of the danger lurking on the periphery of the French Quarter, doctors Ronald Banks and John Hakola made a tragic decision–to walk the few blocks from the historic district to the Hyatt Regency.

Inches from the safety of their hotel entrance, they were accosted by two young men. A scuffle ensued, a shot was fired, and Dr. Banks lay dead on the sidewalk. Fighting Time tells the story of what happened next, hours, days, weeks, and years after those horrible seconds.

Isaac Knapper, a sixteen-year-old boy from a nearby housing project, was wrongfully convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole in the Louisiana State Penitentiary, Angola.

As the time passed, Amy Banks, Dr. Banks’s middle daughter and now a psychiatrist and trauma specialist, realized it was time to unpack her own family trauma. When Isaac was exonerated and released from prison, Amy traveled to New Orleans to meet the man wrongfully convicted of killing their father.

Fighting Time, the powerful true story of two families whose lives became entangled in a moment of trauma, is told with empathy, vulnerability, and grace.