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A Fight to the Life
By Becky Beane|Published Date: October 09, 2009
Long before—and long after—his military service in Desert Storm, Dave Koliba warred against formidable enemies.
 Untrained and unguarded, he wasn’t prepared for the first ambush—sexual abuse at the age of nine by a teenage neighbor. Dave had slept over at a friend’s house after a day of swimming in the backyard. He didn’t know that enemies could come in the form of friends’ older brothers.
“I was so afraid, I didn’t say anything to anyone,” Dave recalls. Not to his friend—whom he still visited at times, just not for sleepovers. Not to his parents—who had adopted him as a baby and had raised him with a lot of love, albeit not much money, in Detroit. Not to his teachers—who expressed surprise when their normally shy and quiet student suddenly started to challenge them and get into other mischief.
“What’s the matter?” his perplexed parents asked him. “Why are you doing this?”
“I don’t know,” he answered, equally perplexed. His young brain couldn’t yet connect the dots between being molested and acting up.
The adults tried to figure it out: Dave went through medical testing, academic testing. Some thought he might have a learning disability. Others suggested he was “bored and understimulated.”
Dave and his friends hit puberty, and the sex jokes and name-calling started. Afraid he might be gay, Dave stumbled through sex with a girl when he was only 13 to prove he wasn’t.
And then, because he wanted to fit in with the kids in his new neighborhood of Warren, he joined them in “random acts of vandalism and breaking into homes,” he describes. In middle school he started selling and smoking marijuana.
One night, along with a friend, 14-year-old Dave stole his sleeping dad’s car for a joy ride that turned into a high-speed chase with the police. “They cornered us and got out of their car with guns pulled on us,” Dave remembers. “We were scared, but also laughing”—an effect of being high on marijuana. The amusement stopped, however, when Dave was sent to juvenile detention. “That was the first time I ever saw my dad cry. I felt horrible. I felt like, I can’t do this anymore. This is crazy.”
So Dave “straightened up” in his high school years, aided by a love of music. He sang in the school choir and played drums in the school jazz band, as well as in a band with his buddies. “My parents made our basement a safe haven for me, so I could have my friends over. That way I wasn’t getting in any trouble. We basically practiced five days a week and did shows on the weekends. Music was a big part of escaping from what I was doing before.”
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