His Karate Instructor Had Been Molesting Him — So His Dad Killed the Man on Live TV

In the fall of 1982, fifth-grader Jody Plauché was attending Mayfair Elementary School in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he and his classmates were handed a flier for karate lessons. Uninterested, Jody tossed his in the trash.

But his younger brother, Mike, brought his copy home. Their mother, June, signed up all three of her boys—Mike, Jody, and their oldest brother Bubba—for classes starting in January 1983 with a new instructor named Jeff Doucet.

“We all loved him,” Jody, now 53, tells PEOPLE. “Jeff became almost part of the family.”

Doucet quickly ingrained himself into their lives, even joining family game nights. But behind closed doors, he began grooming Jody for abuse—something that began subtly during stretches in karate class.

“He’d say, ‘Here, let me help you,’ and he’d start touching my inner thighs,” Jody recalls. “Not my private parts, but close. He was normalizing it.”

The abuse escalated quickly. Doucet would send the other kids out on snack runs, using that time alone with Jody to molest him.

“He’d give them money and say, ‘Go grab a Coke and some M&M’s,’” Jody says. “That gave him 10 or 15 minutes to do what he wanted.”

Despite the trauma, Jody says he kept the abuse secret. “I figured if I just stayed quiet, eventually he’d stop. I didn’t want to upset my parents.”

But in March 1984, everything changed.

Doucet kidnapped Jody and took him across the country to California under the pretense of visiting Disneyland. The FBI located them in a motel room in Anaheim. Jody was watching TV when agents stormed in.

“All of a sudden, there were guns in my face,” he recalls. “They pulled me out of the room. That was the last time I saw Jeff.”

A week later, Doucet was extradited to Baton Rouge to face charges of kidnapping and sexual assault. But before he could make it to court, Jody’s father Gary—armed with a hidden .38-caliber revolver—was waiting at the airport.

He called a friend from a payphone and said, “You’re going to hear it.” Then, as TV cameras rolled, Gary turned and fired a single shot at Doucet’s head.

Asked by police why he did it, Gary replied: “If he’d done that to your family, you would’ve done the same thing.”

Jody’s mother June later visited her husband in jail. “You know you’re going to hell, right?” she told him. “He said yeah… but he didn’t care.”

Gary was charged with second-degree murder, but a judge later accepted a manslaughter plea. He received five years of probation and 300 hours of community service, which he spent mowing lawns and painting at a local Catholic school.

“My dad got lucky,” Jody says.

For a time, Jody was angry. “I gave him the cold shoulder for a couple months,” he admits. But slowly, they reconciled.

“One day, walking to the pool, I told him, ‘I forgive you. I’m not mad at you anymore. I understand why you did it.’ I think that meant a lot to him.”

Gary died in 2014 after suffering a series of strokes. Though the two never spoke much about the shooting again, Jody says he’s come to peace with it.

Today, he’s an advocate for abuse survivors and author of Why, Gary, Why?, his 2019 memoir detailing his experience. His message to others: healing is possible, and your past does not define you.

To those who suspect a child is being abused, he urges action—and empathy. “Abusers don’t just hurt kids—they manipulate them into silence by gaining their love and trust. I didn’t want Jeff dead. I just wanted him to stop.”

If you or someone you know has been a victim of text “STRENGTH” to the Crisis Text Line at 741-741 to be connected to a certified crisis counselor.