Trevor
Trevor is sitting in a banquette by a window at the back of a Denny’s. He has chosen the very last table. His back is to the wall. He has short brown hair, newly buzz-cut, and neat facial hair that is more than “designer stubble” but less than a serious beard. His smile, when it comes, is tentative, like his face is just learning how to do this. His hands are resting on the table, motionless. There is a stillness about him, a mixture of purposeful self-containment, quiet alertness, and studied composure. He is in his early thirties, a millennial, but absent all the stereotypes of his generation. Coming of age in prison, behind bars since he was fourteen, he is not a product of a culture that is said to have forged the defining characteristic of his demographic: entitlement. For close to eighteen years of his life, his entitlement looked like this: He was entitled to a six-by-eight-foot cell and three chow hall meals a day—the proverbial “three hots and a cot.” He was entitled to a few hours of yard time. He was entitled to stand in line to make timed, monitored phone calls to family. He was entitled to see his mother during weekend visiting hours.
His generation is accused of being lazy. But Trevor, behind bars, became a paragon of self-motivation. Industrious, conscientious, tireless, he grew into a man who was both modest enough to learn from those who were wiser and self-confident enough to assume power when he earned it. I first met him when I came into the penitentiary to run the writing group. He didn’t join, but he was then-president of the inmate club that took on sponsorship of the group. He was interested, but not involved. We didn’t speak much until he was out. Trevor had, quite literally, worked his way out, embracing every opportunity to learn organizational and management skills, to learn how to plan and problem-solve and troubleshoot, to learn how to navigate hierarchies and mediate between groups with conflicting goals. His generation is accused of lacking aspirations. For almost two decades, most of them spent in an adult maximum security prison, Trevor lived a life that was all about aspiration.
But even before his crime, he lived a different life. It was in some ways bucolic, idyllic, even. He and his older brother grew up on fifty-two acres deep in the mountains of southern Oregon in a home built from the ground up by his mother and her second husband. They lived a peaceful backwoods life, off the grid with no television, no internet, a life that was equal parts survivalist, hippie, and good ol’ boy country. The boys were homeschooled. They helped with their parents’ antique business, traveling to swap meets and fairs. They did odd jobs for neighbors. They rode dirt bikes. In their tiny, isolated community they were known as good kids.
But there was a dark side to that life. Like many rural households, there were firearms in the house: rifles, shotguns, pistols. And there were drugs: the marijuana that the parents knew about—in fact, Trevor’s father had been convicted and had served time for a marijuana charge—the methamphetamines that they probably did not. There was also an undercurrent of criminality and the glorification of violence that Karen, Trevor’s mother, recognized only many years later. At the time, she thought their purposefully insular life was protecting the boys from the worst of popular culture. They were, as an Associated Press story about the crime put it, “seemingly sheltered against evil.” But in 1990s America, this was not possible. Investigating the crime, not really believing that these good kids could have done something so bad, local detectives searched the cabin on the property that the brothers shared and found these handwritten lyrics from a Marilyn Manson song: “Dealing with insanity, smoking pot, hating this fucking world, murder is the answer, I only kill to know I’m alive.”
After the crime, after years trying to make sense of the crime, Karen thought about the movies they took the boys to see when they all went into town for groceries, movies—like so many—that were plotted around violence in which the most popular and admired men were the ones doing the killing. And she remembered that her husband used to regale the boys with stories about his own criminal behavior, mysteriously leaving it up to them to imagine what he did.
But there was no making sense of this crime, no making sense of that day, July 26, 1998, when Trevor carjacked a sixty-five-year-old man at gunpoint, drove his Chevy Suburban down a remote logging road, and shot him in the head, “execution style,” as the media later reported. The victim was a beloved local businessman with deep roots in the community. The killer was a fourteen-year-old kid. He was tried as an adult and sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty years. His brother, eighteen at the time, who knew what happened but was not directly involved, was tried as an adult and sentenced to twenty-five years.
Now, at thirty-one, Trevor is newly free, the second juvenile lifer released under a “second look” state statute, legislation passed in 2015 that allowed people convicted as minors to have the chance to get out of jail after serving half their sentence. For Trevor that amounted to fifteen years.
He was, his lawyer and many others thought, a great candidate. He had spent his years in prison amassing an extraordinary record of education, rehabilitation, and accomplishment. He had worked his way into a top position at the prison’s biggest employer, a vast commercial laundry operation. He was the youngest elected president of the prison’s biggest and oldest inmate organization, the Lifers’ Unlimited Club. He was instrumental in the development and ongoing operation of the prison’s Inside-Out Program, part of a national education network that brought together college students and inmates in classes taught behind bars. His record in prison, his actions and interactions, his behavior, his affect—everything pointed to a man who had become sincere and trustworthy, measured and thoughtful, dependable and responsible. At his hearing, character witnesses lined up to testify on his behalf, including three university professors, two psychiatrists, and a correctional officer from the prison. One of the judges involved in the case called Trevor “a poster child for criminal rehabilitation.” Still his “second chance” release was contentious. The state had appealed an earlier release ruling and was planning to appeal this one too. His victim had been a fixture of that small community, and the people in the community were not about to forgive his murderer. They were not ready to believe that Trevor had transformed himself into a moral, ethical, law-abiding citizen, or that such a transformation should earn him a second chance. The long list of Trevor’s accomplishments in prison, all the testimonies on his behalf, could (and probably did) have the opposite effect on the people in the community. Here was a young man who was learning and growing and doing, who was—unlike his victim—alive. That, in itself, was unacceptable to many people in the community.
The story of his release carried on a community news site was headlined: “Walraven, cold-blooded killer, a free man.” When the local television station posted its story online, eighty-eight people took the time to respond, all but two of them harshly. “His victim didn’t get a second chance,” someone wrote. Others were more blunt: “He should be put to death”; “An eye for an eye.”
Forgiving is sometimes thought of as forgetting. Moving on is sometimes considered disrespectful to those who were harmed. And, in any case, rehabilitation is a hard sell. But the judge prevailed at that second hearing, and after spending not just half of his sentence but more than half of his life behind bars, Trevor was granted parole.
Sitting at the banquette in Denny’s, where we arranged to meet a month after his release, Trevor looks both embattled and hopeful. There is still the possibility of an appeal by the state, so he is being careful not to let freedom be too exhilarating. Yet it is exhilarating. Next to him, almost but not quite touching shoulders, is Loraine, a sweet-faced young woman several years his junior. She is a community college student studying psychology and criminology. For years she had been corresponding with imprisoned adults who were youths at the time of their offense. One of her correspondents was Trevor. The correspondence grew into a friendship. The friendship grew into something else. And now, as Tom Petty put it in a song released when Trevor was a seven-year-old, carefree, dirt bike–riding kid: “The future is wide open.”