Life After Murder

Just before midnight January 1, 2011, Jesse Reed calls my home phone. I’m out with friends, celebrating, and don’t see there’s a message until midday, January 1. He sounds happy, like his life is settling into a little bit of the dream he had inside: “This is going to be a great year! I just know it.”

The next time I hear Jesse’s voice, his hopeful, patched-together world has turned upside down. “I’m going through a lot. My mom is in the hospital,” Jesse says, his voice raw. “She’s really sick. I don’t know what’s going to happen. She’s my mom.”

I’m stunned, both to hear Jesse’s voice sound so low and to hear his mom has been hospitalized. I flash back quickly to the last time I saw her, only three months before. She looked pretty good for a woman in her late sixties. “What happened?”

“It’s been hell. I’m working all the time and trying to juggle everything. The doctor says she has stage-four liver cancer,” Jesse says, repeating, “She’s my mom.” He says it as though he can’t believe it, as though he’s trying to remind himself that it’s his mom this is happening to.

Early the following morning, a Sunday, I drive over the Bay Bridge to Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Berkeley. Jesse meets me at the elevator doors just down the hall from Lois Parks’s hospital room. “It’s bad,” he says, pulling back from a hug. “It all started three weeks ago. My mom was nauseous. At first she thought she’d had a heart attack. That’s when my sister noticed her blood sugar level had spiked to over five hundred. The doctor said to take her to the emergency room.”

Slowly I walk with Jesse down the hospital corridor. Standing in front of a large picture window, looking out on a hospital garden, Jesse is overwrought. “One thing led to another. They did some tests and found a number of blood clots and a mass on her liver. They gave her an MRI and decided to do a biopsy of her liver. In the process, they nicked an artery and that caused internal bleeding. They didn’t catch it right away, and she got increasingly sicker in her bed. She couldn’t breathe. They had to rush her back into surgery to close the artery, stop the bleeding. It looked like she was going to die right then and there!” Jesse says, his big shoulders slumped. “I mean, this is my mom. I don’t know what will happen to the family if anything happens to her.”

With the cancer diagnosis, the doctors needed someone to make decisions. No one in the family knew if she had a will or had signed a medical power of attorney. Maybe no one saw it coming, but now it was happening. Someone needed to step in, take charge, make life-and-death decisions.

Then word came: things were worse than anyone had thought. “Three days ago the doctors said my mom has stage-four cancer in her liver. They aren’t talking days or weeks,” Jesse says, “but months. The doctor told us he would be surprised if she was still around in a year. I was there with my sister Angie when they told my mom and she just yelled, ‘No! No! I’m going home!’ The doctors wanted to operate on the tumors but Mom is sure they’re wrong. She says she doesn’t have cancer. She doesn’t want anyone to do anything more. She believes God will take care of her. The doctors say without surgery or drugs, she won’t live more than three months.”

As I walk into the shared hospital room that for now Lois has all to herself, Jesse’s mom looks over and reaches her hands out to give me a hug. I’m not family, but to Lois Parks, family casts a wide net. There’s an intravenous line in the back of her hand to give her fluids and slow drips of morphine; a pale blue hospital gown is pulled across her broad black chest. Careful not to disrupt the lines and needles, I take a seat on the edge of her bed. She is wearing a nearly real-looking wig of shoulder-length straight black hair, the long bangs combed to the side. Her full, rose-colored lips are dry and chapped; her eyes are warm, drugged. Jesse stands at the foot of the high bed, staring at his mom. Jayvonce, his younger brother, is at his mother’s side, feeding her small bits of cold, overly peppered scrambled eggs. She tries to eat them but can’t swallow. A nurse comes in to sort things out, take Lois’s blood pressure, and adjust her pillows. Moving any part of her body causes her to wince in pain. To break the tension, Jesse and Jayvonce banter about the football game on the TV and the upcoming Super Bowl between the AFC Pittsburgh Steelers and the NFC Green Bay Packers.

A cousin and his wife pass the nurse on their way in and jump right into the conversation about football: “Jesse was powerful on the field,” his cousin says. “Every time he took another player out, he got another sticker on his helmet. They called him ‘the Assassin.’”

“Every game,” she says, her eyes fully open. “Home and away.” Looking at the television and coughing a little, Lois says she wants the Steelers to win the Super Bowl. Her two sons challenge her, calling for the Packers to win. It’s a safe topic in a room of fragile souls.

Lois is tired. Jesse walks me back out to my car. “You know, when I was inside and my dad died I knew I wouldn’t be able to take it if anything happened to my mom,” he says. “So here we are. I’ve had a year and a half to prepare for this moment. Now I’m ready to be the oldest son, the leader. I’m going to keep my family together. They’re a mess with alcohol and drugs, but I’m not going to let that destroy my family.”

But between work and family, Jesse is stretched to breaking. “Now I’m working five days of the week for IMPACT and that means every day driving to Stockton and Preston and five nights I have my cleaning jobs and I gotta come here for my mom. So it’s difficult. It’s very difficult, but I’m ready for what I need to do. If I weren’t here, if I were still inside, it would be chaos.”

True to her word, Lois refuses all treatment and goes home. It’s not that she wants to die. She loves life and all the power and trouble it has brought her along the way. It’s that she believes from the bottom of her God-loving soul that he will protect her and if the doctors are right, he will save her. After all, God answered her prayers and brought her eldest son, Jesse, home from prison. In time, she is sure, God will free her second son, Gregory. Yes. At home, where she is safe in God’s care, she will live free of cancer. It’s faith, pure faith.

From inside Lois’s bedroom, immediately to the right of the second-floor front door, I hear soft, soothing gospel music. Jesse gently pushes opens the half-closed hollow white door and stealthily peeks inside. It’s cool, dark. Only the most determined of winter morning rays reach through the worn, heavy dust-covered drapes that have been yanked closed, blocking out both the sun and any gasps of fresh air. On the wide, king-size hospital bed that fills the core of the room, the twenty-three-year-old granddaughter Lois adopted as her own daughter is curled up next to her full, dark body, fitting into Lois’s curves like a fetus outside the womb. Lois’s eyes are closed. It’s so still, so private that I want to turn and leave.

Out of nowhere, Jayvonce struts through the door carrying a plate of cold scrambled egg and broken bits of bacon. Moving in between Jesse and the edge of the bed, he pushes the food onto the teeth of a fork and holds it in front of Lois’s mouth. She shakes her head, then opens her mouth just enough for Jayvonce to force the fork between her thick, dry lips. She chews, coughs.

It’s all new, this power struggle. Jesse is the eldest son, but he was gone, locked up for more than twenty-four years. Since he has gotten out of prison on parole, he hasn’t had quite enough time to regain his position in this fractured family. As long as Lois stood tall, no one dared challenge her authority. But now that she’s injured, lying weak before them, the future of the family is blurry. No one knows whom to listen to, who is second in command. Even as they stand on either side of the bed, their mother struggling for her life, small skirmishes break out.

Standing outside the house a little later, Jesse says, “Things are rough with Lisa but I can’t come back here with Jayvonce living here. It’s too dangerous. He’s here every day. I’m just coming over in the morning before I go to Stockton to work, and then back at night. I can’t just drop everything to take care of this situation. I’m the only person in my family who owns a car. I get calls every day: ‘Jesse, can you come pick me up and take me to the store?’ ‘Jesse, I need to come see Momma. Can you come get me and the kids?’ It’s all day and night. I’m the only one. We don’t really know how long we have with my mom. I have to keep my jobs. Every day I go to Stockton and when I get back at ten, I still have to do my janitorial work until two or three in the morning. I’m so tired, but I just gotta keep going.”

Every afternoon I try to take my dog, Gigi, for an afternoon walk on the beach. One afternoon Phillip calls and asks to join me. It’s beautiful and breezy out as we traipse along the low tide of the bay, toward the Golden Gate Bridge. “I wanted to tell you,” Phillip says, “Desiree and I aren’t going to be living together anymore, and the engagement is off. But everything is fine. We are great friends, and we still see each other all the time. In fact, I was over last night for dinner. It’s just the way we live is real different.”

We walk and talk, stopping every once in a while to throw my dog a hard stick. Phillip says they gave themselves a few months to really be sure this is what they wanted and in the end, it was. “I’m renting an apartment near my work. I like it. It’s not exactly what I want. It doesn’t have a garage, but I’ll get that eventually. For now this is fine.”

“Phillip is an absolutely incredible human being,” Desiree tells me awhile later, “in terms of his level of integrity and respect. One of the most respectful and kindhearted people I have ever met, and I’ve met a lot of people. It wasn’t for a lack of character substance or self-control or any kind of lingering sort of problematic behavior that we broke up. It was more a question of pacing. After so many years of being taken out of the work, out of society, out of life, living in an isolated subculture, he has a sense of ‘I don’t want to miss another moment of living.’ So Phillip lives with a lot of intensity. He doesn’t want to waste any time. And frankly, the pace with which he was moving exceeded my capacity to keep up.”

I wonder if there’s something she isn’t telling me about Phillip. I’ve known him for three years, have spent hours and hours with him in all sorts of environments, but is it possible there’s something I haven’t detected? Maybe I shouldn’t, but I have to ask her. “I have to examine every doubt,” I tell Desiree. “You chose to be in a relationship with someone who committed murder twenty years ago. Are you ever afraid that part of him might put your life in danger?”

“Never,” Desiree says. “Never, and I can say that with unequivocal certainty. He is one of the people I trust most in my life. We’ve had disagreements, and we’ve had, like every other couple, fights and never, never did I think, ‘Oh my God, he could hurt me right now.’ Never did I feel any aggressive energy towards me. This man has truly done his work. He would never hurt me and I know this. And you know something, because he did the classes, and did the psychological and emotional work around it and really looked at everything that happened, and because of his high level of awareness around it, he’s a very safe guy to be around.”

There is a sadness that follows these men. It isn’t mysterious, just inevitable, that after being incarcerated for so many years, they want to live every minute and that desire can make having and keeping a relationship with someone who hasn’t had that experience difficult.

Bobby Brown. Tall with a short crop of wiry black hair that eventually was shaved to bald. He was one of the first lifers I met inside San Quentin, in that little room across the hall from the chapel. He was also Jesse Reed’s former cell mate.

Like people do when they hear some tragedy, I search my mind for a memory of Bobby. It settles on the day the board found him suitable for parole. It seemed the whole prison celebrated his pending freedom. But before his file even got to the governor’s desk for a likely reversal, the state authorities determined Bobby didn’t have a safe enough place to live on the outside and they reversed his parole. His south central Los Angeles family, long plagued by drug and alcohol addiction, had been either unable or unwilling to offer him a safe place to live on the outside, a key condition of parole. Bobby was devastated by the reversal. The next time he went before the Board of Parole Hearings, Johanna Hoffman was by his side. But even her legal representation wasn’t enough to get another parole date. “This time,” Hoffman says, “I couldn’t even get his sister to return my calls.” He was denied parole and told he would have to wait three years before he would be eligible for another parole hearing.

When I get through, Lieutenant Sam Robinson tells me he doesn’t know how or why Bobby Brown died. “There’s going to be a coroner’s inquest. I’ll let you know when I get the report. We’re planning a memorial service. Do you want to come in for it?”

“I have to go inside Q for Bobby’s service,” I tell him, “but I’ll come straight over after I get out. At least your mom got to see you on the outside, free. Can you imagine how you would feel if you were still locked up and you lost your mom? You had time together.”

The San Quentin Protestant chapel is packed to overflowing. Men in blue are sitting in chairs and wandering in the lobby outside, unable to sit still. It’s hard to say good-bye. One of the ushers hands me a program. The memorial isn’t just for Bobby Brown. It seems two other lifers have died in custody in the past couple of weeks and instead of holding three separate memorial services, the prison has lumped them all together, family members from the outside filling the first five rows of chairs in the front of the church.

Volunteers from the outside and inmates line up together along the far wall each patiently waiting their turn to offer condolences and tell stories about the three men who have died. To people on the outside, they might have been convicted murderers, but on the inside, these were men with friends and family who loved them. When I tell some of the lifers standing at the back of the sanctuary that Jesse’s mom passed away, there are gasps and sighs. “Tell him we’re with him.” But of course, they can’t be with him.

By the time I leave San Quentin for the twenty-five-minute drive to Jesse’s house, it’s a drizzly, gray kind of gloom. It’s a day of death and memory, lives lost and hope extinguished. I park my car on a side street and walk the half a block, slowly.

At the Parks house, things are chaotic. If there was a thread tying together this troubled family of brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, grandbabies and nieces, Lois’s death has set it unraveling. Women and soaked, bewildered children sit disheveled at the curb in cars patched together with duct tape, their doors half open. Men and boys wander inside the yard in the rain, separate. Jayvonce stands on the bottom of the stairs calling out his bottomless anguish in slurred, too-quick words, unopened bills in his mother’s name clutched in his fists, symbols of his power in a world that is disappearing around him. Standing at the top of the steps, Jesse is watching the scene below. Catching my eye, he waves me up.

“They just took her away,” he says, opening the screen door. Inside family elders dressed in their Sunday best sit on the edge of the couch, holding the hands and rubbing the shoulders of a family looking for someone to soothe the dull emptiness filling the room. One of the women lifts her outstretched hands in the air and sings, calling for God to heal the family that has lost its mother. It’s this family’s first hours of the first day without their mother, and forever is just beginning.

Inside the kitchen, where dirty dishes are piled high and packaged goods are stuffed in the corners, someone has placed a large aluminum pan of cooked chicken, a grocery store sweet potato pie, and a big plastic bowl of ambrosia fruit salad on the sticky counter.

There are things to be done, decisions to be made, but not today. Today is reserved for surviving grief. Like a spiraling vortex, loss swirls around the edges of the living room threatening to suck down everyone standing too close to the center, too far, too fast. Jesse stands to the side, holding back, watching the world he dreamed about and longed for inside prison collapsing.

Days later, with his mother’s body waiting to be buried, someone has to take charge. “There isn’t a will,” Jesse says over the phone. “We don’t know what she wanted to do with the house. Mom told me awhile back she wanted me to have the house, but no one can find a will. The house is such a mess, even if there was one it could be covered up, or hidden under a mattress. But there’s no money. There are bills that haven’t been paid. I don’t think she paid some for the past few months. We have to keep paying the mortgage to keep the house. I went to the mortuary and luckily, my father bought his plot and a plot for her, so we don’t have to pay for that. But the funeral with the casket and flowers and limousines is going to cost about $8,000. The church is donating $500, but we have to raise the rest and I don’t know how we’re going to do it.”

Jesse and I meet at Mama’s in Oakland for breakfast. He looks spent, drained. “Jayvonce is out of control. He’s high all the time. I have to be careful. He’s threatened by me. He told everyone he wanted me to come home, to help share the burden of the family, but now that I’m out, he doesn’t want me around. He hasn’t really worked in years and has been living at my mom’s. Now that world is over. A neighbor gave him $200 for the funeral and he took some of it and bought beer.”

Staring back at me, his face steadying, his eyes turning steely, he says, “You know, inside I learned how to think. And that’s what I’m going to do. When things get to be too much, I know how to step back, take a breath. Sometimes that’s all you need to do is create a little space, take time to get a little perspective so you don’t make a stupid move. I know what that is. I take breaths all the time. That’s the difference. I used to just react. Now I take the time to take breaths. This is hard. Getting my family through the funeral and dealing with the house is going to take time. Right now that’s all I’ve got.”

Walking toward the address Jesse gave me for the Miraculous Word Christian Center, the site of his mother’s funeral service, I wonder if I got the address wrong. Boarded-up, graffiti-scarred buildings and industrial storage facilities, surrounded by razor wire–topped chain-link fence, bookend the block. Not much of a church environment. But halfway down the long block, a hearse is parked outside a white, double-wide commercial-looking building. Could that be the “church”? Approaching, I step inside a small crowd of men and women dressed in purple: purple shirts, hats, dresses, shoes. Opening the back of the hearse, pallbearers dressed in dark purple rented tuxes and light purple shirts pull the white coffin out onto a dolly and push it through the church’s double doors.

Walking into the sanctuary, the only white person, I look for somewhere to sit where I won’t be noticed. Every single chair on the family side and friend side of the aisle is taken. Sam Robinson Sr. is standing at the back of the church, watching. He reaches into the sound booth, grabs a plastic chair, plops it midway down the aisle on the friend side, and points to me. It’s a small world.

Midway through the wrenching, wailing service, Jesse rises from his chair in the front row. Taking the microphone, he sings “Heaven on My Mind” to his mother: “I’ll admit there have been times where I’ve faltered along the way, but I’ll keep trying ’cause somehow I’ve gotta make it. You see, I’ve got a charge on my life and I’ve got a job to do and I can’t stop until it’s through.”

Shortly afterward, things begin to fall apart. The fire department is called. One of Jesse’s sisters has fainted and needs to go to the hospital. Outside the church, Jesse’s brother Jayvonce refuses to get in the family limousine. A kind uncle takes control of the sideshow, escorting Jayvonce down the sidewalk away from the cars lining up for the funeral procession. I watch to see how’s Jesse’s doing—not well.

Later, up at the hilltop grave site, next to the pile of dirt that will cover Lois’s casket deep in the earth, Sam Robinson Sr. stands beside Jesse in the rain. “Let us pray,” Robinson calls out to the few family members who have left their cars to say a final farewell. “The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want. . . .”

When it’s all over, after his mother has been lowered into her grave and the last of the day’s prayers have been said, Jesse turns away from the gaping hole in the ground. There, standing behind him, are Demetrius Daniels and Jerry Elster, two lifers he knew on the inside who have come to support him in his hour of need on the outside. His mother is gone. The men who know what he has done, where he has been, and how hard this all is, are there. Jesse is not alone.

Lifer reunions happen all the time. There are large backyard picnics with wives and girlfriends, children and their children all invited to join the brotherhood of men who survived prison. And there are small get-togethers, the daily car pool to Stockton for the IMPACT program, meet-ups at speaking engagements, and phone calls. “It was kind of taboo inside,” Eddie Ramirez says, “to talk in the line, on the tiers. You were setting yourself up for people overhearing. If you wanted to talk to someone you trusted, not really to get answers, often just to vent, to find a commonality you would say, ‘Hey, wanna take a lap?’ And we would take a lap on the yard, walk around the track. Talk things through. I got a call from a good friend I knew on the inside who got out, and he was having a tough time. He said, ‘Got time to take a lap?’ We took a lap and we cried, bounced stuff off. I told him, ‘We’ve been through a journey and you’re here. Tomorrow will be better.’ Sometimes we go camping or out for a day of fishing; it’s taking a lap and having people you know and trust to talk things through with.”

One of these reunions ends up coalescing around the second memorial planned for Bobby Brown. Unlike the memorial inside, this one is on the outside for the lifers and volunteers who weren’t allowed to go inside San Quentin to pay their respects.

Up at the Russian River, writing, it has been storming. The winds and rain have left behind strewn wreckage. Driving around the wild litter, down rural roads slippery with mud slides and through one-store towns, I finally reach the freeway, emerging as if from a cave. Retreats can be like that.

To get to the church, an hour and a half south, a Google map leads me past San Quentin State Prison. It has been four years since the day I met Bobby Brown, Don Cronk, Bryan Smith, and a half dozen other lifers inside that little room across from the prison sanctuary. It has been four years since I began my quest to find out what really happens to people who commit murder, decades after their crime. Moments, inside and out, flash before my eyes like film images clicking across the shutter of a projector.

First Don, then Eddie and Richie, Phillip and Jesse. There are others, but these five men took me into their lives, inside San Quentin and out. I discovered a healthy mix of trouble and fun, love and heartbreak, hope realized and dreams broken. They are men who committed horrible crimes. They did their time, reformed their thinking, fundamentally changed their behavior, and were found suitable for parole but remained locked up, living in nine-by-six-foot cells. Eventually they were given a second chance. Now they are out, their wisdom and insight lost on all but a very few in a society too afraid to witness it, see it, learn from it.

Passing by the last exit to San Quentin and heading up over the Richmond–San Rafael Bridge, I gasp a private breath. I am driving past what remains a secret, isolated, walled-off community of more than 5,000 people in the middle of one of the most liberally minded, eco-friendly, justice-oriented counties in the United States. Looking down from their million-dollar houses on the hills or glancing at the prison from the freeways that skirt three sides of the massive institution, what questions pass through the minds of the free?

Do they wonder who is in there? What is it like? Is prison effective ? Is locking ’em up and throwing away the key making free people safe? Is this an effective answer to crime and punishment? Or is it a punishment born of social ignorance?

How many people on the freeway with me this Sunday morning look at San Quentin and wonder what’s going on behind the thick sand-colored walls? Or is it a big yellow “black site” in the middle of our democratic world? A place and a people to be haphazardly legislated, paid for out of taxpayers’ increasingly shallow pockets, and ignored?

Reaching the far side of the bridge, I follow the map and park my car across the street from the redbrick, white-steepled church high on a hill in Point Richmond. Walking up the uneven sidewalk, I see Jesse standing up the street, beyond the church. He has the biggest smile I’ve ever seen on his face—which comes as a surprise after the hard time he has been going through.

“Nancy,” he says with a laugh, “I went on a retreat of my own to Stinson Beach. I rented a small hotel room for two nights. It was raining. I walked on the beach in the rain and I sat on the sand in the rain. I cried for my mother. I walked and walked. I was soaked. I just kept walking. It felt so good. I’ve never done that before. But it’s what I needed.”

Inside the sunlit chapel, a woman is sitting at a dark wood grand piano just to the right of a podium. The classical music she’s playing fills the intimate sanctuary. Like half of the people scattered throughout the pews, she met Bobby Brown volunteering inside San Quentin. The other half are men who, like Bobby, committed a murder. Now, decades of guilt, sorrow, self-forgiveness, and acceptance later, they have changed. Unlike Bobby and the 775 prisoners serving life sentences with the possibility of parole who from 2000 to 2009 died waiting for the state to let them out, the men in the chapel this morning are the lucky ones. They got out of prison by governor orders or by order of a court judge. Now out in the free world, their debt to society paid, they are doing what it takes to survive and thrive.

They find someone willing to give them a job and do everything they can to keep it. They fall in love and do their best to keep that love alive while they negotiate the ups and downs of a long-term commitment without the references most middle-aged men have to years of short-term dating. Some break up. A few have children. Others share the lessons they’ve learned with other people’s children, the ones who need to hear what they’ve learned.

When former lifers get together, no longer wearing prison blues, they stand out, distinct from one another. They talk North Block shop, about their still-incarcerated friends on the inside, always the first topic of conversation: who has a date and who has been denied; who is waiting for the governor to decide, or worse, who has had their parole date “taken.”

Standing on the sidewalk outside the chapel, one of the men lifts his cell phone and shoots a few photos. Later someone will print them to send to the lifers inside, so they can post them on the chapel window, the faces of the lifers outside.