Law Man: My Story of Robbing Banks, Winning Supreme Court Cases, and Finding Redemption

by Hopwood, Shon

  Although I had been out for a few months, I was still in the precarious waters of my new life. I had been fortunate to secure a great job, given that so many others at the halfway house were sitting there day after day, unable to find one. There was one guy in particular who begged the staff to drive him to a job interview, because he had no family or friends to do it. They said no. He never found a job.

  The halfway house staff said I needed to obtain a bank account so I could have my wages direct deposited. Then, after payday, I could pay them the 25 percent of my gross earnings—the amount they charged everyone.

  So I drove to a bank in downtown Omaha and was met by a young bank manager in a pink-and-blue polka-dot tie. He asked for a picture ID and Social Security card, which I gave him. He ran the numbers through the computer.

  “We have a problem,” he said.

  “What’s that?”

  “The credit agency says you are deceased. Is this the correct Social Security number?”

  “Yes.”

  He ran the number again. I could tell he was starting not to believe me—especially after he asked if I had an account elsewhere and I said no. Who has no bank account? He called the Social Security office, who said that according to their file I was alive. That was a relief.

  “Is there something missing?” he said. “I don’t understand why the credit bureau says you’re deceased.”

  So I told him I had just been released from federal prison after serving a decade-long sentence.

  He started punching more keys on the computer. Probably letting security know so they can escort me out, I thought.

  I was becoming frustrated, because I didn’t know that credit agencies run everything these days. I had a valid ID and Social Security number. Wasn’t that enough?

  He kept glancing over at me while he was typing information into his computer.

  “You can ask me if you want to,” I said.

  “So what did you do?”

  I looked around to make sure no one else would hear us, because I didn’t want someone to hear the word “robbery” and press an alarm.

  “I robbed five banks.”

  “No way.” He looked around and then whispered, “How much did you get?” Maybe he didn’t like the bank’s retirement plan or something; for one reason or another, he seemed suddenly delighted to meet me.

  I left with no bank account that day. It took me weeks to straighten out the credit agencies. Then I walked back into the bank and was greeted by my friend, the young banker. This can be such a funny planet.

  Annie was miserable in Malibu. She didn’t like working at the treatment program and decided to part ways and find something else in the area. I wanted her to come back, but she said she liked California, liked her little apartment, and liked the independence. I think she liked the isolation.

  Her depression worsened, and I was worried to the point where I considered contacting her father. Instead I tried to just lighten things up.

  I called her one day and told her to play three songs in a row that I knew she had on her iPod. While she played the songs, I sent her a series of texts telling our story together, including passages from notes we had sent to each other. Maybe it was a lame romantic gesture, but she called afterward and thanked me for it anyway. It was the best I could do, given I was a broke former prisoner living in a decrepit halfway house. Legally, I couldn’t leave the state to go cheer her up.

  She came home for the Christmas holiday. My family gathered at my sister Samantha’s tiny apartment in Omaha. It was a tight squeeze for the twelve of us, but Annie fit perfectly with my family.

  The next evening we went to Aromas, our favorite coffee joint. It was our chance to be quiet together. For a long while we didn’t say a word. She just turned her paper coffee cup around and around and looked at the room, out the window, at me, smiled, and looked around some more.

  “I’m going to move home,” she finally said.

  “And?”

  “And I think we should find a place together. I want to be with you.”

  I have asked Annie many times what had helped her turn the corner. And, much like her answer to why she wrote that initial letter to me, she never has a definitive reply. Part of her reluctance had come from the fear that she would love me too much and I would hurt her. Or that if we moved in together, I would see all her imperfections. I had the same fears.

  I think no one thought we would succeed, not even our families.

  Annie and I met with her father, Ray, at Panera Bread to break the news that we were moving in together. I felt bad for Ray. If I had been in his place, I probably would have punched me.

  We told him. Actually, I told him, since Annie was more nervous than I was. He started stuttering: “Okay, ah-hum, ah-hum,” but he took it better than I would have. He had seen this worst-case scenario hovering over his daughter for eight years now and had steeled himself for the possibility. While he didn’t know me, he did know my family, especially Mom, and he knew my dedication to Annie. I had to hope that was enough for now.

  “I want you to know that no one will love your daughter like I will,” I said outside while we were moving Annie’s airport luggage from my car to his.

  Ray is all midwestern courtesy. “I appreciate that, Shon,” he said, and he shook my hand.

  I was officially released from Bureau of Prisons custody on April 9, 2009, which meant I could leave the halfway house and move into the apartment Annie and I had rented. I opened the door to my new home and she was sitting in a corner wearing pajamas, tilting her head and smiling in a welcoming way.

  In the weeks following, I borrowed an engagement ring from Annie’s sister, Angie. I had waited long enough. I had let Annie think that a proposal was months, if not years, away. I created the subterfuge because if I couldn’t afford to make the proposal grand, the least I could do was to make it a surprise.

  We went to the Whole Foods Market near our apartment and hit the salad bar, as we often did. We took our food to the seating area. There was one table alone near the window that looked unusual. It had a tablecloth, a bouquet of pink roses, wineglasses, and elegant dinnerware.

  “Let’s sit there,” I said. Annie was a little off balance. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s for us.”

  She looked down and saw the card on the table: RESERVED FOR SHON HOPWOOD.

  A group of ladies who worked there, who had conspired to set up the table for me, watched from a distance.

  Annie started fanning her face with both hands.

  “While you haven’t earned a marriage proposal, you have earned a nice dinner.”

  Her smile was replaced with something else. We sat down.

  Once she relaxed a little and was no longer expecting a marriage proposal, I went down on one knee. I asked her to marry me.

  She said yes.

  I hoped the worst part of returning to society was over. I had steady income at a job I enjoyed and was engaged to the one person I felt destined to be with. I thought I could glide for a couple of months and settle into this new world. I was wrong.

  Annie and I had never planned on having children. We even questioned the sanity of people who were “trying”—as if purposely having children was a sign of insanity. After years of battling anorexia, doctors had warned Annie that her chances of conceiving were not good. And I was fresh out of prison so the responsibility of a child was not on the agenda. But three weeks into our new life, I arrived home to Annie’s ashen face; she was pregnant.

  This was not supposed to happen. We had waited all these years to be together and now a child was crashing the party.

  Annie called Ray about the new development, just as she had after the engagement. I was worried he would stop answering our phone calls. His support, however, remained steadfast.

  In the weeks ahead, Annie suffered through days and nights of sickness. She lost weight, a lot of it, and our friend and baby doctor, Mark Carlson, considered hospitalizing her. She was supposed to be gai
ning weight now, but she was shriveling before my eyes.

  Annie’s health wasn’t our only concern. I had been out of custody for all of a month. I had nothing. Annie had been working part-time and trying to finish her internship, but she was too sick to continue either.

  “We are short on bills again,” Annie said. “I can pull some more out of savings if we need it.”

  I shook my head. “That’s your money.”

  “It’s our money, and if we need it we’ll use it.”

  One income was barely paying the bills for two people, let alone three.

  Annie and I decided to attend marriage counseling with Marty Barnhart, the former pastor of my family’s church, and he agreed to meet with us regularly.

  The first thing Marty demanded of us was that we sleep in separate bedrooms until we were married. I laughed, but he was serious.

  Annie’s dad was quick to help. We asked him if he would bring a spare bed to our Omaha apartment, and it seemed as if he was there in the next hour. So we made that happen.

  After all, you’ve got to have some rules in this life.

  Marty explained what it means to live a life together with God as our focus. Usually when someone mentioned God or spirituality, my mind would be off to whatever sporting event was nearest on the calendar. But this time I listened. Marty said that I could be forgiven for everything. “Yeah, even you, Shon,” he said.

  On the car ride home, Annie and I discussed what Marty had said.

  “What did you think?” I asked.

  “I have never heard anyone talk about having a relationship with God. It is … I don’t know.”

  “Me, either.”

  That night in bed I thought about it. I could no longer pretend all my good fortune came from chance, from some random action of the universe. Had I landed in the law library by accident? Then there were the Supreme Court petitions that had been granted—they were the equivalent of winning the legal lottery, and there was the fact that it had happened twice. Had I met Seth and Noah by accident? How about finding Cockle in downtown Omaha? And surviving prison? And Annie. How had all that happened? Surely I was not that lucky. And certainly it had nothing to do with merit.

  I also couldn’t escape the feeling, the intuition, that we are more than flesh and bones. And that this life is not the whole show. If that is true, I wondered what my priorities should be.

  I just couldn’t rationalize myself away from God any longer. To be honest, it was never that I didn’t believe; I just didn’t want to follow. I wanted to do things my way. But that attitude was not going to help my wife, it would not help my child, and it sure wouldn’t prepare me for whatever was to come in the next life.

  The more I thought about it, the more I realized I needed Jesus. I needed a ground for the electrical current of a society telling me that getting my own way, doing everything for myself, and trying to appear important are the keys to true happiness. It was the same happiness I had chased while robbing banks. To put it differently, I needed a baseline structure—much like the Constitution acts for our government—that would guide my life.

  I knew I believed in God, and I knew that His purpose was for me to help people through the law. It felt like my personal rehabilitation required Jesus and my professional rehabilitation required service.

  If you think about it, God and service go together very well.

  And so I made it official. I prayed, and I prayed, and I worried what my future wife would think. But then I prayed some more and felt peace with my decision.

  Annie and I argued about it that night. She was concerned that I had taken a leap off the Jesus cliff and was going to make her jump, too. She believed that the guilt and fears instilled in her by the religion of her childhood had contributed to her anorexia. She didn’t want any more of it.

  But she accepted the idea that it was the right move for me. It was a gradual process. In time, she wanted it for herself.

  We decided that we would organize our life around love and service. We went to visit Hater’s father in a retirement home; Annie set it up. She was moved when the old guy’s eyes welled up as I talked about his son and his legal battle. On the most important things, Annie and I were as one. So we had that in common right from the start, and everything else grew with time.

  I had been working at Cockle for nine months when it was time to send out the wedding invitations. My workspace at Cockle is an open office, surrounded by hardworking women who excel at their jobs.

  One afternoon I swiveled around and announced we had set the date for the wedding, and I needed their addresses for the invitations, because they all had to come.

  Tiffany, who bears the burden of sitting next to me every day, cheered, but it was Sandy who was first to write down her address.

  “Here you are, Shon.” She paused. “But I just want you to know that we really have nothing much of value in our home.”

  There was an awkward silence. Mary Anne was the first to crack up, then Tiffany, then the room erupted.

  I once heard my father joke that it’s hard to get Hopwood men all the way to the altar. That proved prescient for me. Two days before our wedding one of my teeth broke down to the gum, and the soft root was exposed. Annie took me to the emergency dentist and they extracted what was left. I was given some pain pills.

  I woke up late on the morning of the wedding. The side of my face was throbbing. Without thinking, I gulped down a few of the pain pills along with the usual nerve medication for my back. Bad idea.

  Twenty minutes later I was all pins and needles and sweating profusely.

  “You all right” Brett asked. He was at the apartment to babysit me until the wedding.

  I staggered around the apartment. I drank some water and immediately vomited.

  “Wake me up in thirty minutes.”

  Three hours before the ceremony, I was taking a cold shower, slapping myself awake.

  I later learned, through a Google search, that the two medications I had taken should never be mixed. I was experiencing an overdose.

  Annie intuitively felt that something was wrong and she called me. I didn’t answer. When I felt slightly better I called her back and told her what was happening.

  “Do you need to go to the hospital?” she asked.

  “No, I’ll live,” I said with one arm on the wall holding myself up.

  “Are we getting married today?” she whispered.

  “I will be there, that’s a promise.”

  “It’s okay, you know,” she said. “If you need to go, you should go.”

  “I will see you in an hour.”

  It took all of my energy to put on the tux. But by the time I reached the wedding site, the overdose was wearing off.

  We were married on the steamiest day of the year. Brett and Brook, John Fellers, and Tom stood with me as my best men, and to catch me if I fell.

  Tom had made the long trip from Phoenix, where he runs a business and is raising his son.

  “Thanks for making the trip, brother,” I said, wrapping my arm around his head.

  “I wouldn’t miss it. Is Ann really going to go through with this? With you?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  Tom and I had not been together since 1999, when we were in a county jail for a few weeks after sentencing. Things had come full circle for us. We were both out of prison, both defying the statistics of recidivism, both Christians, and soon we would both be in the parenting business. And we are still pals today just like we have been since sixth grade.

  When Annie first appeared in her wedding dress the people gathered for the ceremony gave a collective sigh. She walked down the aisle with her father, Ray. He smiled, we hugged, and then he handed his daughter to me.

  “I love the way you became reacquainted again,” Marty said; he was presiding at the service. “You began by writing letters, then visits, then more visits, time spent together—when you couldn’t wait for the day that you had talked about, this day. It would be real
ly consummated by you, Shon, when you gave Annie a ring and said, ‘Will you marry me?’ and she said, ‘I will, yes,’ and so happy that she did. I can remember you guys saying it was worth it, worth the wait.”

  Marty finished with a slogan that basically summed up the new life we planned together: “Love is a lifestyle.”

  That will always remain the happiest day of my life.

  The fall months saw new clothes, an expanding waistline, and nervousness about being a parent. And that was just me!

  About a week after the wedding, Dr. Carlson told us that we would be having a boy. We celebrated that night and picked a name. I had promised my dad that if I ever had a son, I would name him Mark, after him. We also took Annie’s dad’s name, making it Mark Raymond Hopwood.

  My mom cried when I called and told her the name. There would be another Mark Hopwood in the world, and that was worth a few tears.

  Annie was due on January 7, but she and Dr. Carlson believed the baby would come early.

  One of the worst blizzards in Omaha’s history hit on Christmas Eve, and it kept us from driving back to David City to meet with the family. The interstate was closed, and most of the city was shut down. We enjoyed a quiet dinner at home and we sat on the couch in our pajamas talking and watching the snow fall in sheets.

  A few hours after dinner, Annie said she felt “weird.”

  “What’s new?” I said.

  “No, seriously,” she said. “I feel very strange.”

  Ask any man who has lived with a pregnant woman and he’ll tell you the situation was probably not cause for alarm. Throughout the pregnancy Annie had not felt well. Of course she felt weird; she was carrying a small alien inside her.

  But Annie was right. Three minutes before midnight her water broke. An hour later I was driving us through six inches of snow and ice in a little Toyota Corolla. We were the only car moving through the white fog of blowing snow and city lights. We made it to the hospital—barely.