by Leo Sullivan
Shots rang out and I heard a body drop. I screamed, clutching on to the bed sheets for dear life. My heart was beating madly, and my baby started to stir. As I held my breath, time seemed to stall like infinity. Forever waiting…
Then, I heard one of the gunmen start to speak.
“What? I had to shoot him. His big ass took that gun and then slung ol’ boy out there like a fuckin rag doll.”
My heart sank like a ship with a giant hole in the bottom.
The man then added, “You good in there, Daze?”
“Nigga, da fuck you callin’ my gotdamn name for? You stupid ass, muthafucka!” I heard the gunman in the room with me say. Horror seized my entire body.
I knew the name. Daze was street dude, a rival that had been warring with the John Doe Boys for years back before King got locked up. In fact, King had killed one of Daze’s men in the parking lot near the strip club, Magic City. They had a heated argument inside that spilled out onto the streets. Eventually guns were drawn, and King prevailed.
My breath caught in my lungs when I heard the sound of footfalls coming back down the hall toward me.
“Lord help me, please…” I continued to pray.
“Man, my bad. That big ass nigga tried us. I had to put a cap in his head, slump his ass. I shot Caesar too. He still alive, but not for long from the way that nigga leakin’.”
“Shut up, nigga, so we can get da fuck outta here. Go put this in the duffle-bag.”
I listened intently to the exchange.
The second man asked Daze, “And what you finna do?”
When I heard his reply, it made chills crawl down my spine.
“I’m finna have some fun with her. She’s King’s old bitch.”
“But ain’t she pregnant?” the first guy retorted. Daze made a grunting sound as if to say he didn’t care either way.
I tried to rise. “No, please no!” I protested and was violently shoved back down.
“Fuck outta here, man! Go tie both them other niggas up. I’ll be out in a minute, you stupid muthafucka!” Daze said.
I heard the sound of feet walking away and I began to resist again when Daze touched me. My heart beat fast in my chest. I felt his hand nudge at the boxer shorts that I was wearing. Beneath them, my panties were soaking wet. I had peed on myself earlier.
Unmoved by that, Daze began to pull and tug on my panties, trying to get them down. I continued to squirm.
“No, please don’t,” I objected and grabbed at his hand.
WHAM!
He struck me in the jaw with his fist so hard that I felt it crack. My head snapped back and all I saw were white spots and stars. Instantly, blood spew from my mouth. There was so much, I nearly choked on it.
“Bitch, shut da fuck up! See what the fuck you made me do? I ruined my shoes with all yo’ fuckin’ blood drippin’ on me.” He scoffed evilly like the devil. I was dazed, disorientated and riveting with pain.
Daze tore my clothes off and I closed my eyes and beginning again to pray to God that He would have mercy on my soul and protect my unborn baby. I began to lose consciousness, willing it in order to block out the madness. I would always remember the hurt, the pain and I would never forget his name.
Daze.
Once he finished his assault, I was ushered out the room at gunpoint still naked from the waist down. So much blood continued to spew from my mouth which was aching to the point that I wondered if I should welcome death as a gift. I didn’t know it, but my jaw was broken in two places.
What kind of animals would do this?
I would never forget the expression on Caesar’s face when he looked up from the carpet and saw me. There was a puddle of blood, sanguine red all around him. He had been tied with his hands behind his back, lying face down on the carpet. Next to him was Kirk; he had a hole in his face the size of a fist. The entire back of his head was blown off, leaving only matter and gory brains and blood sprayed across the room and walls. It looked like an animal had been slaughtered. On his other side was Saz who, remarkably, was still alive, gasping his breaths and groaning from the pain of his gunshot womb.
There was so much blood.
“Sunday?”
Caesar called my name in a way that I had never heard him say it before. His voice echoed with melancholy as if we were both in a dream state—no—a horrific nightmare. He looked at me with his sorrows showing in his eyes.
“Caesar, I’m so sorry…” I began sob.
“Shut the fuck up!” one of the gunmen, that I hadn’t noticed before, barked.
I was forced to my knees as the rancid stench of blood and death rushed through my nostrils. The baby started kicking wildly again and the pain was unbearable. It made me double over, wincing in agony.
“Oh God, it hurts!” I cried out, grabbing my stomach.
At the time, I didn’t know I was having contractions and about to go into labor.
What really let me know my life was doomed was when I looked over at the gunman who had shouted at me and saw that he had his mask off. He was light-skinned and a thick beard with green eyes enclosed by long lashes like a girl. In my heart, I knew there was no way they were going to let me live after seeing their faces.
“What you got your mask off for?” Daze asked him.
“The big ass nigga pulled it off when he took my gun. That nigga was strong as a muthafucka, too.”
“Damn right! Damn near broke my arm when he threw us across the room,” the other gunman chimed in as he rubbed his arm.
“Tie this bitch up, pour gas on ‘em all and shoot them. Then we need to roll out,” Daze gave orders that forged a lump in my throat.
I gasped and turned to Caesar who was going in and out of consciousness. He was in bad condition, lying in a puddle of blood. From the loo of it, he wasn’t going to make it. He was dying.
Neither am I, I thought, devastated.
“I left the gasoline in the van,” the guy with the mask off said, gesturing with his hands.
“Fuck you mean ‘you left it’? I handed it to you and told you to bring it!” Daze shot back.
“Yeah, nigga, but I was already carryin’ the duffle bag, the shotgun and two pistols,” he retorted.
To my surprise, the two began to argue back and forth as the other guy looked on incredulously. Neither of them was paying us any attention.
“Fuck it! Just shoot ‘em in the head so we can bail outta here,” Daze commanded.
“Noooo, please, don’t,” I began to plead and beg for my life. “I won’t tell anyone. I promise, I swear to God—”
Before I could finish my sentence, I was violently slung to the floor. Luckily, I was able to use my hand to partially save my fall, but I still came down on my stomach. Excruciating pain racked my body and, just then, with strength I didn’t know Caesar had, he rose from the floor, on one knee, wobbly and managed to push the guy nearest to him.
“Fuck you slam her on the floor for?” he shouted as blood spewed from his chest. His eyes flickered with terror and strength.
The gunman hit him with the butt of his .9mm, pistol-whipping him mercifully. I saw a tooth carom across the carpet as Caesar fell down, balling up into a fetal position, using his arms to ward off the blows.
“Y’all need to leave us the fuck alone!” Saz suddenly said as he awoke with deep cut spewing bleed from the side of his forehead.
He furtively reached toward his side where his gun was stashed. Before he was able to get it, Daze snatched him by the collar and took out a large bowing hunting knife. My eyes widened as I watched him move with quick precision and slice Saz’s neck from ear-to-ear. Blood squirted nearly two feet high from his neck and sprayed the room.
I screamed to the top of my lungs clutching my chest. Caesar’s entire face was wet with Saz’s blood and it looked like he was going into shock from the sight of the young boy being killed right before his eyes. Saz’s body shivered in convulsions as I screamed out for dear life.
Then he suddenly stoppe
d moving.
He was dead.
“Tie the other two up, shoot ‘em and let’s get the fuck outta here. Like I fuckin’ said before, we moving too slow!” Daze ordered again like he was frustrated and in a hurry. One of the gunmen moved quickly, securing all of our wrists with zip-ties, even Kirk’s, though I knew he was dead.
“But… Daze, she pregnant,” the green-eyed man said tentatively.
“I’on give a fuck! You shoot them or I’m shooting yo’ ass. You walkin’ round here without yo’ mask on, fuck you think they gon’ say if the police come?”
That was enough to convince him.
BLOCKA!
He shot Kirk, just to make sure he was dead, and then the other gunmen walked over to Caesar as the green-eyed one came toward me with his gun in his hands. I couldn’t look at him. I closed my eyes and began to pray for my son.
“Man… Do I gotta do it? I mean, man, she pregnant. Can’t you just slit her neck like you did the other one? I really don’t—”
“Dumb ass, nigga, that is worse! How ‘bout I slit yo’ fuckin’ throat? Now kill them and meet us outside. You know what King wanted us to do and I know you don’t want it gettin’ back to him that you ain’t follow his orders. Make sure that gay ass nigga over there gets to watch you do it before you bust a cap in his ass, too.”
The guy didn’t respond. I looked up at him and saw that his hands were trembling. In his eyes, I could tell that he didn’t want to harm me, but he was stuck battling between his duty and his morality.
“Nooo,” I heard Caesar yell as arms flailed.
The gunman walked over, aimed the gun at him and fired. Instantly, Caesar went limp as the bullet struck him in the chest. Next, he walked over and stood over me. That was when we both heard a police siren. I saw him flinch and slightly turn.
“Please don’t kill me. My baby, I’m pregnant,” I pleaded.
“Shut up! I gotta do this,” he said, but I could tell his heart really wasn’t into it as he held the gun over me. The barrel looked like the size of a cannon as I looked up and then saw him sneer at me like he finally had the guts to pull the trigger.
All I could do then was close my eyes like my mama had taught me and pray some more.
“Lord, I will fear no evil for thou art with me. Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me...”
BLOCKA!
4
Florence Federal Correctional Penitentiary, Supermax. Death Row
King
* * *
I worked out in silence doing push-ups on the concrete cell floor as my anxiety got the best of me. Normally, I would do a thousand but this day I did double. With nothing else on my hands, all I had was time.
I had been away for nearly three years in prison and, after countless appeals being turned down, finally, I had a victory. An appellate court judge had made ruling in my favor. It was a partial ruling, but it was hope, which was better than what I had. At the time, I was serving a sentence of death plus forty years for a triple homicide, a crime I had not committed and truth be told murder charges were most always picked up by the state the charge were committed in but because I was said the be the ringleader for one of the biggest organization in the United States, The John Doe Boys, the Federal Government picked up my state case and charged me with the RICO Act, it’s the Racketeering Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act. a federal law design to combat organized crime.
Presently to date, there were over 30,000 members of The John Doe Boys, not even counting in other states due to social media the organization grow to astronomical numbers in the millions there is power in numbers, so I became America’s threat.
To make matters worse, I was serving out my sentence in a supermax facility on death row. This was America’s most infamous and secure prison. You don’t get to be a prisoner at ADX-Florence Colorado without having a measure of incredible violence in your case. Name a convicted terrorist, a foreign or domestic killer or a convicted organized gang leader and there is a strong likelihood they are right with me, serving eons of time without the possibility of parole in a eleven by nine feet box also known as a cell.
Larry Hoover, Terry Nicols, Ramzi Yousef, and Eric Rudolph are just a few high-profile felons that ended up here to do their time. In my opinion, they were lucky. At least they were sentenced with time. I my sentence carried death.
I was sent straight to the D-wing, death row. I lived out my life on borrowed time. I was sort of a celebrity on the row. The good thing was, I would receive tons of mail from all over the United States. The prison had to have someone just to read through all the thousands of letters I would receive. My status as a very rich and powerful gang leader infuriated the guards, plus there was the fact that my crew were suspected for the murders of police officers who had killed innocent Black men and women in cold blood for something simple as a routine traffic stop.
My two hood orphans, Bulletproof and Dolo, who I’d raised since they were around seven years old, were working to get me back on the streets. Both of their moms were addicted to drugs and they actually lived in the streets, homeless, at that age. Though I’d tried to get them in school, their moms and other family continued to call them back in the streets with their lifestyle so, eventually, I had to accept them for what they were: a product of their environment.
Between the two of them, with me as a mentor, they managed to organize the hood in a way that had never been done and brought a lot of young brothers and sisters in the hood together in unity. They rallied them under one common goal by starting businesses like ‘Hit Records Entertainment’, a very successful record label and several restaurants and nightclubs. They were also into real estate; they had bought up a lot of the eyesore abandoned homes in the neighborhood, remodeled them, and then sold them.
The only sore spot was when a white cop brutalized a pregnant Black woman over an illegal traffic stop. She refused to get out of her car because she felt the stop was illegal and didn’t warrant her to be searched. She was six months pregnant and the video went viral of the cop body-slamming her and kicking her in the face. In the end, the cop was found not guilty. Days later, the officer was discovered murdered in his patrol car with a note attached to his forehead that read:
Every time you harm one of ours, we killing one of yours. It was signed: JDB
There were also more instances where it was alleged that The John Doe Boys were suspected in killings in retaliation of other injustices, the violence of police brutality.
I was locked up twenty-three hours out of the day in an iron box with no human contact. The rule was that inmates couldn’t communicate with each other and that went for the outside world, too. On the daily, I fought to keep my sanity like a championship boxer. Each day was a new round.
With a population of less than one percent of blacks working at the prison, it was a cesspool for racist white men with a personal agenda against Black men like myself. I had been in physical altercations on more than one occasion but because I kept in shape, I managed to protect myself. However, there was one time when I nearly got my ass whooped.
The correctional officers tried to jump on me when I was being escorted to the recreation part of the prison while I was being handcuffed. A C.O. stole on me and I managed to break his jaw, but they did end up roughing me up pretty bad. It’s amazing what you can do with a head-butt and other perfectly timed maneuvers designed for self-defense.
Last one hundred, King. Let’s go. Keep ya mind right. It’s almost time for you to be done with this shit.
Once again, for what seemed like the umpteenth time, I thought about what had happened to bring me to this point. I had been convicted of four grisly, tragic homicides. One of the victims was a four-year-old girl. Two confidential informants testified against me, sealing my fate. One of them was my sister’s boyfriend, Andre Forte. It was a complete lie; however, it did earn him a reduced sentence for a drug charge.
As for my sister, Nikki, l loved her and supported her even after her man And
re turned snitch and agreed to testify against me in return for a lighter sentence. At the time, he was facing a drug and weapon charge, carrying a forty-year sentence. After his testimony where he lied and said he saw me coming out the victim’s apartment on the morning of the triple homicide killings, he was released, and I found out later the Feds had paid him $50,000 for his testimony against me.
There were three other guys currently serving life sentences with me because of Andre jumping on their cases with his lies. I had made a solemn oath if I ever got out of prison, off death row, I was going to kill him, but Bulletproof and Dolo got to him before I had the chance. I was sure that Nikki had to know by now that my team was behind his murder. I couldn’t help but wonder if she would forgive me.
Even with all of the things that happened, the worse of all was that my ex-fiancée, Sunday Kennedy, the love of my life, had got caught up in all the madness. I had sent her to pick up some money from one of my homies and when she got there, strangely, the front door was open.
According to her, when she walked in, the place was a shamble with overthrown chairs, furniture askew. It was in the living room that she discovered the bodies. Tony Span and his girl, Renee, were regular people in their 30s, high school sweethearts with a four-year-old child, Aaliyah. She was adorable and she was also my goddaughter. Just like her parents, she had been shot in the head and bound by duct tape, with her throat slashed.
The moment I got the call from Sunday, I was in Colombia, the cocaine capital of the world, parlaying a shipment of coke so big that we had to weigh it all on a scale you normally use for whales. I had scored over a hundred million dollars’ worth of product with the connect, Santiago, who claimed to be a relative of Pablo Escobar’s grandson. I was illegally in the country with a fake passport and I.D.; there was nothing I could do when I got the call from Sunday but instruct her to get the money and get the fuck out of there!
I’ll never forget that day. It was like yesterday when Sunday called with the devastating news. I tried to do everything in my power to keep her calm, even though I wasn’t. Tonie Span and his family were like my own family, like blood. We grew up together, stayed in the same building in the 4th Ward of Atlanta but Tonie never ran the streets, sold drugs or got into trouble. He was a good athlete, had a scholarship to play football. He hurt his leg a week after finding out that Renee was pregnant with the baby and dropped out of school to find a job. I was moving major weight by then, so I paid him two grand a month to allow me to stash money at his house. He was the only one I could trust other than my sister and my mom.