Uncaged

by Frank Shamrock

  So now I was a drunk and a wife beater. When I got home, everyone was gone. Christy had packed her things and taken off. I called Christy’s mom and drove over to Christy’s parents’ house. It was all dark, but I pounded on the door until her dad came out. He said, “I don’t know where she is.” I went home thinking she’d be there when I got back, or that she’d change her mind. She didn’t. Her parents told me she wasn’t coming back. I begged to see her, and after a few days they finally agreed to meet me in a park.

  It didn’t go too well. They all showed up—Christy’s father, her mother, and at least two of the seven kids in the family. Her father told me I was a drug addict and a criminal and not fit to be married to his daughter. We started yelling at each other. He attacked me and tore my shirt. I fought back. Her mother jumped in. Everyone was screaming and beating on me. Finally they got into the car and drove away. That was it for my marriage. Not long after that, I got a court order telling me I had to start making child support payments. I wasn’t even divorced!

  That was the beginning of a real downward slide. With Christy gone, the brakes came off. I had no reason to be responsible. I had no reason not to be a real criminal. I started really drinking and really taking drugs, full time, with no regard for the consequences. What difference did it make?

  While I was married, when I lived in the camps, and when I lived with Bob, there was usually a limit to how much I drank. I always had to be somewhere, or do something, that kept a kind of lid on my drinking. I might go out and get drunk, but that didn’t happen every day. Now it was every day. There was no reason to remain sober or to control myself in any way. I was also smoking weed, and I started using huge amounts of crystal meth. In those days it was called “speed” or “crank,” and I was snorting or smoking at least $100 a day worth of it.

  I needed a lot of money, so I committed a lot of crimes. After Christy moved out and took the baby, that’s what I did with my time. Sometimes I had an accomplice, sometimes I worked alone. The jobs were always my idea, my plan. We went out every night and committed “jobs”; this was my new line of work.

  For a few months I stole everything I could get my hands on that wasn’t bolted down. The idea was to steal stuff and sell it. So we’d break into houses and vacation rental homes and steal stereos and cassette players. I thought electronics would be worth all kinds of money, but they weren’t. I could hardly sell most of the stuff we stole. I wasn’t a very good criminal. So I cranked it up. I started robbing businesses. I broke into an auto-body repair shop and stole some cameras. I broke into a pizza place and stole a VCR and a radio, plus some beer and some pizza sauce. I broke into a storage facility and stole some tools. I robbed a gas station, where I stole $200 from the owner’s checkbook and a mini-cassette tape recorder. I snuck into the golf course across from Shamrock Boys Ranch and stole some money. I tried to break into the cash register in a restaurant, but all I got was a Makita drill. I broke into a florist shop and got away with some coffee mugs, some ceramic vases, some imported cheese samplers, and a roll of dimes.

  Some of the crimes I must have committed while I was blacked out from drinking and smoking. I don’t remember the incidents at all. And I wasn’t wearing gloves, which meant I left fingerprints everywhere, which suggests I didn’t really know what I was doing. Besides, I stole pizza sauce and imported cheese samplers; I had to be high. What kind of idiot steals cheese samplers?

  The great Susanville crime spree went on for several months. I had met another girl named Christy, and we were hanging out. This was kind of funny, because her father was the local district attorney and I was a “master” criminal. Maybe that’s why she liked me. I was the furthest thing she could imagine from her father.

  My wife filed for a separation and got a temporary restraining order against me, so I couldn’t see her or my son, and a child-support judgment. I was still working at Payless Drugs and scamming them, but they got camera footage of me lifting twenties from another employee’s register. I was fired immediately and escorted to the front door with the promise they would turn the tapes over to the police. I left quickly. Then I got another job, as a fry cook at Taco Bell. I didn’t like working at Taco Bell. I resented the way they treated me, so I decided I should relieve them of their money. I had noticed that the drive-through window wasn’t secured very well. I figured I could come back after the end of my shift, break the glass, and climb through. I would clean out the cash registers and sneak out. I’d come back to work the next day like nothing had ever happened.

  Nothing could have been simpler. I went over there really late one night. I broke in through the drive-through window as planned. I noticed the manager’s office door was open. I walked inside and saw that the safe, for some reason, hadn’t been locked. I started shoving money into a bag. I felt like I had won the lottery! When the safe was empty, I went out to check the cash registers.

  That’s when I heard tires screeching. I heard people moving, too quickly. It was the middle of the night, so I knew something was up. I didn’t want to trip the alarm, so I crawled back out the drive-through window and started to run.

  There were cops everywhere already. I heard them yelling “Stop!” and “Freeze!” The Taco Bell was at the edge of the shopping center, at the edge of a wilderness area. I ran hard for the trees and up into the foothills, the cops running behind me. I knew I could outrun them.

  But there was a cliff a little way into the woods, with a creek at the bottom of it. There was a thirty-foot drop to the creek, which was actually part of the Susan River. I jumped. But it was the middle of winter, and the creek was frozen. I hit the ice, broke through into the freezing water, and hit the bottom of the creek. The bag I was carrying broke and a bunch of the money slipped out. And because of the ice, I had trouble getting out of the creek. I had to swim to the other side and crawl out before I could start running again.

  The cops got busy. They launched a manhunt and brought out the bloodhounds. But I was still running. I found some railroad tracks and started heading down those. I ran for a long time. I was tired, and I was soaking wet with icy water from the river, and it was January in Susanville. I’d never been so cold in my whole life. Then after a while I started to warm up a little. I started feeling pretty comfortable, in fact. I was a little sleepy. I felt like I was going to be OK. So I lay down on the railroad tracks and started to take a little nap. But then I realized this didn’t make sense. I couldn’t be warm. I was freezing! It was the middle of the night in the middle of the winter and I was soaking wet. I realized it might be hypothermia. This wasn’t good.

  So I got up and ran some more. I made my way to a place where I thought I’d be safe. I knew a girl named Tracy. She was the girlfriend of a friend of mine. She was older than me, and she was beautiful, but all I wanted was a safe place to hide. Tracy took me in. She got me dried off and put me in bed.

  I might never have gotten caught. I found out later that my body was so cold from the icy water that the dogs couldn’t follow me. My body temperature was too low to give off a scent. According to the police report the cops called out an officer from the Lassen County Search and Rescue Team—Officer Daugherty and his dog Zeus. They wanted to catch me, but they were afraid I was going to die from exposure. (I did get hypothermia, and to this day I get cold whenever the weather changes, and I hate the winter.) They gave up after four hours and called off the dogs and the search.

  But Tracy had a jealous boyfriend. He was one of my cronies, and we had committed some crimes together. He was pissed that I’d stayed all night at Tracy’s house. He thought I had betrayed him, so he called the cops and told them where I was. The cops arrested me and searched my place and found all kinds of evidence.

  I was sent to the Lassen County Jail, where I met with a public defender and got the chance to start thinking about what I was going to do next. The public defender seemed to think the evidence against me was pretty substantial. He didn’t think I had a chance of beating the charges. Neith
er did I. So it became a question of minimizing the damage. We decided to plea bargain and throw ourselves on the mercy of the court, and hope for the best.

  It didn’t seem that serious. I had a history of screwing up and getting caught. So I thought I knew what was coming next. I was going to get the old wrist-slap thing again. I guess I had kind of lost touch with my own activities. I didn’t realize how much trouble I had caused, or how many crimes I had committed. I hadn’t added it all up.

  The state added it up for me. There were a lot of crimes, and a lot of victims, and the cops knew who they all were. It even turned out there had been another investigation under way at the Payless Drugs. Detectives had been looking into a series of things over there. They had reviewed the store videotapes. Something like $3,000 had been stolen. They figured it was all me, and they had the video to prove it.

  The judge brought me in for my hearing. The public defender and I had decided to plead guilty to certain charges—the ones where they had me cold—and hope for some sympathy. I told the judge about my wife and son being taken from me, and trying to graduate from high school while working two jobs, and having this drug and alcohol problem. I told the judge, “I just want to go to school and AA or NA to get help.” The court records state that I was “polite.”

  But the victims of my crime spree called for justice. They all came to court. According to the court records, they told the judge things like “If he gets loose, he’ll just go and do it again” and “He has no remorse. He should be taught a real lesson” and “Something needs to be done about him—he’s an out-and-out thief.” The only guy who sounded sympathetic was the security officer at the Payless. He said I seemed remorseful.

  I got off the hook on some of the charges because I pled guilty to the others. But that didn’t mean I was out of trouble or that I was going to get the old slap on the wrist. The judge fined me $1,500 and sentenced me to six years in the California Youth Authority.

  4

  JAIL

  So I went to jail.

  I was used to getting into trouble and then manipulating the situation to my advantage. I wasn’t afraid to be sent in front of a judge. I wasn’t afraid to go to jail. I’d been in courts and jails almost my whole life. I knew what CYA was. It’s like graduate school if you’re an adolescent criminal. It’s like prison for little kids.

  I thought I’d fit right in. I figured I was basically still a kid, and most of the crimes they’d busted me for had been committed before I turned eighteen. I figured I could handle whatever they threw at me.

  It didn’t start off too bad. I was locked up in the Lassen County Jail in Susanville for three or four months. That was real jail. It was pretty hard-core—all men locked up because they were criminals. After I had been processed, when they keep you apart from the rest of the population, I was put into a two-man cell with a guy who was accused of beating his wife to death with a telephone.

  He had been a very successful local businessman whose marriage had fallen apart. He was very high-strung, and the breakup was upsetting to him. He started taking Prozac, which instantly fixed him, except when he’d go into these rages. His wife had moved out and found another place about ten houses away. One night they were arguing on the phone. He said, “Can you hold on a minute?” He walked out his front door, walked down the street to her house, took the phone out of her hand, and beat her to death with it.

  “It was the Prozac,” he said. “I’m innocent.” He was the nicest guy, but he was a murderer. And he was going to sleep two feet away from me, every night.

  I was working on my plea bargain. I was trying to figure out which things I could admit to, and how far they’d reduce my sentence. My cellie was also waiting to go to trial. The whole process moved very slowly and took a couple of months, so we got a chance to know each other.

  His trial date came up before mine; he had been there for almost a year. He was sentenced to twenty-six years to life. It would have been twenty-five years to life, but he was carrying a concealed weapon at the time his crime was committed, and so that added a mandatory year. He was in the habit of carrying around large sums of money and had gotten a gun and a concealed-weapon permit, but the law didn’t care about those details.

  When he came back from the sentencing he looked sort of crushed but also sort of outraged. He kept saying, “It’s not fair! I had a permit for that gun!” He didn’t seem that upset about the twenty-five to life for first-degree murder, but the extra year really pissed him off. I kept thinking, “Dude! You killed your wife.” Besides, what was the difference between twenty-five to life and twenty-six to life? Either way, he was out of there. Being a convicted and sentenced murderer meant he had to go to a different part of Lassen County Jail. So I lost my roommate.

  Once I had my plea bargain session, it was time for me to move on, too. I wasn’t that worried about being sent to the California Youth Authority. How bad could it be? Like juvie, but bigger? Like juvie, but for longer? It didn’t seem that scary. A bunch of screw-up kids, like me, who’d gotten busted and put away for a while.

  Besides, my wife had started visiting me again in jail. She brought me my son. We rekindled our relationship. She was going to keep visiting me. We were going to be together. The future looked kind of bright.

  The next stop for me was the CYA induction center in Sacramento. I didn’t expect to be there long; I’d been told I was going to be one of the first one hundred prisoners to be sent to the new “Chad” high-security facility near Stockton. (This became one of the state’s most notoriously violent institutions. At the time it was described as a facility for California’s “worst of the worst” juvenile offenders. Its real name was N. A. Chaderjian Youth Correctional Facility.)

  I knew right away that I was in trouble. I’d had this romantic idea about CYA, that it was just like the adult prisons I’d seen in the movies. I imagined tiers of cells, with everyone quietly doing his time. I imagined something orderly and quiet.

  This was hell. This was Lord of the Flies. This was thousands of kids who were disconnected from life, who had no connection to anything. They were seriously screwed up—tattooed, like lifelong gangsters, at twelve. I felt completely unsafe.

  I was a good-sized guy by then. I had a fair amount of experience in the criminal world, stealing stuff, selling stuff, doing drugs, and making trouble. I could pass for a fairly experienced criminal. And I was near the top of the age range. Though some kids were going to stay at CYA until they were twenty-five, most of them were my age or younger.

  But this was a seriously bad environment. I came from fucked-up shit; this was a whole new level. There was heavy gangbanging here. There were serious politics. I was out of my element. I thought I was a man, with a wife and a child. I felt like a grown-up. But now I had thirteen-year-old kids, really hard kids, coming up on me and saying, “Where you from, holmes? Who you roll with?”

  “Uh, nobody. I’m from Anderson.”

  I understood right away that I had to get out. I knew that if I stayed I was going to be in CYA for a long, long time. I’d just get sucked in. I felt like I was past that kind of behavior, in terms of who I was and where I was in my life. In jail, I had begun a new relationship with my wife, and things had changed.

  When Christy was first pregnant and then when our son was born, I did everything I could to avoid being involved. I didn’t want to feel responsible and I couldn’t stop doing drugs. I was high all the time. I was in jail half the time. But now I had this new experience where I was sober for the first time in a long, long time. Everything felt so clear once the drug haze wore off. I felt a new responsibility to my son and to my wife. Christy was writing me letters. I was committed to becoming a real husband and father. When I got out, we could be a real family.

  But I knew as long as I was in CYA, I couldn’t help her and my son. There were no jobs, which meant you couldn’t make money, which meant you couldn’t send money. There was no visitation. I couldn’t be a dad to my son locked up
in that place.

  So I went to the counselor and asked him what my options were. He said that because I was over eighteen I could ask to be classified as an adult and sentenced to an adult facility. He tried to scare me off that. The counselor said, “You think you’re all hard, and you want to go where the real criminals are. But you’re a good-looking kid, and you’re young …”

  He was probably right. He was trying to protect me. It was outside the norm for a youth offender to ask to be reclassified as an adult. He warned me that there would be no coming back. I wouldn’t be able to change my mind. But I knew I wasn’t going to make it at CYA. My only goal was to get out, be a father and husband, and move on with my life. In the CYA system you can be held until you are twenty-five years old, even if your sentence is less. Unlike in the adult system, where you get a day off your sentence for every good day you produce, in CYA you are subject to periodic reviews by your counselors. They can add what they think you “need” to behave. I was a youth offender. I had a long rap sheet. They might feel like they needed to keep me a while to help me get over that. That might mean staying the full six years. Plus I knew from what I could see around me that I was going to have to fight. If I had to fight, I was going to get more time added to my sentence.

  I had already had one incident. It was just after I arrived at Lassen County Jail in Susanville. It was dinnertime, and it was chili night. I had already heard about chili night; the old-timers had warned me about it. The old-timers said it hurt their stomach. But I was hungry, and I had a strong stomach. The chili was served in bowls at the tables. I sat down and started to reach for my bowl of chili.

  A big, bearded biker dude, way bigger than me, sat across from me. He looked like he had just came down from the mountains. When I reached over to pick up a bowl of chili, the biker dude grabbed the bowl and said, “That’s mine.” I apologized and reached for a different bowl. But he said, “That’s mine, too.”