Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  I hung up.

  The captain’s phone rang. “What did you find?” Long pause. “Okay.” He hung up and looked at me and B. “You two, step outside.”

  Apparently the drug dog officer was on his way. As he came down the hallway, I quickly called out to him, “What did you find?”

  “I found the bag,” he replied.

  “What was inside?”

  “Marijuana.”

  I let out a sigh of relief. I thought the other detective must have destroyed the other drugs that had been in it. “Anything else?” I asked, hopeful.

  “Crack and heroin,” he said.

  I could not say a word. Game over.

  Later I learned the detective I had trusted in the bathroom went straight to his supervisor, not the other bathroom, and told him everything I’d said. The two of them then went to the bathroom, found the bag, and started processing the room as a crime scene.

  The captain came up to me. “You probably don’t want to say anything else until you speak with a lawyer.” That was the reading of my Miranda rights. Then he asked for my gun and badge and instructed me to go with him to the chief’s office.

  My meeting with the chief didn’t take long. The captain told him what they’d found, and the chief simply replied, “Prosecute him.”

  The dam broke. The chief had always been one of my biggest supporters. Not now. Not ever again. I wept openly and began to blubber something about how I had always been a good cop.

  “Keep quiet,” I was told. They called in the sergeant on duty and instructed him to walk me out of the station and drive me home. “You are suspended with pay until further notice,” they told me.

  I knew that was only a formality. I was now on the other side of the line. I was just one more person caught with drugs in Benton Harbor. I knew what the future held, and it wasn’t going to be good.

  Jameel

  The only place I found peace in the Federal Correctional Institution in Milan came through the job I had there. All my life, music has been my passion. When I had planned on going to college, back before my first arrest when I was fifteen, I wanted to major in something related to music. Working in a studio had always been my dream job. After my mom pleaded guilty for me and sent me off to prison the first time, the closest I ever got to that dream was installing car stereos for my friends. But when I got to Milan, I found it had an organized music program complete with a recording studio and all kinds of instruments: keyboard, piano, guitar, bass, drum, you name it. When I saw that, I was like, Cool. This is the place for me.

  I ended up getting a job as the quartermaster of the studio. That meant I was in charge of all the music. I worked with guys as they came in and played and recorded music. On days when no one came in to record, I would listen to music for hours. I found great peace in that. Outside of the music room, though, peace was hard to find.

  I got in a couple more fights after the one that scared me. Both started in the television room. Most prison fights start in the television room, the basketball court, or the weight pile in the yard. The first fight began when a guy I recognized from the weight pile started making loud comments in the television room about anyone from Benton Harbor. This guy was serious about his weights. He could bench-press around five hundred pounds. I lifted most days, but I topped out around two hundred fifty. This guy was like the weight pile champ and he knew it.

  Maybe that’s why he came after me with his Benton Harbor comments. He couldn’t have been after anyone else because the first time he spoke up, there were just a few of us in the room, and I was the only one from Benton Harbor. I ignored him because I didn’t want to get into another fight.

  Later that day he did it again, this time when the room was packed with people. He pointed at me and called me out. I gave it right back to him and made some comments about people from Detroit, which was where he was from. He didn’t like what I said, but he was asking for it. Other people in the room looked at me as though I were crazy for going back after someone so ripped, but I knew being able to bench five hundred pounds didn’t mean a thing in a fight.

  Everything should have ended in the television room. He’d insulted me. I’d insulted him. We were even. Again, I wasn’t looking for a fight, so I decided to call it a night and went back to my cell. I was about to lie down when I heard, “What’s up, ———?” he said, using a degrading word. He’d followed me from the television room to my cell.

  I turned around and saw him standing in my cell door. “What’s your problem, man?” I asked.

  “That stuff you said in there,” he said. “That’s my problem.”

  “Listen, man,” I said, “you had your little piece to say and I said my piece. That makes us even. I ain’t trying to fight you. I don’t have time for that. I’m fixing to go to sleep.”

  “Oh, you’re about to go to sleep one way or another,” he said.

  “Serious, man? You really want to fight?” I was annoyed.

  “You don’t want this,” he said, puffing out his chest.

  “No, I don’t,” I said, “so I’m going to go lay down.” I turned to get in my bunk when he pushed me from the side. I turned around and pushed him back. He then came at me like he was going to grab me. He didn’t get close enough to lay a hand on me. I punched him twice in the mouth and dropped him. That’s when the rage came back. I fell on him and just started punching. At one point I grabbed a chair and started hitting him in the head.

  The next thing I knew, I felt someone touching me from behind and saying, “Jameel, Jameel, come on, man.” Eventually the gentle touch from behind became arms wrapping around me, pulling me backward. “Come on, Jameel. You don’t want to do this. Stop.” I dropped the chair. “Don’t do nothing, bro. I’m just holding you so you can cool down.” That’s when I realized Hernandez, my Muslim friend with whom I’d had the fight at the processing center, was pulling me back.

  The guy on the ground looked bad. Blood poured out of deep cuts over both of his eyes. His friends came and took him back to his cell. One of the guys stitched up the gashes. The next few days the guy wore a skull cap low to cover them to keep the guards from seeing he’d been in a fight. If you were caught fighting, you’d go to the hole, even if you got the worst of it.

  The next day I went to see the guy I’d beat up to apologize for going so far. Just like the other guys, he apologized first.

  “It’s cool,” I said. “I ain’t got no issue with you.”

  A few days later I was back in the television room and a really tall white guy came in and started griping about the channel I was watching. He wanted to change the channel to his show, but the rule of the television room is that whoever is there first chooses the channel until his show is over. This tall guy either didn’t know the rule or didn’t care, because he kept pressing and pressing and wouldn’t let it go until I finally pushed him out of my way. The guy was really shocked that someone so much smaller would push him back. He charged at me and I dropped him. When I turned around, I saw a lot of people staring through the big window that looked into the hallway. I was like, “Ah, man,” and went immediately to my cell to get my things together for a trip to the hole.

  Sure enough, the guards put us on lockdown and had everyone take off their shirts and put their hands through the cell bars so they could see who had been fighting. They started at the end of the cellblock farthest from me, but I knew it was just a matter of time before they came for me. Off in the distance I heard them open a cell and pull someone out. It was the tall white guy I had dropped. I waited. Then I heard another cell open. They pulled out the guy who could bench five hundred pounds and carted him off. And that was it.

  The guards had two guys—one black, one white—and as far as they were concerned, they had everyone they needed. All that night I waited for the guards to come and get me. I figured it was just a matter of time before one or both of these guys spilled their guts. But the guards never came. They should have, though, because I was a bomb primed
to go off.

  My attorney had written me to tell me all my appeals had been denied. He was sorry, but there was nothing else he could do. There was one last ditch appeal he planned to make, but the odds of its working were next to impossible. In all likelihood, this prison cell was going to be my home for a long time. The rage boiling inside me grew to a whole new level. That’s what pushed me to keep beating the one guy with a chair. Just like before, I wasn’t beating him; I was beating Andrew Collins, the cop who had put me here. If Hernandez hadn’t grabbed me, I hate to think how far I might have gone. It was just a matter of time before I went too far. Every fight was just a dress rehearsal for what I planned to do to Collins when I saw him.

  I planned on killing him.

  —

  Not long after the two guys I beat up went to the hole for fighting, I noticed something in my room I’d never noticed before. Lying on a table was a dusty Gideon’s Bible. Apparently the Bible had been lying on the table since the day I moved in, but I had never touched it. On this day, however, it was like the Bible was calling to me. I had to pick it up. I had to start reading.

  I opened it to the first book, Genesis, and started reading. After five verses I heard a voice speak to my spirit saying, Let it go. The voice might as well have been talking out loud, because it was that clear. Let it go ran through my mind over and over. Let it go. This was a long time before the movie Frozen, so I wasn’t hearing the words to that song. But the words did sound like a song that started playing in my head. Let it go.

  I stopped reading, but I could not put down that Bible. Let it go. I didn’t leave my cell for a very long time. I sat there on my bunk, holding the Bible, hearing the same words over and over in my head. Let it go.

  —

  After a while my head started to pound. My mind turned to all the Bible verses I’d read or heard when I was younger. Romans 12:19 in particular jumped out at me: “Dearly beloved, avenge not yourselves, but rather give place unto wrath: for it is written, Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord” (KJV). I also kept hearing the words of 2 Chronicles 20:15: “For the battle is not yours, but God’s” (KJV). I wasn’t even sure where 2 Chronicles was in the Bible, but I knew it was in there somewhere. I’d heard sermons on it before. Now the words kept running through my head, along with the same chorus, Let it go. God was telling me to leave revenge to him.

  I had not touched a Bible or even thought about anything linked to God since I was arrested on February 8, 2006. When I got to the prison in Milan, I didn’t go running back to God like I had when my mom had pleaded guilty for me when I was a juvenile or when I went back on a parole violation. I didn’t run to God when Collins arrested me because I knew the police didn’t have any hard evidence against me. And as angry as I was, I had held out hope that the appeals court would see what Judge Bell and my jury did not. I didn’t think I needed divine intervention for people to see what I thought should have been obvious to everyone. Every time one of my appeals was denied, I became too angry to think about God. But now God had come looking for me.

  All these thoughts ran around in my head until I thought it might split open. What does this all mean? I asked myself. Is God telling me I need to let go of all I’m dealing with, because I can’t do that. I have to handle it. I have to take care of this situation. If I get back home and don’t do something about Collins, then everyone is going to look at me like I’m crazy. To me, not getting revenge for what Collins did to me was the same as telling everyone, “Yeah, I did it. I’m guilty.” I couldn’t do that.

  The battle is not yours, but God’s, I heard in my spirit.

  No, no, no! I gotta fight this. I gotta take care of this fight.

  “Vengeance is mine; I will repay, saith the Lord.”

  I stood up and put the Bible back on the table. If I stayed in my cell another minute I was going to lose my mind. I had to think. I went outside to the track that runs around the perimeter of the prison yard. Some guys run on the track, but most people just walk. That’s what I did. I walked laps as Let it go echoed in my head.

  For the next several hours I walked around and around and around that track. I didn’t talk to anyone and no one bothered me. Because I never talked to anyone, no one thought it odd to see me keeping to myself. I didn’t talk to God, either. Instead, I walked and thought about my life. I reflected on my whole life, from the time I was a little kid until the present.

  Since the day I first went to prison at age fifteen, I’d always blamed others for what had happened to me. My mom had pleaded guilty for me to the carjacking charges, even though I was with my dad when the crime happened. Walking around the track, I took another look at how I’d ended up in that situation. My dad had warned me not to go for a ride with my friends, but I told him nothing bad would happen. I realized I had simply taken the easy way out. I should have listened to him. That was on me. It didn’t matter what happened after that. I could have chosen to listen to my father and stayed home. If I had, my life might have turned out very different.

  The same was true of the ride I took to the store with Will. I went back to that day as I walked around the track. When I asked someone to give me a ride to the store, I did it because I was in a hurry. But Will wasn’t. By the time he was finally ready to go, I could have walked to the store and back. Why didn’t I? I asked myself. Why didn’t I? Sure it was cold, but when you live in Michigan, you get used to the cold. And why did I accept a ride from somebody I didn’t know? I didn’t even know his real name until after I’d been arrested. Hadn’t I learned my lesson from what happened when I was fifteen? I should have been smarter than that. I should have just walked, but instead, I took the easy way out. That was also on me. If I had just walked to the store rather than waiting around for a ride with someone I didn’t know, I would not be in prison now.

  I’d spent so much time being angry at everyone who put me here that I failed to recognize I could have avoided the whole situation by not putting myself in a position where something bad could happen to me. That didn’t excuse the lies told against me in my trial, but it did make me realize I had to stop blaming everyone else and spending all my time being consumed by anger and a desire for revenge. All anger had done so far was turn me into someone I didn’t like, someone I did not want to be.

  I had to let it all go. That was the hardest thing for me, which made me start praying.

  More guys had come out on the yard, but no one paid much attention to me as I continued walking laps around the track. And God and I had a long talk. I did not pour out all my complaints to him over what had been done to me. I prayed about my situation, but not in a “God, you need to do something to these people” kind of way. Instead, I told him how everything I had been doing wasn’t working. If I stayed on this path, I was going to end up in prison for a very long time, not because of the original drug charges, but because I was becoming a menace to both the prison and myself. I had not yet been busted for fighting, but I knew it was only a matter of time before I hurt someone so bad that I might even kill him. And the worst part was I had nothing against anybody inside these walls. All my anger was directed at the people who put me here, especially Andrew Collins.

  Let it go.

  I thought about my son, who was now four years old but didn’t know me at all. I want to get to know my son, I told God. I want to raise him or at least be in his life. If I keep doing what I’m doing, that’s not going to happen. The last thing I want is for my son to only know me as a man in prison. I came here an innocent man, but I’m not anymore. I didn’t do the things they accused me of doing, but I’m in a bad place now. God, I need to change.

  I kept walking, but now I stopped talking and started listening to God. He’d already been talking long before I got outside. I listened to what he had said to me with the Bible verses and with the three little words that kept running through my head: Let it go. Finally, I chose to do just that. I let it go. I gave my anger and my desire for revenge over to him. All of it. />
  The moment I turned loose of my anger, God planted inside me a desire to open up to others. That was something completely new for me. From the day they had led me out of Judge Bell’s courtroom, I closed myself off from everyone except a couple of people. I didn’t want to get to know anybody, and I didn’t want them to know me, because I did not deserve to be here. Now I understood it didn’t matter that I didn’t deserve to be here. I was here, and shutting everyone out wasn’t making this place any easier for me. Minding my own business and telling everyone else to keep out had contributed to a lot of the fights I’d had. I did not come across as an innocent man upset over the injustices of the system. I came across as rude and angry, someone just looking for a fight. God showed me that had to change.

  Eventually I stopped walking and started back to my cell for the night. I prayed again before I went to bed. God, I prayed, when I wake up tomorrow, I want to feel like I am at home. I want to feel different, better. Then I went to sleep.

  When I woke up the next morning, my anger was gone. Instead, I felt this overwhelming desire to talk to somebody I did not know, somebody I had shut out and kept from talking to me in the past. As soon as I walked out of my cell, I saw an older gentleman who’d tried to talk to me off and on the entire time I’d been in the Milan prison. Every day he asked me how I was doing, and I always just pushed him back. Today I went over to him.

  “Hey, how are you doing today?”

  The man looked from side to side, then looked at me as if wondering what in the world had just happened. “What? You can talk?” he said with a smile.

  “Yeah man. I can talk.” I laughed.

  “So what’s your name?” he asked.

  “Jameel. I’m from Benton Harbor.” I then talked awhile longer, telling him more about me.