It was then that I faced painful and liberating emotions after numbing them for years. I had to feel them and became familiar with them.
I have been incarcerated for 13 years because I was at the wrong place, at the wrong time and with the wrong people. And because I chose to stay quiet about how and why he was shot in front of me and my mother’s home and that choice was simply a product of accumulated generational wounds, childhood trauma and unresolved pain.
My earliest childhood memory is when I was about five years old and my parents were arguing, which eventually turned physical. My mom grabbed me and held me in front of her as a human shield so that my dad would stop hitting her. I was confused and scared. Eventually my parents divorced when I was nine, by then I had thee siblings who were 4, 6 and 8 years younger than me, Sonia, Kevin and Lizbeth.
My mom then met a new man who, like my dad, was also an alcoholic and didn’t hesitate to remind me that the pain my mom endured was because of me and my siblings every time he would get drunk. This only lasted a couple of years. By 11 my mom left him and we migrated to LA with my mom’s brother, uncle Ramon. Not knowing a word of English and being an immigrant I was subject to bullying and discrimination from other kids. But I wasn’t the only one; there were other kids like me at school and we all confided and looked after each other. We eventually (and subconsciously) formed our own crew, and became part of an established gang when we were faced with the question of which gang we were going to become a part of around the same age and time that other kids would be contemplating colleges and universities.
This warped belief system took over my psych along with being dealt with violence on a kid if I made any mistake. All this accumulated pain became numb when at the age of 14 I was introduced to cocaine, crack and meth. It was at that moment that I adopted a new persona. I picked up a broken mask and placed it over my wounded child’s face, from there on the objective was to keep my emotions and pain at bay and continue self medicating myself. That was my life’s purpose, until October of 2010 when I found out I was going to be a father, only then I started to wonder about the future and how it would be to have a kid, I knew that if I wanted to be the father I always wanted but never had I would have to start making changes immediately.
But on December 24th, 2010, while mediating a drug deal between two people who had a pending debt of which I had no idea about, things took a wrong turn and Ruben ended up getting shot and beaten in front of me. I WAS IN SHOCK! and afraid that if I was to intervene I would wind up getting shot myself. Remember? “Don’t bang if you can’t hang,” “ride or die,” and “snitches get stitches”? Those thoughts lingered in my head and led me to avoid law enforcement for 11 months because I was afraid of what might happen to me or my family if I was to break one of those rules.
On November 26th of 2011 I was arrested, leaving a 5-month-old boy fatherless. Fear took over me one more time and led me to shut down and stay quiet during my whole trial because I didn’t know how to defend myself and was afraid of making things worse to the point of putting my family in harm’s way. So I sat there hoping and praying that the truth would come out on its own and I would go back to my family. The truth never came out and I was convicted of robbery, assault with a deadly weapon, torture, and mayhem under the “natural and probable consequences” doctrine and sentenced to 32 years to life.
It was only during my imprisonment and years of asking myself “why?” that I began to explore myself and my life, contemplating my decisions and the decisions made by the people that came before me. It was then that I faced painful and liberating emotions after numbing them for years. I had to feel them and became familiar with them. That led me to see clarity in my life and gave me the strength to begin breaking the cycle and finding healing not just for me but for my family and the generations that are coming after me!
