The Gangbanger-Turned Death Row Chaplain

This is Lee Habib, and this is Our American Stories. And we tell stories about everything here on this show, from the arts to sports, and from business to history, and everything in between, including your story. Send them to OurAmericanStories.com. That’s OurAmericanStories.com. There are some of our favorites. And now, our own Alex Cortez brings us the voice of someone who has worked at the highest levels of two radically different yet similar jobs. But you might not have expected it, given this beginning, this very early start of his life.

There was this lady named Ulsie Pittsfield that was allowed to come into our home, and she became the lady that cared for me and took care of me, instead of the Stockton kid, Earl Smith’s mom. As a result of that, I really bonded with Ulsie Pittsfield, who I called Grandmama, and she was like the protector for me. My dad worked three jobs, and he was my best friend, and he still is, even though he’s passed away. And in the midst of all of that, as I grew up, I felt a sense of rejection, especially around a memory of when he was four years old and he was sitting with his mom and her friends. And Earl noticed that the bottle for the newborn baby, sitting on one of the ladies’ laps, was empty. And being told, “Shut up, fool!” for what he said, as I said, “That baby ain’t got no milk!” And, you know, being slapped, being embarrassed to the point that I wet my pants because the women, and the women, are laughing. I got slapped, and I’m this little kid, and I felt like, “Wow,” it was a horrible feeling to be laughed at. I don’t know what age people can go back and remember things from, but when you’re four years old and you can remember an incident like that, that puts a print, it stamps something into your memory, into that memory bank that just doesn’t go away. And what I did not realize was my mom had her own stuff in her box, and she was trying to deal with her stuff, and I was part of the stuff that she wasn’t quite sure how to maneuver through. A young lady in the South, married to an older man, not of her own choice. As a result of that, that guy is abusive to her, and so she ran away from him. And she wasn’t even sixteen years old. Through all of this, and then she marries again, and she marries my dad. She has two daughters and a son, and things are okay. Then she’s pregnant with me. You know, my mom, in actuality, in hindsight, had every reason in the world to be upset about this kid. That shows up three and a half years after she finally quit having kids. She’s in her early twenties and finally getting ready to have some kind of life after all these years, and the cycle is getting ready to repeat. She’s going to have to take care of this child. Her freedom is going to be hindered once again. It’s almost like she’s going to be shackled once again. And I represented shackles, in my opinion, as I think back on it. I represented shackles to her. And if I, in fact, represented shackles to her, her response to who I was was justified, because when you’re oppressed or shackled, the one thing you want to do is get out of the shackles or get away from the oppression. So my mom did not have the opportunity just to be a young girl, a young lady. I mean, only later did I find that out. But when you’re a kid, you don’t know that. You don’t know what your parents have gone through. And here you are, and you’re feeling total rejection because you’re a kid, and all you want is to feel some kind of compassion, some kind of love, and you think you’re not getting it yet. What I realized after the fact is she was giving me the best she had. And at least he had Ulsie until his mom decided that he wouldn’t have her either. I loved this lady beyond reason. And then one day, I come home, and she’s not there, and I’m like, “Where is she? Put her out?” What does that mean? What does that mean that she’s not going to be here at night when I lay down? What does it mean that that lady, who was my one safety net? What does it mean when they say that she’s no longer going to be available? You don’t understand what that… You really have to understand what that lady meant to me. She, man, she was… She was my answer. “She’s not here, and you, and don’t go look for it?” What does that mean? “Don’t go look for it?” You know, if you lose a million dollars, you’re going to look for it. And she was worth much more than a million dollars to me. So I found out where she lived, and the word was, “If you go there and you find, if you don’t come straight home from school, you know, you don’t get a spanking.” I weighed the two options: be around her for a little while and feel the love that she had for me and get a spanking, or just come home and not get a spanking. I chose a spanking. I chose it. I fully understood when I got home, because I was coming home late, I was going to get a spanking. But I didn’t care. And that’s the other thing: you start as a kid to say, “I don’t care,” and that can take you to some really dark places. It can really take you to dark places when you realize at a very young age, “I don’t care.” We had a University of the Pacific that was in Stockton, and we’d go over there and find a bike and ride home on it. You know, from the bicycle, you steal a car, because you could steal a bike, you could steal a car. Stabbed a guy that was actually a friend of mine at eight years old, and just doing crazy things as a way, basically, to let this anger that I felt out. And I didn’t understand. The kids don’t understand why they do what they do until later in life you find out, “Oh, that’s what they call that. That’s why you did that.” And you’re listening to Earl Smith, and what a remarkable voice he has! And, straight as an arrow, he’s telling the story as he recalls it now, and with real compassion. When we come back, we’ll continue with Earl Smith’s story. And as always, we cover these stories about love and the lack thereof, because, well, it defines a life, particularly love’s absence. Earl Smith’s story continues here on Our American Stories. Lee Habib here, the host of Our American Stories. Every day on this show, we’re bringing inspiring stories from across this great country: stories from our big cities and small towns. But we truly can’t do the show without you. Our stories are free to listen to, but they’re not free to make. If you love what you hear, go to OurAmericanStories.com and click the donate button. Give a little, give a lot. Go to OurAmericanStories.com and give. And we continue with Our American Stories and with Earl Smith’s story. Feeling abandoned by his mom, Earl tried to fill this hole in his heart, and fill it with crime. The other thing my dad did for me was he took me to a field one day. I have, about, to be like an eight or die. And he takes his pistol out, and he puts some stuff out, and he starts shooting and hitting this stuff. He says, “You want to try?” And when I put that pistol in my head and I fired it, I cannot believe how that felt to me to fire that God. And it was all the addiction of the sound of a god in my hand, is something I have not forgotten even to this day. And it became a very bad thing that he considered to be a good thing he was doing, but it was a bad thing that I felt so great about the sound of that gun and it being in my hand. Because I was already at eight or nine years old, I was already committed to being, doing a bearing things. I was already committed to being different than other people in my household. I was already committed. I did not have a problem with the shreds. I didn’t have a problem with crime at eight or nine years old. And the gun part was just power. I knew how I learned how to shoot a gun. I learned what it sounded like when I shot it, and for me, that was a power. So I’m not saying that it was wrong that he did it, because he didn’t understand what feeling that gave me the first time I did it. It’s almost like if you use drugs, if you shoot dope, you’re not going to remember what it felt like. Everyone says, ‘Hey, you want to get high?’ So you get high, and the reason you become addicted is because you keep trying to chase the first high you had. And for me, my addiction was to keep chasing the feeling of the first time I fired that gun. I mean, one time a guy almost… my dad and I were in the street, and this guy swerves this car like he’s trying to hit us, and my dad jumps out the way. I grabbed, and, you know, it’s like the guy is laughing and hooting, holler, as he goes down the street. My dad goes and gets the gun. I take the gun from him, and I hide it again, that I find the guy. And we lived by the railroad tracks, and I just… I beat the guy that I left him on the tracks to get hit by a train because of what he had done to my dad. And I kept the gun, and I told everybody, “I got this gun.” “If anybody moves him, I’m going to shoot you.” Earl was also a gang member, a pretty big drug dealer around us, around ’99, and a college student. You know, of the part of this ’99 quarter deal is you go from Turlock all the way to Sacramento. And if you can have a drug trade through that whole quarter back in the day, you’re really being successful. We had an apartment in Turlock, we had one in Modesto, we had one in Stockton, and you had people that lived in Sacramento. And every weekend, we’d go to different cities for the parties, and we’d do all of that. But we developed this quarter. So, Stanislaus State, Salon, King Delta College, Sac City College. People were at different schools, and so everybody was really, really educated, really smart. It wasn’t just that we were crazy people, it was that we were pretty smart. So we’re all in school, and we were all doing different things. I think all of us ended up getting our degrees, at least our bachelor’s degrees. And from there, we, you know, some of us have a vast degrees. But we were okay. But so, it was almost like, when we were a group that did two things. And somewhere in the midst of that, Earl would visit his old nanny, who he considered a grandmother. Ulsie, the thing that was so great about this lady was that she never moved more than half a mile away from our house. She always found someone that would let her rent a room, that she would be close by me. She was that person until she went into the nursing home. She was still living that close to that house I grew up in when she finally was in the nursing home. And, you know, here’s the deal. When you’re, when you’re a criminal, when you’re committing crime, you know, yeah, yeah, for me, I tell people all the time, “You know, there’s a difference in gang membership and gang banging.” And gangbanging is when you’re actually in the process of the stuff. Membership is what you’re part of. And I separate the two. I tell people, “Yes, I’m a gang member, because that’s what I was. That’s what my commitment is.” That doesn’t change. I don’t bang. So when I went to see my grandmother, as when I was much younger, it didn’t change that I was a part of a gang. I would always make sure I had a haircut. I’d always make sure that I looked presentable, and I would always make sure that when I went to see her, I planned to spend time with her, and I would not be in a hurry to leave. I did not want to disrespect her. So I may have done something the night before. But if it was always like, an almost like a calendar, I knew when it was time to go see her. If I went more than two weeks, it was a problem. Sometimes, a junk had to pause, because she was still a priority, because if she didn’t know I was okay, it would trouble her beyond measure. And yet he put himself into situations that could trouble her. Well, I’ve been off at the golf course, of nineteen years old, and we were doing a big deal. So we went out to the golf course so we could sort of talk about it where no one we knew. No one was around, because we knew we were being followed and watched. So my gun was in my golf bag. The other gun was over there, my bed. And so I put the World Series is on, so I have to get home in time to watch the game. So I leave my clubs in the car, and running the house, and then turn the TV on. Knock on the door. Guy says, “I came to pay you.” He owed me some money, and he was late, and so I put the word out: “Whenever you see him, let him know that he owes me, he’s late, and I got to deal with him once again.” I knew the guy. I knew the kid. I started him off selling, and now business dictated that because you didn’t handle your part of it, I got to do something to you. And you know what that meant. So then he gets someone along with some other people, and they convinced this other person, “Okay, if you kill him, the problem will be solved.” So this guy, Stevie, comes. I don’t even know the guy, never seen him before in my life, but he’s with this guy that owed me the money, and they come in. I said, “Well, sit down,” because I’m watching a game, and I needed to really process what I was going to have. I had to do something. I sort of liked the guy, but I knew I had to do something, because personally I liked him, business dictated I had to do something to him. And as I’m sitting there, he sort of makes a motion like he’s pulling the trigger with a finger. And the guy he’s with, while I’m watching the World Series, he just gets something, takes a gun, and starts shooting me. And so, no gun up under my couch, no gun in the living room. So now, and I’m dodging, trying to dodge bullets, and I grab a coffee table. The bullet goes through a coffee table, it hits me, and he has six bullets in the gun. He hits me all six times. I’m shot in my face, my neck, my shoulder, my back because I’m sort of turning, the spinning. And one bullet goes in and comes back out. So I have seven holes in me. And then he stands over me clicking the gun. And the guy that brought him there says, “So, come on, let’s go! He’s done,” and they walk away. And it doesn’t get more compelling than this, folks. You’re seeing it, you’re feeling it, you’re hearing it from Earl Smith. The consequence of many bad decisions, and the consequence of the abandonment of love from a young man. And these are the things that happen. These are the stories that you hear here regularly, and we tell them not to depress you, and not to do anything but ultimately inspire. When we come back, you’re going to hear the redemption story to follow. And it is remarkable because how one rises from this circumstance… My goodness, there is no worse circumstance, perhaps, than the one this young man is facing. And, by the way, the way he was able to separate his life out and go see Ulsie and just sort of man up and straighten up, but then right back to the pull of that life, the only life he knew, the only life that was organized around any kind of meaning, camaraderie, or all the other things. We’ve heard countless times hear stories from gang members who say that that’s the love they did not get from their family. When we continue Earl Smith’s story here on Our American Stories. And we continue with Our American Stories and with gang member Earl Smith’s story, finally being on the receiving end of gunfire. The other part that it really was sort of weird when you’re on the other end of the gun, when you’re firing it and you feel the vibration in your hand as you pull the trigger. And the sound sort of trials through your hand, through your arm, up into your ears and into your heart. The sound of a gun when you shoot it, actually almost, it seems like for me, it was hitting my heart and it became part of that. But now I’m getting shot, and I know exactly how some people must have felt when you get shot. It’s just like you had a poker, a hot poker that’s been sitting in fire, that is poked into different parts of your body. And the only thing I kept thinking is, “I need water!” “I’m hot, I’m burning up, I’m burning up!” “I need water! I need water!” It was just like these hot pokers were like in my face. There were hot pokers where I’ve been shot, and in my neck there are hot pokers, and there are hot… I’m just like someone is taking up branding iron poker and poked it all the way into me. So it went through me, and it stopped at a point, and that point is stopped at… It’s like I’m on fire, but I’m not on fire in one spot. I’m on fire in a lot of spots at the same time. And it’s almost like you would take a flame and put it inside of someone’s body and allowed to continue to burn. I mean, think about this. So, the police have me under surveillance. They’re getting ready to bust me. So they’re on a corner, and I’m mark car. These guys come in. I’m shot numerous times. My neighbor said they didn’t know if it was firecrackers or what was going on. They could just hear, “Bamah bamamama bam!” And then they leave, and they walk out, still under surveillance on the corner over there. I get up, I knock on my neighbor’s door and say, “Can you call the police?” “I’ve been shot!” She starts screaming. She calls the police. They’re there in no time at all, because, you know, wow, of course they’re going to be there in no time at all. They come in, they walk right past me. They don’t say a word to me. They started going through my house. Then they leave. Another set comes in, and the lady, Miss Loreen, says, “Well, where’s the ambulance?” And I heard them tell her, “Lady, if you want an ambulance for him, you call her.” They were so… And that’s the thing that people don’t understand. There comes a point when even the authorities get tired of you. They get tired of what you’re getting away with, and at some point they believe that death is the easiest thing to deal with because they no longer have to deal with a person like me. So she had to call the ambulance, and I’m on this gurney, and they make it real clear that I’m not going to make it. They make it very clear, and I just need to tell a police of shot me. I wasn’t going to tell. I had no intention of telling. And Doctor Morrissey says, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you people!” He was another person that was laying on a gurney in his emergency room, and the police were saying, “Tell us wh…”