Disir
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- Sep 30, 2011
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He was a 72-year-old man with a messed-up back and he knew he shouldn’t be lifting this stuff, but he was here to help a friend move, and so were some other old guys who had their own issues with bad knees and arthritic joints, so Hercules Williams Jr. plucked a small wooden end table from the back of a U-Haul truck and carried it down the sidewalk, slowly.
“That’s the Herc I always knew. Lifting that thing like it was nothing,” shouted 64-year-old Larry Owens, who sometimes walks with a cane. “You’re gonna feel that tomorrow.”
“I feel it now,” Williams said, setting the table down and placing a hand on his back. “I feel it now.”
Donald Shakir, the beneficiary of all this labor, saw that Williams was having trouble and grabbed the table from his hands, pulling it up the steps and into the living room. Shakir is a muscular 63-year-old with thick black glasses and a bright-orange beard. He’s legally blind and can’t see at all out of his left eye, even with the glasses. He also suffers from arthritis in his knees, but if the pain was bothering him that afternoon, he didn’t let on.
He had been leading the operation, telling the guys where to put a chair or a couch, insisting on lifting the heavier objects, pausing every so often to look around at his new neighborhood.
He didn’t want to call attention to himself, but this was a big day for him, a setting down of roots after a period of upheaval and wandering. Three years earlier, he had met a woman named Nzinga Amon and fell in love. They moved in together. At first, they slept on a couch in Shakir’s sister’s basement; they had to spoon each other to keep from falling off. “Hoooooo,” Amon says now. “It was hilarious. But what do they say: love is blind?” After that, they moved to a cramped one-bedroom apartment. This new place, though—a house instead of an apartment, with a Formstone facade, on a quiet block in southwest Baltimore? “It means stability,” Amon told me.
After the men unpacked the first load of boxes and furniture, they drove the empty U-Haul back to the old place to load up again, passing fans and flower pots through an open first-floor window. Inside, a TV was tuned to the Orioles’ first game of the season.
“The Orioles ain’t won nothing since I’ve been home,” Hercules Williams said, shaking his head. He was dressed in an Orioles raincoat and a white Orioles cap. He told me that he went to his first game at Camden Yards three years ago and couldn’t believe the size of it; he’d only ever seen a game at the far smaller Memorial Stadium, which the team abandoned in 1991. “I thought I was in New York City. The crowds, you know? And the gaiety of it all?” he said. “That was the first big positive crowd I saw since I got out.”
Every so often these guys let slip a phrase that reveals how long they spent in prison. Forty-one years and four months for Williams. Nearly 44 years for Owens; 41 and change for Shakir. They were all convicted of murder in the early 1970s. Shakir was 19 when he shot and killed a 77-year-old confectioner during a stickup. He wanted money to buy drugs. Owens had just turned 20 when he gunned down a dry cleaner, also during a robbery to fuel a drug habit. The circumstances around Williams’ conviction are murkier. He maintained his innocence and had a strong alibi, but his alleged accomplice testified against him in exchange for immunity, sticking him with the same sentence Shakir and Owens got: life in prison.
Back then, lifers who demonstrated good behavior and personal growth could get paroled after 20 or 25 years. But in the following decades, the state’s prison system became more punitive. Maryland is one of three states where the governor can overturn the parole board’s decision to release a prisoner. In 1995, after a lifer named Rodney Stokes committed a brutal murder while on work release, Governor Parris Glendening, a Democrat, said the parole board shouldn’t bother sending him any more applications from lifers, because “life means life.” Every governor since has followed his lead. So by the time Williams and Shakir and Owens had put in their 25 years, it didn’t matter what they had done with their time. They weren’t getting out. They were going to die in prison, with their loved ones far away. But then a fellow inmate named Merle Unger Jr. discovered an unexpected kind of door.
Freed On A Fluke And Trying Not To F**k Up
It's a lengthy but interesting read.
“That’s the Herc I always knew. Lifting that thing like it was nothing,” shouted 64-year-old Larry Owens, who sometimes walks with a cane. “You’re gonna feel that tomorrow.”
“I feel it now,” Williams said, setting the table down and placing a hand on his back. “I feel it now.”
Donald Shakir, the beneficiary of all this labor, saw that Williams was having trouble and grabbed the table from his hands, pulling it up the steps and into the living room. Shakir is a muscular 63-year-old with thick black glasses and a bright-orange beard. He’s legally blind and can’t see at all out of his left eye, even with the glasses. He also suffers from arthritis in his knees, but if the pain was bothering him that afternoon, he didn’t let on.
He had been leading the operation, telling the guys where to put a chair or a couch, insisting on lifting the heavier objects, pausing every so often to look around at his new neighborhood.
He didn’t want to call attention to himself, but this was a big day for him, a setting down of roots after a period of upheaval and wandering. Three years earlier, he had met a woman named Nzinga Amon and fell in love. They moved in together. At first, they slept on a couch in Shakir’s sister’s basement; they had to spoon each other to keep from falling off. “Hoooooo,” Amon says now. “It was hilarious. But what do they say: love is blind?” After that, they moved to a cramped one-bedroom apartment. This new place, though—a house instead of an apartment, with a Formstone facade, on a quiet block in southwest Baltimore? “It means stability,” Amon told me.
After the men unpacked the first load of boxes and furniture, they drove the empty U-Haul back to the old place to load up again, passing fans and flower pots through an open first-floor window. Inside, a TV was tuned to the Orioles’ first game of the season.
“The Orioles ain’t won nothing since I’ve been home,” Hercules Williams said, shaking his head. He was dressed in an Orioles raincoat and a white Orioles cap. He told me that he went to his first game at Camden Yards three years ago and couldn’t believe the size of it; he’d only ever seen a game at the far smaller Memorial Stadium, which the team abandoned in 1991. “I thought I was in New York City. The crowds, you know? And the gaiety of it all?” he said. “That was the first big positive crowd I saw since I got out.”
Every so often these guys let slip a phrase that reveals how long they spent in prison. Forty-one years and four months for Williams. Nearly 44 years for Owens; 41 and change for Shakir. They were all convicted of murder in the early 1970s. Shakir was 19 when he shot and killed a 77-year-old confectioner during a stickup. He wanted money to buy drugs. Owens had just turned 20 when he gunned down a dry cleaner, also during a robbery to fuel a drug habit. The circumstances around Williams’ conviction are murkier. He maintained his innocence and had a strong alibi, but his alleged accomplice testified against him in exchange for immunity, sticking him with the same sentence Shakir and Owens got: life in prison.
Back then, lifers who demonstrated good behavior and personal growth could get paroled after 20 or 25 years. But in the following decades, the state’s prison system became more punitive. Maryland is one of three states where the governor can overturn the parole board’s decision to release a prisoner. In 1995, after a lifer named Rodney Stokes committed a brutal murder while on work release, Governor Parris Glendening, a Democrat, said the parole board shouldn’t bother sending him any more applications from lifers, because “life means life.” Every governor since has followed his lead. So by the time Williams and Shakir and Owens had put in their 25 years, it didn’t matter what they had done with their time. They weren’t getting out. They were going to die in prison, with their loved ones far away. But then a fellow inmate named Merle Unger Jr. discovered an unexpected kind of door.
Freed On A Fluke And Trying Not To F**k Up
It's a lengthy but interesting read.
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