Convicted

by Jameel Zookie McGee

  “Man, what has been your deal all these months? What did you do?” he said.

  “Honestly, I didn’t do nothing,” I said.

  He sort of shook his head. “Usually when people come in here and act like you been acting, they’ve committed murders or something really bad like that,” he said.

  I laughed. “Nah man, ain’t nothing like that.”

  “Well, when you get the time, we can, you know, sit down and talk about it now that I know you ain’t all on edge.”

  “Cool,” I said, “we can do that.” As I walked away I glanced back and noticed him talking to another guy. The older gentleman made a motion with his hand to indicate he thought I was crazy. I couldn’t blame him. I just laughed and went on my way.

  This conversation was at least a start. I knew I had to keep making an effort to connect with people every day. I started playing cards and lifting weights with the other guys, just talking and getting to know them. Since this prison was going to be my home for the next six or seven years, I needed to treat it that way. I was tired of being alone.

  A few days after my breakthrough on the walking track, a letter came for me. This was no ordinary letter. I had to sign for it, which meant it was some kind of official document. I’d had a really good week in the band room, helping guys record some music, and I was feeling pretty good. The envelope made me nervous. Inside was a letter from John, my attorney. The news wasn’t good. The appeals court had denied John’s final, last-ditch appeal to get me out. I sat on the edge of my bed for several minutes, holding the letter, thinking about what it meant. That’s it then, I thought. There is absolutely nothing else I can do about any of this. It is what it is—ten years, federal prison.

  Every other denied appeal had left me boiling inside. This letter was my test. Had I really let it go? Had I truly surrendered my situation to God? Then I remembered the verse from 2 Chronicles: “The battle is not yours, but God’s.” I thought to myself, This isn’t my fight. God’s got it. Jameel, just let it go.

  And I did.

  Andrew

  After the sergeant drove me home from the station, I told my wife I was in trouble for some drugs I hadn’t handled correctly. “I should have put them into evidence, but I never did and now they want to prosecute me over it,” I said. I’d lived a lie for so long I actually believed what I told her. When the story broke on the news that night and my face was plastered across the screen, I believe doubts crept into my wife’s mind about me.

  Even though the situation could not have looked worse, I still thought I could find a way out of it. Surely if I explained that in my zeal to get more drugs off the street I had simply forgotten to log these drugs into evidence, my superiors would understand that. I’d admit I’d been lazy and sloppy. I rehearsed what I planned to say over and over in my head until I nearly believed it myself.

  My plan for redemption blew up when I met with the police union attorney. The first words out of his mouth were, “I’m not sure what you did, but this is getting big.”

  I tried to play it cool. I gave him that old “I don’t know what you’re talking about” look and said, “Big? Really? How?”

  “Now the FBI is involved. They’re already talking about indicting you for a racketeering conspiracy. Investigators are interviewing all your confidential informants because apparently the police suspect you lied about your controlled buys. Word is the money that was supposed to go to the CPIs went into your pocket,” he said.

  I tried not to react, but I knew I was dead where I stood. Only one other person on earth knew about my pocketing money. B must have come clean. But if he had, he would have had to tell on himself as well. Or he may have simply lied to save himself. The thin blue line had failed me again.

  I could hardly force words out of my mouth. Finally, I managed to spit out, “So what can I do?”

  “If you resign immediately, they might back off since they will have given the public what they want, which is to get rid of you,” he said.

  “Okay,” I said. My little plan to save my job was no longer an option. Now I hoped to avoid going to prison. With great reservation on my part, the union attorney and I went to the chief’s office, where I signed my resignation papers. I could not believe my dream was dying like this. On the way out of the station, I ran into the captain and B. The two were walking along, joking with one another, until they saw me. B’s eyes dropped to the floor. The captain stared a hole through me. I recognized the look. It was the same one I gave suspects after I’d nailed them.

  When I returned home I collapsed onto a chair in the living room and felt the weight of all my failures crashing down on me. Back in my bedroom I had a .357 Magnum hidden where my daughter could not accidentally find it. Sitting alone in my living room, alternating between crying jags and fits of anger, I thought how easy it would be to grab my gun and go out into the woods behind our house and end it all. With any luck, my wife wouldn’t be the one to find me. Maybe no one would. Everyone could then get on with their lives. They’d all be better off without me.

  Thankfully, my wife came home from work before I put my plan into action. She took one look at me and said, “I think you should go talk to Pastor Brian.” Brian Rumor was the pastor at New Life Baptist Church in St. Joseph. I’d been there a few times with my wife and daughter. The church seemed loving, and Pastor Brian genuinely seemed to care about people. But he also had a way of talking in his sermons about whatever I had done wrong the week before. I didn’t know who had been talking to him about me, but he seemed to know all my secret sins. That’s why I didn’t attend very often. I hated coming out of Sunday services feeling so bad about myself.

  When I went to see him on February 20, 2008, I knew I couldn’t feel any worse about myself or life than I already did. If he’d watched the news or read a newspaper, he probably had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to talk about when I made the appointment. I might not have gone except Pastor Brian had been a cop before he became a pastor. If anyone could understand the pressures I’d felt and why I did what I did, it was him.

  Pastor Brian welcomed me into his office and offered me a seat. After a long, awkward silence, he asked, “What’s going on?” His tone of voice struck me. He didn’t sound like a cop conducting an investigation. To me he sounded like a compassionate friend comforting someone who had just lost a family member.

  “Can I trust you with a secret?” I asked.

  Pastor Brian rocked back in his chair and took a deep breath. “Anything you tell me will be held in the strictest confidence. If the president of the United States subpoenaed me to his office and asked me about you, I could not tell him anything you tell me.”

  I let out a long sigh. “Okay.” Another delay. “Well, I guess I should start from the beginning.” I then dumped everything on him in what felt like one breath.

  When I finally finished talking, Pastor Brian looked across at me and said, “Boy, you are in a mess of trouble.”

  That wasn’t what I expected to hear. I wanted him to make me feel better, to give me hope that everything was going to turn out all right. Instead, he told me what I already knew. Doubt overwhelmed me. I wondered why I had made the horrible mistake of saying anything to him. What a terrible counselor! My every instinct was to get up and run out. I might have, but I could not muster up the energy to even stand, much less run.

  Pastor Brian let me hang there for a few moments before adding, “How’s your relationship with Jesus?”

  Jesus? What does this have to do with Jesus? I’m not sure why I was so surprised that a Baptist preacher wanted to talk to me about Jesus, but it was as if I had run into a brick wall with that question. I rattled off stories of how my grandfather had been a youth pastor and how my grandmother had been a pillar of the church.

  “That’s all well and good, but I didn’t ask about your family. I asked about you. How’s your relationship with Jesus?” he asked again. Memories flooded back of going to church as a boy when I was seven or eig
ht and praying a prayer asking Jesus to save me.

  Finally, I confessed, “I don’t deserve Jesus! Didn’t you hear me tell you what I’ve done? I don’t deserve him.”

  “None of us do,” he said with an intent look. “We’re all sinners, fallen short of God’s glory. None of us ‘deserve’ Jesus. That’s the beauty of grace. Andrew, I believe you when you say you accepted Jesus into your life as your Savior as a boy, but you’ve never trusted him to be the Lord of your life, to guide your steps, to help you see how to live.”

  My mind flashed back to all the events that had led me to this place. I’d been in charge of my life and I’d made a mess of it. Looking ahead, I couldn’t see anything, at least not anything good. When death looks to be your best option, you’ve probably hit bottom.

  “I’m at the end of myself and I need someone else to take over because I’ve screwed everything up royally,” I said.

  “All right then,” he said. “Why don’t you kneel down here on the floor with me.”

  I agreed, but it put me a little on edge. I’d prayed many times in my life, but I never felt compelled to get down on my knees. Before I could say anything, Pastor Brian started talking to God about me as though he were talking to his own dad. I’d never heard anyone pray like that. He told God all I had done as if God hadn’t been in the room when I’d spilled my guts. The funny thing is, the more Pastor Brian talked to God, the more I was right there with him, agreeing and talking to God myself. The Father was in the room and I could feel his presence. Before I got up off my knees, I confessed to my Father all I had done and asked him to save me based on what Jesus did for me when he died on the cross. I also asked him to fill my heart and take over my life. I turned everything over to him, even though there wasn’t much to give.

  The more I prayed and the more I confessed, the more I felt him lift the burden off my shoulders. I didn’t feel better about myself. I experienced something better. By the time I got up off my knees, I didn’t matter anymore. My life was now his and his life was now mine. I had a new start and a new life. I felt free, and tears of joy flowed. And the whole mess with the police department and the FBI investigation and a possible indictment? It all disappeared, and my wife and daughter and I lived happily ever after. The end.

  Except, we didn’t.

  We started going to church together as a family, and I continued talking to Pastor Brian. People within the church recognized me, which I expected given the news coverage, but I never felt judged. My life was changing for the better, but I still faced a mess of my own making.

  When I resigned from the police department, I received a check for unused vacation time as well as payment for the money I had paid into my retirement. Three months after leaving the department, though, our money was nearly gone. Thankfully, I found a temporary summer job driving for UPS. If everything went well, I would have a good chance of being hired on permanently.

  But my wife and I weren’t doing quite so well. Even before everything blew up with my old job, the two of us were having problems. After she learned I’d been living a lie for most of our married life, the strain got even worse. We hardly talked. I felt like a failure because I couldn’t support the family financially. Given all I’d put my wife through, I thought she probably also had trouble trusting me. I couldn’t blame her.

  And then there was the stress of not knowing what was going to happen once the FBI finished its investigation. I read my Bible like I never had before, and I prayed with an intensity I didn’t know was possible, but the elephant never left the room. We couldn’t make plans for the future because we had no idea if I even had a future.

  The strain hit its peak one day when I was home alone with my little girl. I looked outside and saw a familiar SUV pull quickly into my driveway. I recognized the vehicle right away as one that belonged to an FBI agent named Al with whom I’d worked closely on several drug cases. Now he was at my house. He had to be here to arrest me.

  The moment the SUV came to a stop, I grabbed my two-year-old daughter and ran into a closet, closing the door behind us. She thought the whole thing was a game and started to laugh, but I held my finger up to my lips to tell her to be quiet while also trying to act like I was playing along. A loud knock rang out from the door. I held my breath. A vision of Al dragging me out of the closet in handcuffs while my little girl screamed and cried ran through my head. I reached down to my pocket for my phone only to realize I’d left it in the living room. Now I had no way of calling someone to come get her.

  Another knock, even louder this time. Then another. Finally, I heard a car door close. Slowly I opened the closet door and did an army crawl across the floor to the window. Out in the driveway I saw two women get back in the vehicle. They’d left Watchtower magazines from the Jehovah’s Witnesses at my door.

  —

  August rolled around. Six months had passed since I had resigned. My wife and I went to a wedding in a quiet little town on the shores of Lake Michigan while our daughter stayed with her grandparents. Getting away from Benton Harbor, just the two of us, worked wonders for our relationship. The two of us walked hand in hand through little shops and on the shore. It almost felt as though we were the ones getting married. By the time we came home, everything had changed between us.

  I tried to call in sick to UPS the day after we returned. It was raining and windy and seemed like the perfect day to cuddle up with my wife in bed and escape the worries of the world. My boss, however, didn’t see it that way. He already had two or three other drivers out. I had to go in. I got up, dressed, and reported to work.

  Six hours later I was writhing in pain, my UPS truck resting against the garage of a house. My brakes had failed on the slick streets, sending me through an intersection. I hit the front passenger-side corner panel of a pickup truck, which caused it to do a complete 180 in the intersection. Time slowed. I remember thinking, That wasn’t so bad. Then I saw the tree. My truck bounced off the tree and didn’t stop moving until I hit the garage.

  My left leg was pinned between the seat and what was left of the dashboard. Somehow I managed to pull it free myself. I hobbled over to check on the driver of the pickup truck. As it turned out, my leg was broken and so were my spirits. Because of the accident I knew my chances of landing a permanent driver’s job were nil.

  I didn’t know how I could face my wife after this. We’d just had what felt like a fresh start. Now I feared we were back to square one. At least things can’t get any worse, I thought.

  —

  Two days later my phone rang. On the other end was a friend from the police department. Turns out not everyone on the department had abandoned me after all. “We need to meet tonight,” he said.

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “I just had an accident, and I don’t know if my wife will understand if I take off all of a sudden for a meeting.”

  “This is pretty serious, Andrew,” he said in a way that let me know I had to see him.

  “Let me put Krissy on the phone and have you explain things to her,” I said. I gave my wife the phone. She went into our bedroom to talk while I sat on the living room floor and played with our daughter. A few minutes later she came back. The look on her face told me something was wrong.

  “What did he say?” I asked.

  “He said he needed to talk to you tonight because some things are going down with the criminal investigation,” she said. “I asked him if you were going to jail and he said, ‘Not tonight.’ ”

  “Then I better go see him,” I said.

  “Yeah.”

  —

  The news was bad. “A grand jury has been called for your case. At least two officers on the department have been subpoenaed to testify against you,” my friend said. He paused for a moment. “It looks really bad because, you know…”

  He didn’t have to say the rest. I knew what was coming.

  When I returned home I went straight to my daughter’s room and sat on the floor to watch her sleep. I was afraid
to talk to my wife because I didn’t want to face reality. With all that had already happened in 2008, I couldn’t add a separation or divorce to the mix. I thought if I didn’t say the words, they weren’t true.

  Part of me was angry with God. I’ve come clean with him. Why doesn’t he fix all this? Those thoughts didn’t last long. God hadn’t done this. I did it to myself. That’s why I sat in the dark in my daughter’s room. I wanted to be a dad, watching over and protecting my daughter.

  Oh, God, how could I have done this to her?

  As I sat in the dark, hugging my knees to my chest, I saw my wife standing in the bedroom door. After what felt like an eternity, she asked, “What did he say?”

  I couldn’t talk. My tongue was stuck to the roof of my mouth.

  “What’s going on?” I could tell she was getting annoyed.

  I didn’t say a word until she simply said, “Seriously?”

  I looked up at her. A look of disappointment and anger flashed from her eyes. I looked away, trying to work up the courage to say the words. Finally, I simply said, “I’m getting indicted.”

  Krissy turned and walked away without saying a word. Fear paralyzed me as the realization hit that I was going to prison. I sat on the floor of my daughter’s room in the dark and wept over the thought of my little girl growing up without me.

  —

  When I knew a federal indictment was inevitable, I immediately started looking for a good defense lawyer with extensive experience in the federal justice system. I didn’t just need a defense attorney who could fight for me. I needed one who knew the ins and outs of the federal system, which is different from Michigan’s state system.

  A friend referred me to Frank Stanley in Grand Rapids. The first time we met he explained how everything we talked about was protected under attorney-client privilege. Then he added, “If you’re guilty, the best thing to do is minimize the damage. If you’re innocent, I’ll fight for you with everything I have. Now, I must tell you, the federal government does not like to lose cases they prosecute, especially in a case involving police corruption. I guarantee you they’re going to come at you with all they’ve got as well.”