“But you have a drug case. That means you have to take the program,” the counselor argued.
“I don’t have a drug case,” I said.
“That’s not what your record says.”
“I don’t.”
“Anybody who was caught using or selling drugs has to take this class. It is a requirement by law,” he said.
“Yeah, well, I’m not taking it. I have never done any drugs and I didn’t sell any drugs. I hate drugs, so I ain’t taking any drug rehab class.”
“But it’s the law!”
“I don’t care. I’m not taking it. You can send me to the hole if you want, but I am not taking that class.”
“All right. So be it,” the counselor said, and the meeting was over.
About three weeks into my stay in the camp, I got up as if I were at home and went to work. I drove a group of guys out to the highway and dropped them off, then came back to the camp to do a little mowing. Even though it was early February, we’d had enough warm days that some weeds were sticking up. I drove the truck over to the shop to pick up a zero-turn mower, which I planned to use between a couple of the cottage houses that made up our housing units. I got out of the truck and heard the camp intercom crackle. “126945040, report to the warden’s office.” In prison you don’t have a name. You have a number, and this one was mine.
My heart sank. All my appeals had been denied, so I knew they weren’t calling to give me good news. Has to be the fights, I thought. Those guys back at Milan finally spilled their guts about how I beat ’em up, and now I’m fixing to go to the hole. I couldn’t think of any other reason the warden might want to see me. It had to be the fights back at Milan. My past has finally caught me.
If I wasn’t about to be sent to the hole for fighting at Milan, I figured it had to be my argument with the drug counselor. I’d even told him he could send me to the hole when I refused to take his drug class. Maybe he had called my bluff. Or maybe they were going to send me back to Milan or, worse, across the street to USP, all because I made a big deal about not taking the drug class. Either way, this was going to be bad.
Since nothing good could come out of my going to see the warden, I ignored the intercom and kept on working. I figured if they really needed me, they knew exactly where I was. They could send a truck out here and get me. I wasn’t going to them. I mowed for a while and then took one of the Gators out to pick up some trash around the camp. When I was finished, I hauled the vehicle back to the shop and headed back toward Interstate 70 in my truck to pick up my crew. All the while the voice over the intercom kept saying, “126945040, report to the warden’s office.”
I kept ignoring it. The timing for this setback could not have been worse. I was finally in a good place spiritually and emotionally and even physically. If I had to spend the next six or seven years in a federal prison, I might as well spend it here. Working on a landscaping crew wasn’t my dream job, but at least I got to be outside and I had some degree of freedom. Plus I got to work with the musicians in chapel, including the original Isley brother. I did not want to lose all of this to some stupid mistakes I made when I let my hate and anger at the cop who put me here boil over.
My crew unloaded the trash they’d collected and threw it in a Dumpster. By now it was around three in the afternoon. All through the drive back from the highway and over to the Dumpster, I felt sick to my stomach. I knew I was going to have to respond to the warden’s summons sooner or later, and the time was now. With my work finished I went back to my unit. The first guy I saw said, “Hey, they’ve been calling you all day. You should probably go see what they want.”
“Yeah, I’m fixing to,” I said. But instead of heading straight to the office, I went back to my room and changed clothes. I figured if I was going to the hole, I didn’t want to go in clothes covered with dirt and grass. There wasn’t time for a shower, but I wished there was. It might well be my last chance to shower for a few weeks. Oh well, time to face the music, I thought and headed straight to the warden’s office.
When I walked in the door, the warden asked me a strange question. He said, “Where would you go if you were released today, tomorrow, or six months from now?”
Release? Why is he asking me about release? I sort of shrugged my shoulders and said, “I guess to my grandma’s house.”
“I need an address,” he said. I wondered why. Then he started writing things down in a ledger book. After a few moments he looked up at me and said, “I guess you were right.” The fax machine beeped. He reached over, took the piece of paper from it, and handed it to me. “You have fifteen minutes to vacate the premises,” he said.
Wait? What? I read the paper. It was an order from Judge Bell saying my conviction had been overturned and I needed to leave the prison premises immediately. I looked up at the warden. He showed no emotion at all.
“Really! This says what I think it says?” I asked.
“You have fifteen minutes to gather your belongings and go,” he said to me like a landlord evicting someone for not paying their rent. “If you need anything from your room, you need to go get it now.” He then handed me a one-way bus ticket to Benton Harbor by way of Indianapolis. There was no apology over my wrongful conviction. No “good luck to you.” No nothing. It was basically a vibe that said, “You’re trespassing and you have to leave.”
“Man, I don’t need nothing!” I said and headed toward the door. I walked outside and yelled, “Thank you, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus!” I knew this was nothing I or any man had done. The appeals court had thrown out every one of my lawyer’s requests for my release. Humanly speaking, I should not have walked out of these gates for another six or seven years. The only explanation for my release was God. The timing also had his hands all over this. The day was February 4, 2009, my son’s fourth birthday.
I nearly danced out of the prison and down the sidewalk toward the street. I wasn’t just free. My conviction had been overturned. I was an innocent man. I didn’t have a parole officer to report to or probation to keep. I had just been handed my life back. Hallelujah! Praise Jesus! All the way down the walkway and out through the front gate of the camp I kept dancing and praising God. Then I reached the street and realized, Oh geez, I don’t have a ride. Where am I gonna go now?
I walked to the end of the street, trying to figure out how I was going to get to the bus stop when I saw one of the officers in a prison van. He’d been out getting gas. When he saw me, he said, “I can run you up to the bus station right now. No problem.” Word had spread among the officers that my conviction had been overturned.
By the time the bus left Terre Haute and made the eighty-mile drive to Indianapolis, it was starting to get late. I got off the bus in Indy because my oldest brother, Kornell, lives there. I wanted to see my family and let them know what had happened instead of riding a bus all through the night. Since I did not have a phone of my own or money to use a pay phone (the prison gave me a bus ticket and nothing else when they set me free), the woman at the bus line main window let me use their phone. Kornell was surprised to hear my voice.
“Zookie? Hey, bro, what’s up?” he said.
“I need you to come get me.”
“What? Come get you? Where you at?”
“I’m in Indy at the bus station next to the football stadium. They let me go today. I’m a free man. The judge overturned my conviction.”
“Nah, I’m not going to come get you. You had to have busted out of jail,” Kornell said.
“I didn’t bust out. They let me go,” I said.
He still didn’t believe me. “Where are you?”
I told him again, “I’m at the bus station in downtown Indianapolis. It’s right across from the Colts’ football stadium.”
“How…” Then he said, “Hey, the phone you’re calling from isn’t a prison phone.” He had just noticed the caller ID.
“I told you they let me out.”
Kornell’s voice started getting louder. “Zook! Where you
at? You left that place for real?”
“Look, man, are you going to come get me or not?”
“Zook, man, I don’t know. What’s the number where you are right now?” Kornell wanted to call me back to make sure I was telling him the truth, because he still didn’t believe me.
I asked the lady who’d let me use the phone if I could receive a call. She told me that normally they didn’t allow it, but given the circumstances, she would. I gave Kornell the number, and he called back immediately. When he heard the lady say “Bus station” and then hand the phone to me, he nearly went crazy.
“What are you doing at a bus station?” he yelled. “You have over six years left. There’s no way you should be out of that prison.”
“I’m telling you I am free as a bird. I’ll show you the paper when you get here. Now come get me!” Spending my first free night in a bus station was not what I had in mind when I danced out of the prison a few hours earlier.
“All right, I’m on my way,” Kornell said.
I sat down and waited for him. And waited. And waited. An hour passed. I started to wonder if I should just get on the bus to Benton Harbor. Then the lady at the desk called my name. “There’s a phone call for you,” she said.
It was Kornell. The first thing he said was, “Where you at?”
“Bro, are you kidding me? I told you I’m at the bus station in Indy. Are you coming to get me or not?” I said, more than a little angry with him.
“You for real, ain’t you?” he said. “They for real let you out of there.”
“Yes. I told you I was. I’m at the bus station and I’m ready to get out of here. Dude, I can’t even talk to you anymore. Here, talk to the lady and then come get me or I’m getting on the bus right now.”
I gave the phone back to the woman. She spoke to my brother for a short time and then said to me, “He’s on his way right now.”
Twenty minutes later Kornell pulled into the bus station. When he saw me, his eyes got wide. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He ran over and hugged me and said, “Zookie, I thought you were playing a joke on me.”
“I told you I was here,” I said. Even as I said this I noticed Kornell’s eyes darting around like he expected the police to pull up at any moment. I pulled out the letter. “Here, read this,” I said.
After Kornell read it, he looked up at me in shock. “You’re free!”
“Yeah man. I’m free.”
Andrew
“Where are you going?” my three-year-old daughter asked as I stood in the kitchen dressed in a suit and tie.
I crouched down to her eye level and said, “Daddy has to go to court in Grand Rapids.”
She threw her arms around my neck and cried, “Daddy, don’t go!”
Tears welled up in my eyes. I wanted to tell her everything was going to be okay and I’d be back soon, but I couldn’t. I could not lie to my daughter. “I have to go, sweetie. I don’t have a choice.”
“No, Daddy, don’t go,” she sobbed. “Don’t leave me.”
Believe me, I did not want to leave her. She’d never cried like this when I left the house. Everyone knew she was a daddy’s girl, but this was out of character even for her. She knows, kept running through my head.
Finally I managed to extricate myself from her grip around my neck, and her grandma pulled her into her arms. I kissed my daughter goodbye and walked out the door wondering if I would ever kiss her in this kitchen again. My wife and I climbed into our car for the drive to Grand Rapids for my appointment in Judge Bell’s courtroom. We pulled out of our driveway on the morning of January 26, 2009, not knowing when, or if, I’d be back.
Because I planned to plead guilty to the charges against me, I didn’t have a trial per se. I appeared before Judge Bell to formally enter my plea. I’d been in his courtroom many times before, but this was the first time I noticed how everything was designed to intimidate the accused. The high ceilings and the judge sitting above the proceedings made me feel very, very small. Then I heard the words ring out, “The United States of America versus Andrew Collins.” The United States of America—the entire country—now stands against me, I thought. I could hardly bear it.
After reading the charges against me and explaining my case, Judge Bell said with a cold tone, “Andrew, how do you plead?”
“Guilty, your honor.”
“Have you been offered anything in return for a guilty verdict?” Judge Bell asked.
“No, your honor,” I said. This was the truth. The proffer was not a substantiated offer. There was the understanding that my sentence might be reduced for my cooperation, but no deal had been struck.
“Can you give factual evidence for your guilty plea?” he asked. Frank, my attorney, had explained this ahead of time. I could not just say “guilty.” The court had to make sure I understood the charges against me.
“Yes, your honor, I can.”
“Well, tell me the circumstances of your case,” the judge said. “You have pleaded guilty to possession with intent to deliver. Just who were you delivering to?”
“I did not sell the drugs and I did not deliver them to people,” I said.
“Then how did you distribute them?” he asked.
“I kept the drugs in a locked container in my office. I used them as evidence, usually to attain a search warrant. When I needed them for this purpose, I packaged them and delivered them to the drug lab, where they were tested and then destroyed. So I guess you could say I delivered them to the person doing the testing,” I explained.
“Don’t you think that’s stretching the ‘delivery’ piece a bit?” Judge Bell said with a tone that told me he was looking for more. Delivery meant delivery for sale, not carrying them down the hall of the police station. I got the feeling he wanted me to admit to something more than I had done or this whole proffer might come right off the table.
“No, your honor, because this is what I did.”
He paused long enough to make me feel very uncomfortable. Finally he said, “So just to clarify, you carried the drugs to a lab, where they were tested and destroyed?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. Your plea is accepted.” He then read off the sentencing guidelines for the charges against me. The mandatory minimum was five years. The maximum was something like twenty or twenty-five years. It could have been seventy-five for all I know. All I remember was thinking it was a really long time, which made me very thankful I had cooperated with the FBI and prosecutors the past few months. Frank assured me the maximum was not a possibility. He hoped to secure something below even the minimum.
Once my plea was accepted, I expected to go home, still on bail, until my sentencing hearing. But the prosecutor would not have it. He stood and read a part of the federal statute covering guilty pleas to drug offenses. According to the letter of the law, when a guilty plea is entered, the defendant “shall be remanded to custody.” Frank argued that the judge had discretion in such cases, that the law did not mean I had to be taken into custody immediately. The two went back and forth, arguing over the meaning of the word shall. In the end, Judge Bell agreed with the prosecutor.
When he made the announcement, I heard my wife gasp from the back of the courtroom. Federal marshals then led me to a holding cell, from which I was transported to the Kent County Jail in Grand Rapids. Although my formal sentencing hearing was scheduled for June, my imprisonment had already begun.
—
Since I was an ex-cop, the Kent County Jail didn’t quite know what to do with me. They did not want to put me in with the general population in case someone recognized me. I might well run into someone I had put behind bars, and if I did, things might get ugly. Not knowing what else to do with me, they placed me in solitary confinement for my own protection. For two days I spent twenty-three hours a day alone in a cell, cut off from all outside contact. They let me out only for meals, which I ate by myself, and exercise, which consisted of a solitary walk around the unit.
The firs
t day I had to make a decision whether to walk or stand in line to use one of the few pay phones available. I opted for the latter because I needed to talk to my wife. Given how rocky the past year had been, I did not know what to expect when we finally spoke. Even before our world collapsed, we seemed on the path to divorce. My being locked up could have been the clean break she needed. Not that I would have blamed her. After all, I’d brought this nightmare on her. No one would fault her if she opted for a fresh start without me rather than putting her life on hold for the next five years or more.
These thoughts ran through my head when I finally got to the phone. Making a phone call from jail is not an easy process. You have to call collect, and the person on the other end has to agree to set up an account to cover the costs. I think that’s why a lot of men and women in prison never talk to anyone on the outside. I let out a sigh of relief when my wife agreed to accept the charges. Looking back, I had no reason to think she might refuse the call, but your mind plays tricks on you when you’re behind bars.
I was relieved just to hear the sound of Krissy’s voice. Then she said something that gave me the strength to face whatever lay ahead. “I’m fighting for us,” she said. “We’re in this together. Wherever you go, I got you.”
Hope filled my heart. I knew we were going to make it now.
—
Over the next few months the feds moved me every few weeks or even every few days from one county jail to another. Some places put me in solitary; others turned me out with the general population. I stayed busy reading. I read my Bible a lot. I also read Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven Life. My uncle gave me a copy of Chuck Colson’s Born Again, which recounts not only his time in Washington but also his time in a federal prison because of Watergate. The book helped prepare me for what I faced. Thanks to Colson’s book, part of me looked forward to seeing how God might use me behind the walls.
Convicted Page 14
