But apparently there was a way, because he didn’t see it. “Let me tell you a little about myself,” Andrew said. “I was a police officer here in Benton Harbor, but I did some stupid things and made some mistakes that hurt a lot of people around here. If I’ve wronged you or your family, please let me know so we can talk about it—”
I cut him off. “Wait a minute. You don’t remember me?”
“No,” he said.
I shook my head and smiled. “You serious? You really don’t remember me,” I said.
“How should I know you?” he asked. Now he was the one who was confused.
“Broadway Park” was all I said.
Then it clicked. “Oh shoot,” he said as he pushed back his chair. “That Jameel McGee?”
“Yeah, that’s me.”
Andrew
The moment Jameel said the words Broadway Park the memory came flooding back. I could see him staring at me, squeezing the life out of my hand, jaws clenched, angry. When he walked away that day I thought I’d never get a chance to make things right with him.
“I am so sorry, man,” I said. As I said this I remembered how angry he was the last time we saw each other. I did a quick look around the café and back toward the resale store to see how many customers we had, just in case I had to do some damage control. I had no idea what might be about to happen.
“It’s fine,” Jameel said with a look and a tone that made me think it really might be fine.
“No, it’s not fine,” I said. “I hurt you and I am so sorry for that, for everything I did to you.”
“It’s taken care of. It’s over. It’s done. It’s forgiven,” Jameel said.
We went back and forth like this for what seemed like a very long time. Finally, Jameel stopped me and said, “It’s taken care of because God’s got it. I don’t deal with that situation because I gave it over to God. It’s his now. I have nothing to do with it.”
“There’s got to be something more I can do,” I said.
“Man, if you want to do something more, then you gotta take that up with God,” he said. “Right now, I’m just trying to get my life back together.” Jameel went on to tell me about all he’d been through over the past couple of years and all the roadblocks he still faced. “I’m just tired from dealing with it all,” he said. “I’m worn out. If it keeps going like it has been going, my next step is just to say ‘Bye, everybody’ and be done with it.”
I saw the hurt in Jameel’s eyes. “That’s heavy,” I said. “You seem tired.” When I said those words, he began to tear up and look away. I’ve been there before, betrayed by my own emotions. It was clear Jameel no longer wanted to fake it and wear a happy mask. I didn’t know what else to say, so I said, “Can we pray?”
“Yeah, let’s pray,” Jameel said.
So I started praying. I began by praying for Jameel and what he was going through. Then I thanked God for what had just happened and asked him to bless what was to come. I asked him to bless this opportunity to grow together and to bless our friendship, which probably sounded really odd because, honestly, how do you become friends with someone who lied and put you in federal prison and generally ruined your life? But I prayed it anyway.
After I said amen, I looked over at Jameel. “You think we can do this?” I asked.
Jameel smiled and nodded. “I think God wants us to do it.”
“There’s a lot of history between us,” I cautioned. “Do you really think we can move beyond it all and go forward?”
“Yeah, we gotta be able to do that. And if we can move forward, then maybe we can teach other people how to do the same,” he said.
“Okay,” I said, relieved. “We’ll meet on Tuesday, then.”
“Tuesday it is,” Jameel said.
After Jameel left, I went into the back room of the café. I walked past one of the girls who worked for me and then burst into tears. She came over and put her arm on my back. “Drew, what’s wrong? What’s wrong?”
“I…” I had trouble forcing the words out. “I put that dude in prison with a ten-year sentence.”
“What!?” she said. “What did he say to you?” The way she said it made me think she thought Jameel had laid into me.
I looked over at her. “He forgave me.”
As soon as I said that, I lost it completely. The dam of emotions broke. I felt like I did the day I first confessed everything to my pastor and to God. A lightness came over me. I felt clean. I felt…forgiven.
Later that day the girl told me she was moving to Indianapolis. That meant I had a job opening I needed to fill.
Andrew
I had never heard Jameel’s side of the story of his arrest until maybe the second or third time we met as part of the Jobs for Life program. It wasn’t because he’d never told me. He told me his side of the story when I first confronted him at the door of the convenience store on Fair Street in February 2006. But at that moment I wasn’t interested in what he had to say. I already knew everything I needed to know. Of course he claimed he didn’t know anything about the dope in the car. Of course he swore it wasn’t his and he didn’t have anything to do with it.
In all my time on the police department, no one I busted ever said, “Okay, you got me. I’m guilty.” Even if I caught someone with dope in their jeans pocket, they’d claim they put on their brother’s pants that morning and had no idea how that dope got there. I expected Jameel, who I thought was Ox at the time, to say he didn’t have anything to do with the crack I knew was his. Everyone I ever arrested said that, including the guy I arrested with Jameel that morning.
When I arrested Jameel, I knew he was exactly the guy I was looking for. That’s why I lied on the police report and in my testimony at his trial. I knew—I mean I absolutely knew—that was his dope, and I was not going to let him get off on what I saw as a technicality.
After we met at Mosaic, I wasn’t so sure. Nearly every person the feds set free after my confession had ended up back in prison. Jameel didn’t. That gave me serious doubts about him being the big-time dealer I was after. But at the very least, I thought he had to have been an accomplice to the other guy in the car. If the dope in the cup holder had not been Jameel’s, he at least knew what was going down with the drug deal I’d set up through my informant. He and the other guy had to be working together.
Even after meeting with him and apologizing for how I had hurt him—and I had hurt him terribly because my lies had put him in prison—part of me deep down inside did not want to believe he was completely innocent. This belief had nothing to do with Jameel. It had everything to do with me. Even after all these years since I’d been caught and confessed and came clean with God, the city of Benton Harbor, the United States of America, and my victims, I could not bring myself to admit I had put an innocent man in prison. I still held on to a thin shred of hope that despite all the wrong I’d done, I had not sunk to that level of depravity. People were hurt, but it’s not like they were fine, upstanding pillars of the community. I could even justify taking the money that belonged to dealers. It wasn’t as though they’d earned that money through hard work. I’m not trying to minimize what I did. All I’m saying is I wanted to hold on to a last shred of dignity as a police officer. I tried to believe that deep down my motives had been pure, that all I really wanted to do was get bad people off the streets.
And then I made the mistake of asking Jameel about the day of his arrest. I asked because even though I did not want him to be innocent, I had to know one way or the other. This wasn’t the first time I’d asked someone a question like this. I did it pretty much every time I was reunited with a person I had put away. Obviously, I didn’t bring up the arrest if the person appeared ready to hurt me. And I always apologized for what I had done before I brought up anything else. Asking these kinds of questions in no way trivialized what I had done. This was just about easing my own conscience.
I don’t remember exactly how I brought the arrest up with Jameel. I didn’t do it in the
middle of a heavy conversation. Instead, I waited for a light moment and then said something like, “You know, on the day I arrested you, I never could find the car keys on you. Where’d you hide them?”
“I never had the keys,” Jameel responded. “I never drove that car.”
“Really?” I asked. Inside I felt my last little wall of self-defense about to crumble.
“No, man. That wasn’t my car. I was the passenger. I needed to get to the store to buy my baby some milk before he got to my house. I needed a ride, so I asked Will. Next thing I know, I’m getting arrested,” he said. “If you’d checked out the security tape from the store, you would have seen that.”
“So you had nothing to do with the drugs in the car?” I asked.
“Nope. I didn’t know anything about what Will was up to. I didn’t even know his real name. He was at my grandmother’s house with one of my cousins when I needed a ride. When we got to the store, I loaned him my phone. That’s all.”
And that’s when it hit me. I actually heard what he was saying, not as a cop with his mind already made up, but as a person sitting across from an innocent man in Cafe Mosaic on a very ordinary weekday morning. “So you were completely innocent,” I said.
“Yep,” Jameel said.
“Oh man,” I said, broken. “I am so sorry I did that to you.”
“I told you, Drew, I gave all that over to God. We’re good. It’s all forgiven,” he said.
“No, no, no. There’s got to be something more I can do for you,” I said.
“No man. There’s nothing.”
“Don’t you want to punch me or something?” I asked, only half joking.
Honestly, I think I’d have felt better if he had punched me. At the time I had no idea that while he was in prison, he fantasized about beating me to death. I didn’t know any of that until we started writing this book together. If I’d known, I probably wouldn’t have said it. But in that moment I felt I had to do something more than apologize. Saying I was sorry felt so small in comparison to how much damage I’d done to his life.
“No,” Jameel said with a big smile. “I don’t want to punch you. Like I told you, bro, if you want to do something more, take it up with God. I gave it to him. This is his deal now.”
I held it together for the rest of our meeting time. We moved on in the conversation to whatever it was we were supposed to talk about that day for the Jobs for Life program. But after he left I went off by myself and thought about what had just transpired. A whole new level of guilt and shame and regret rose up in me. My mind could hardly process the truth that now dawned on me. I did not break down and weep as I had after our first meeting. Those tears came out of the joy of being forgiven. Now I was trying to understand how much Jameel had actually forgiven. All I could think of was how I had destroyed his life. Not only had I put him in prison, but I had kept him from seeing his son for the first time.
And he has forgiven me…kept running through my head.
Later that evening I called my mom and told her, “I think I put an innocent man in prison.” She listened while I talked through everything I was feeling. I told her how I knew I’d hurt people but I always thought my crime had been in going too far. “I never thought anyone I put away was actually”—I could hardly say the word—“innocent. But he was. I really put an innocent man in prison.”
My mom listened, which she is really good at.
Since that conversation I’ve come to realize just how much I took away from Jameel. After surveying the totality of what was taken, I’ve come to the conclusion that the most harmful thing I did to him was take his voice away. As he cried out from jail those first couple of days, telling people he was not the person I was looking for, I took his voice away. When he relayed all the lies and deceit in my report to his lawyer and then heard each argument destroyed by more lies, I took his voice away. After every denied appeal, his voice was taken away.
To this day, the part of his story that haunts me the most is the fact that his own family, his own flesh and blood, believed he was the drug kingpin I had made him out to be. Voiceless. How many more voices have I stolen? Whose voices am I stifling now? My relationship with Jameel will forever change the way I evaluate all my relationships. I pray this book gives him his voice back.
The next time I saw Jameel, I apologized again. And again. I still do it to this day. Every time, he just smiles at me and tells me, “Drew, bro, we’re good. Quit apologizing.”
Maybe someday I will be able to stop. I haven’t reached that point yet.
Jameel
I don’t really know why I opened up to Andrew during that first meeting at Mosaic. Before I walked into the café, I had no idea how the conversation might go, but I never imagined it might include spilling my guts. I am a very private person. When things aren’t going too good, I shut down. No one except Dr. Carter at Riverwood knew how low my life had become. And yet there I was with the last person on earth I wanted to see, much less talk to, confessing I was tired and worn out and not too far from just checking out once and for all. God had to be the one to open my mouth. I don’t have any other explanation.
God’s timing did play a big part. Right before I met with Drew that morning, the Jobs for Life class talked about the pit. The speaker discussed how all the roadblocks in your life history have put you where you are. Life throws some of these roadblocks at you, and others you make yourself. After banging up against these roadblocks over and over again, you find yourself in an emotional pit where all you can do is focus on yourself. The pit gets so deep you can’t see the people who want to help you. You just look down, stuck, unable to crawl out. If by chance you manage to scratch your way up toward the top of the pit, the other people down there with you pull you back in.
Everything in this lesson spoke to me. Everything. I thought more and more about the pit I found myself in. My homelessness didn’t dig my pit, and neither did hurting my hand, which made it hard for me to work. Those are the obstacles. I’d dug my pit when I cut everyone else off and shut down emotionally. I sat at the bottom of my pit, focusing only on myself, and I couldn’t see the hands offering to pull me up. I think that’s why the book cover illustration of the one guy pulling up the other guy jumped out at me. God used it to tell me it was time for me to reach up and take someone’s hand.
Maybe that’s why I opened up and told Drew how much I was hurting. I needed to reach up and take someone’s hand, and his was the closest. Now that I think about it, he had to be the one. Who better to share my burden with than the one I had forgiven for the part he had in creating the obstacles that eventually led to my pit? It was as though by forgiving Drew, I stopped blaming him for where I was. And that set me free to let him help me out.
Andrew
The timing of Jameel’s coming in right when one of our employees had turned in her notice to quit had to be more than coincidence. I saw it as divine timing. Even so, I was a little nervous about asking him to work at Cafe Mosaic. Working as someone’s boss can put a strain on even a good relationship. I didn’t know what our relationship might be yet, but good wasn’t the word I’d use to describe it. Yet the more I thought and prayed about it, the more convinced I became that I should offer him the job.
The next time Jameel came in for our scheduled meeting, I bluntly asked him, “Are you a good employee? We’ve had an awkward enough relationship as it is.” Jameel didn’t know it yet, but I wanted to offer him a job.
“What?” Jameel asked.
“One of the women who works for me just turned in her two-weeks notice. I need to hire someone to replace her. It’s just a part-time job, but it’s a start,” I said.
Jameel looked at me with that big smile of his. “Are you serious?” he asked.
“Yeah, I am. How would you like to work for Cafe Mosaic?”
As soon as I asked him if he wanted the job, I saw a Jameel I had never seen before. He lit up. “Yeah. Yeah, I think I would. Now, I have an issue with my hand, but I th
ink I’ll be able to handle it,” he said.
I didn’t know about a hand issue, but I didn’t think this was the time to ask more about it. Instead, I asked, “Do you want to jump behind the counter and try it out and see if it works for you?”
“Let’s do it,” he said.
I showed him how to steam milk and make some of the coffee drinks. Two weeks later he officially started. From the start I realized asking him if he was a good employee was a ridiculous question. The man has an unbelievable work ethic. He not only went above and beyond whatever I asked of him but also constantly looked for ways to do his job better. Because the café is an entry-level job, and part time at that, no one works there for long. At first Jameel worked fewer than ten hours a week. Before long other people left, and I was able to increase his hours until he got up to around thirty or thirty-five hours a week.
With the two of us working closely together, I quickly figured out Jameel was homeless. The weather turns cold early in Michigan, which made me start bombarding him with questions about where he was going to stay and what he needed before winter came. I even tried to arrange things where he could come stay in my basement. I approached Krissy about it one night, and she gave me a very curious look before asking if I was serious. She said, “I’m glad you two are getting along, but what if he were to snap one night and kill you in your sleep?”
Jameel and I hadn’t known each other long. The thought of waking up with him standing at my bedside was a chilling thought. Maybe there were other options.
When we first started working together, I don’t think either of us thought we might become friends. However, the space behind the counter is pretty small, which meant we worked in close proximity. Before we started working together, our conversations had all been about my putting him in prison or the Jobs for Life material. Back behind the counter we started talking about everything. Even though we are very different, the two of us found we have a lot in common. We just sort of clicked. Without realizing it or giving it a lot of thought, the two of us became friends.
Convicted Page 19
