On a recent Sunday morning in the cellblock, I was on my way to check on my buddy Ramon “Weemo” Henriquez when I heard an old-school track playing. Weemo, age fifty, was bumping one of hip hop’s conscious-rap pioneers, KRS-One. In a maximum-security prison.
Weemo gravitated toward the street storyteller’s ability to speak to the toughness needed to navigate the roughest New York City neighborhoods, with lyrics like, “when you rhyme like a soft punk / you walk down the streets and get jumped.” Another track advocates self-preservation with a 9mm handgun.
One day in 1981 in Harlem’s Wagner housing projects, Weemo told me that, at the age of six, he traded an afternoon of boredom inside with his mother and sister for a summer day outside with his dad, Francisco. Weemo’s dad never seemed to have time to take him to the playground, but he’d recently found the time to slap Weemo’s mother and smash his sister’s face bloody with a windup clock. Weemo was playing on the monkey bars when a kid his age walked up and punched him in the face. Stunned, and unable to speak a lick of English, Weemo glanced at his father, who gestured with his hands for Weemo to fight back. He did.
In April 1991, fearing for his life, sixteen-year-old Weemo ended a decade of victimization by killing two older kids who were bullying him. A judge sentenced him, but not before prosecutors gave him a choice that no child should ever have to make: plead guilty and receive a harsh sentence, or exercise his right to a trial and risk an even harsher sentence. Weemo chose the latter, paid the so-called trial tax, and went to prison. And thirty-three years later, as I watch Weemo through the bars, I can look past his balding, noodle-thin frame, salt-and-pepper beard, and a few missing teeth and still see a splash of youth when he smiles, which is often. Prison has a way of freezing us in time.
Weemo told me his story because I’m a prison journalist. I’m serving my fifteenth year for manslaughter. I first met him in Green Haven Correctional Facility, in Stormville, New York. But we never vibed. We met up again here in Sullivan, a maximum-security prison tucked in the Catskills. You can live in the same prison with someone for years and never say a word to them. Then you two can land in a spot, click over conscious rap, and become the best of comrades.
Weemo and I have something else in common: We’re both represented by Steve Zeidman, director of the CUNY School of Law’s Second Look Project—Steve, he insists, to those of us he represents. Ours are two of a number of cases that Steve and his team have taken on, petitioning New York governor Kathy Hochul to grant us clemency.
It’s Weemo’s only shot at getting out of prison. He pulled out a stack of medical documents showing he has chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and a host of other ailments. In 2022 he had three back-to-back ministrokes. Looking at his frail body, I wonder if he’d survive a fourth. With the inadequate medical care they give us in prison, he fears he won’t make it seven more years to his parole board.
Here’s why Weemo’s case is more tragic than mine. He is in a camp of kids who were given sentences that stole the bulk of their lives but fell short of a life sentence. Often there are forces at play, beyond the scientific ones about undeveloped brains that we’ve come to learn in recent years, that can further explain why a sixteen-year-old would shoot two older teenagers.
This is Weemo’s story.
Ramon grew up poor in a project in Harlem. He was little and bullied. Bullying happens wherever kids congregate, but it didn’t become a national conversation until 1999, when two white kids strolled into Columbine High School and gunned down twelve classmates and one teacher.
Reflecting on the Columbine killings many years later, President Bill Clinton said he chose his words to the nation at the time to encourage an outpouring of “communal love” for those grieving in Littleton, Colorado. “We don’t know each other’s stories anymore,” the president recalled. “We’re used to treating each other like two-dimensional cartoons, not three-dimensional people.”
Unfortunately for Weemo, that message was never received; it largely failed to reach Black and brown communities, where you’re expected to knuckle up. Win or lose. Even if a fight leads to another, unfair fight. Or escalates to gun violence.
When I told Steve I was writing a story about Weemo, he said, “Sixteen years old. Forty-to-life. He’s been in prison thirty-two years. When is enough enough?”
I agreed: to sentence a kid with a tenth-grade education to that kind of prison time is to destabilize the institution of corrections. Glutting prisons with children is not justice.
The most influential force that shape us, and our choices, is what Ta-Nehisi Coates has called “an array of lethal puzzles”: our environment. I wanted to understand this lethal milieu that shaped the hyperaggressive behavior of the bullies and the passive behavior of the bullied.
One evening, I sat down at a table with Weemo in the cellblock’s communal area. Next to us, guys smoked K2 while others watched the TV that hung from the orange railing. On the top tier, a bare-chested Latino man crouched with his beard to the bars, whispering, “Lo siento.” Weemo translated into English: “I feel for you.”
Maybe he knew I was following Weemo into the mouth of a fire-breather called the Wagner Houses.
First, a quick history lesson: Robert F. Wagner, Jr., served as mayor of New York City from 1954 to 1965. He oversaw the funding for the construction of the housing projects that bore his senator father’s name. Completed on May 31, 1958, the projects started out as a decent neighborhood, full of hardworking people. Then, in the early 1980s, little white rocks devastated the community, setting the city on fire with violence, misery, and burning questions of everyday survival.
“I seen some of the craziest shit,” Weemo said, hands wedged between his legs, grinding his palms together as if trying to remove something imperceptible and sticky.
One time, when he was walking through the projects, he heard a firecracker sound. He then saw a guy stumble and lose an eyeball.
There was the time at the Dominican parade when he heard shots and then saw a guy clutching his bloody abdomen. Another time, standing outside the playground, he saw a woman fling her cat from the roof. She jumped after it, her pink nightgown fluttering like a failed parachute all the way down.
Weemo lived in a predominantly Black neighborhood but he didn’t learn to speak English until the fifth grade. Home was screaming matches and physical abuse. School meant scuffles when older boys tried to take his books.
He was scrawny and passed for white, which didn’t come with privileges in this context. As a Dominican, he had a senseless cultural beef with Puerto Ricans—he had to scrap it out with them, too. “I was an easy target,” he told me. “And no matter how many people I fought, it never ended. And it was never just one; it was always a group who’d catch me and start jumping me. I used to tell my older sister to run.”
“They jumped your sister too?” I asked.
“Yeah, they didn’t give a fuck. It was the hood.” He smirked. “But I didn’t go down easy.”
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Sometimes he’d run. He’d jump over fences, arrow across an asphalt field, dodge syringes and dog shit and shoot around Robert Wagner’s memorial wall, where he was saved by civilization: Second Avenue. He’d blend in, using pedestrians as cover.
He’d run to Holy Rosary at 119th and 1st, where he attended church. One time, the priest there grabbed one of the kids chasing him and said, “Why you keep calling Ramon a pussy? Does he have a crack down the middle of his face and hair all over it.” The priest held the boy and let Weemo take a couple free shots.
At home he was his father’s punching bag. The stubbornness, and assertiveness, that comes from learning to hold your ground in the streets, and at home, stuck with him. Still, he questioned his existence. “Is this what I came into the world for?” Weemo had no safe haven, nowhere to escape, though he tried hard to do so—riding the trains or his bike into the city for peace. At dinnertime, Weemo had to return to face his fears.
There were three guys that Weemo always tried to duck: Lyndell, Lyndell’s cousin Frank, and Melvyn. But in housing projects, where we all live on top of each other, fleeing is impossible. Eighteen-year-old Lyndell was 6’3” and about 180 pounds, like a basketball player. Frank was shorter, but took point for trouble. They roughed up Ramon whenever they saw him. Melvyn stole Ramon’s bike. He recalled chasing him for five hours to get it back.
I wasn’t surprised when Weemo told me that, from time to time, he actually hung out with Frank. They’d fight, not speak for months, and then end up becoming friends again. In the hood, we kill the people we know. Sometimes we kill the people we love.
In 2009, when I was twenty-six, I killed my girlfriend. A night out at the bar dancing and drinking devolved into arguing on the drive home. Once inside, she threatened to stab me again—not that she’d ever stabbed me, but in March of the previous year, after I had thrown a guy out of my residence, he had come back and stabbed me.
I brought some knives from the kitchen—an unspoken I dare you. I expected her to scoff at my dramatics. But she stabbed me. I stabbed her; she was gone. I went to the hospital, then prison. Every time I think about killing my girl, I wrestle with despair and a sense of shame. Remorse consumes me. I wish I would’ve just walked away as soon as the argument got heated.
“You were just kids,” I said to Weemo, and also to myself. I had to ask, “Why’d you keep hanging out with him?”
“Sometimes he was alright. I’m the type of person that thinks that tomorrow will be different. I’m like that here. You see me, I get mad at a person, and I let it go.”
When you don’t really fit in anywhere and your self-esteem is low, it’s easy to hang with toxic people who get a rise out of making you feel less than them.
Wanting to show his loyalty, Weemo held onto a gun for a friend who couldn’t keep it in his apartment because of his mom. But Weemo’s younger brothers were always sneaking into his room. He wouldn’t hide it there. He carried it with him.
That afternoon, Weemo was inside a nearby B&B Hardware store on an errand when Lyndell and Melvyn walked in drunk. The store clerk, Angel Santiago, who’d been looking at the gun from behind the counter, passed it back to Weemo and told Lyndell and Melvyn he didn’t want any trouble in his store.
“Do what you gotta do ’cause one of us ain’t leaving here,” shouted Lyndell. He came from behind Weemo and grabbed him by his throat.
Weemo heard Lyndell’s words in his head: One of us ain’t leaving here. In that moment, he recalled all the running, the dodging, the black eyes and busted lips, his sister shrieking, the man’s gushing abdomen, his father. He shot four times.
After Weemo told me this in the cellblock, he stopped grinding his palms together, and he appeared lost, staring through the cellblock’s blood orange exit door.
Interested in the prevailing wisdom concerning brain development in adolescence, and how the courts are currently reconciling science with the law, I thumbed Steve an email. He quickly responded. Neuroscientists and even the courts now recognize that “young people are more prone to take risks, more impulsive, less likely to think about the consequences of their actions, and highly susceptible to peer pressure,” he wrote. “Relatedly, young people all have the innate capacity to grow and change. The Supreme Court has recognized all of the above in a line of cases from Roper to Graham to Miller and then to Montgomery. These cases drew the arbitrary line at 17 but the current prevailing wisdom (via MRIs) is that our brains (most importantly the prefrontal cortex) continue to grow until our mid-20s.”
I walked down to the law library, sat in front of the computer, opened up Westlaw, and sifted through the cases that Steve had summarized. In Roper v. Simmons (2005), a line from Justice Sandra Day O’Connor’s dissent made the point that many failed to—that “juveniles are more vulnerable to outside influences because they have less control over their surroundings.” I took that to mean that people who were convicted when they were young should be resentenced, especially those sentenced to life in prison.
In 1991 David Gonzalez, a metro reporter at the New York Times, handled Weemo harshly, like a kid with an arsenal. He quoted Frank as saying Weemo “figured he had beef with everybody.”
In Gonzalez’s defense, his story was police blotter stuff, written in the tough-on-crime era where journalists covered the constant violence instead of the cultural forces at play. That is a sentiment easily understood in the housing projects where the youths lived. “I know it’s crazy,” Michael Simmons, a neighbor of Melvyn’s, told Gonzalez in the same article. “I just want to get out of this place. Everybody just killing each other for no reason.”
Since 1993, when Weemo was taken from Rikers and bused up north, he hasn’t had a misbehavior report for violent conduct—a sharp contrast to what one would expect after reading news coverage of the incident.
Weemo admitted that an old Vietnam veteran gave him some BB guns, but his mother found them and made him get rid of them. Then there was a video of him, with his brother, who was holding two actual guns. During the prosecution, the DA used it against him as evidence that he had guns.
I know about BB guns, and real guns. When I was a teenager, I had friends who bought BB guns that looked real to the untrained eye. When they pointed them in the faces of unsuspecting pizza delivery guys, they did the trick. When I was in my twenties, I had friends who bought handguns, and a sawed-off shotgun. My clique of friends even had a semiautomatic Mini-14. Since my homies owned them, it was almost like they were mine. When girls came over to my place, I showed them off like were mine, too. But they weren’t. In 2006, when I was twenty-three, I was arrested in Brooklyn for carrying a handgun that wasn’t mine; the judge gave me probation. In the hood, everyone has access to guns, one way or another, but you can’t equate access to ownership.
If you scratch below the surface, people are people, and bad circumstances, based on environment, place us in horrible predicaments. And some of us make terrible, impulsive decisions. In Weemo’s case, he was a teenager who lived in the projects. His family couldn’t afford to just pack up and leave. The environment shaped the actions of the bullied, and the bullies. Outside of that environment, dumped in a world of cages even smaller, and even more hostile than the world Weemo just left, the criminal system expected him to become the monster who stole his innocence. But Weemo wouldn’t live to become his father.
He entered prison around the time Governor George Pataki phased out Pell Grants for prisoners, and for a while he did what we all do at the beginning of a long bid—watch TV, sleep, catch contraband tickets, put all his hope in appealing his criminal case, fix broken Walkmans and radios, and read.
He says he’s read more than a thousand books since being incarcerated, including somehow the obscure, long-out-of-print Silver: The Life Story of an Atlantic Salmon by Roderick L. Haig-Brown. “It changed the way I saw things,” he told me. “I thought, Well, if a salmon can go through all that, and make it, what I’m going through is nothing.”
The prison system is a small pond. In 2021, for the college course Writing for Healing, Weemo wrote an essay titled “Father!” in which he recounts the story of how, in the early 2000s in the Green Haven prison, Weemo came across Rodney, the kid who’d punched him out of the blue when he’d been playing on the monkey bars. Rodney revealed that it was Weemo’s own father who’d paid him fifty cents to beat up his son. In 2014 he called his father and asked him if it was true. By then, his father had become a Christian; he said he couldn’t lie and confessed. In the essay, Weemo explains how that one act of parental bullying ruined his future. But still he forgave his father and they shared a good cry over the phone. Weemo said the class was “a liberating experience.”
For a little over a year, inside the cellblock, I’ve watched Weemo give away his last scrape of ketchup or mayo so others could doctor up cardboard-flavored chicken patties. It amazes me that thirty-two years in prison haven’t hardened him. At any time of day, you might catch him in his cell chopping up onions and tomatoes, chefing up sandwiches. Holding not guns for his friends, but food for them in his makeshift ice chest. He looks out for everyone. His heart is open like the doors of your local bodega.
Lately, since Pell Grants were restored and college started back, he’s in counselor mode—talking to younger guys about the entry exam and embracing his role as elder, and teacher, with KRS-One, hip hop’s First Master Teacher, knocking low in the background: Stop killin’ one another / ’cause in the ghetto we all brothers.
Image: Madamechaotica/Wikimedia Commons/Inquest
