“Kill him,” Cynthia Williams told prosecutors when asked to determine Shawn Horskin’s fate during trial. Cynthia imagined Shawn dying in a barrage of bullets—in the same way he had murdered her son Antoine. If not death, she wanted Shawn to spend his last days in prison. But after Shawn was convicted of murder and sentenced to life without parole in the spring of 2012, Cynthia left the courtroom unsatisfied.
After the trial, she suffered from physical illnesses, anxiety, and insomnia. Although the court had severely punished Shawn, systemic vengeance did not mend Cynthia’s broken heart. Even after hearing the evidence, she still questioned why Antoine had been killed.
One year later, Cynthia sat down to write Shawn a letter, seeking some sort of closure. But she never thought she would one day love him almost as much as the son he took from her. Over time, Cynthia and Shawn have built up a strong mother/son–like relationship. And this isn’t unique.
Cynthia’s unaided effort mirrors a structured model of reconciliation for violent crime called restorative justice, or RJ. Most RJ programs use a professional facilitator to connect survivors and the people responsible for harm—first through letters, and eventually in a controlled, in-person setting to produce healing dialogue. According to Shannon Sliva, a professor of social work at the University of Denver and an RJ facilitator herself, these meetings “offer a safe space where survivors can ask questions” and expel their trauma. Likewise, responsible parties “can express remorse.”
Sliva’s state, Colorado, currently has forty legal provisions referencing RJ. She points out that many RJ laws prohibit prosecutors from using incriminating evidence shared during a facilitation in court proceedings. This practice creates an environment where both parties can express honesty without repercussions.
According to Sliva, by promoting accountability on neutral ground, RJ accomplishes what incarceration cannot. “When a lot of people say ‘accountability’, they mean punishment,” said Sliva, whereas in an RJ context, accountability means “to make amends. When people have an opportunity to atone for what they have done, it enables them to become better and to not harm again.” Sliva describes RJ as an intuitive desire that names something we all want: reconciliation.
Cynthia knew nothing about RJ when she sat down to pen Shawn a letter. She knew only of her sorrow and the need to rid herself of it. “I cried all the time,” Cynthia said during a phone interview. “A movie or a song would remind me of Antoine, and I’d cry all day. Sometimes I still do.”
But Cynthia also found herself grieving for Shawn. She would recall moments from his testimony at trial, where he described his rough upbringing, the struggle to overcome it, and how his past may have led to Antoine’s death.
“When he testified,” Cynthia said, “I wished I had been his mother, because he deserved better.”
At about five-foot-eleven, Shawn is no imposing figure. His frame is fit, though, with muscles stretched taut from years of calisthenics on prison yards. His dark chocolate face is marred by a diagonal scar across his right cheek, a souvenir from a long-ago fight. It’s a constant reminder of his deeper, internal scars that may never fully heal.
Shawn and I are housed in the same medium-security prison in North Carolina, called Nash Correctional. When I interviewed Shawn in a noisy cellblock, he boldly recounted his childhood, like a decorated soldier might remember escaping a war zone. And, in a way, he had. His crack-addicted mother had nursed her habit more than her three children. At the age of five, after spending his first years living with family friends, Shawn’s grandmother won custody of him.
“That was the worst day of my life,” he said. “I left a nice, middle-class home to move into the slums.”
Shawn’s grandmother lived on the west side of St. Louis, in a neighborhood nicknamed 51 Skan. The home was a cramped apartment where seven other family members lived, including an alcoholic uncle. Shawn’s grandmother called him “nigger” to keep him in line and hit him with any object within reach if he stood up for himself. She interpreted his self-defense as insolence, resulting in more abuse.
When Shawn was in the eighth grade, the Department of Social Services moved him to an orphanage on St. Louis’s North Side, in a neighborhood rife with gangs. Shawn didn’t belong to a gang, so as an outsider, everyone despised him. “A day didn’t go by that I didn’t fight,” he recalled. “It was normal to hear shooting all night. We learned the drill early: get down, get low.”
The violence he experienced as a kid followed him into adulthood. When his then-girlfriend gave birth to their second son, he joined the Army to help provide for his growing family. But the military’s violent culture offered him nothing new. When Shawn’s Army friends would marvel at his ability to nap during shooting drills, he responded: “I’m used to sleeping with gunshots going off outside. On the gun range, at least I know where the bullets are going.”
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Yelling drill sergeants didn’t intimidate him, either. The abuse he experienced at his grandmother’s hands somehow seemed worse. “They couldn’t break me. I felt like I was already broken in,” said Shawn. “In the neighborhood, we fought for reputation. We were taught to hate one another because we were from different sides of the street. But my anger didn’t come from that. It came from hating my grandma for what she did to me. I didn’t know that back then.”
Shawn’s childhood trauma and anger collided to create chaos in the early morning of January 1, 2010. According to a North Carolina Court of Appeals’ slip opinion, Shawn and two other soldiers—Everett “Booty” Bynum and Dominique Blunt—drove down to Elizabeth City, North Carolina, from Virginia to club hop. Booty handed Shawn his 9mm handgun for safekeeping while he drove.
The same night, Antoine Williams was celebrating the New Year with his sister and her boyfriend. Around 1 a.m., they decided to leave the club—but as they were backing out, Booty parked behind them, blocking their exit. Shawn later testified that the conflict escalated when Booty and Antoine traded gang-related insults, identifying themselves respectively as a Blood and a Crip—mortal enemies. During the exchange, Booty told Antoine that he had a gun. According to Shawn’s testimony, Antoine responded with, “You not the only one with a forty,” referencing a 40-caliber handgun. When Antoine made a motion like he was reaching for a gun, Shawn shot him seven times, killing him.
“My son was shot in all his major arteries,” Cynthia said about Antoine’s death. “That hurt me.”
Police charged Shawn with first-degree murder, even though Cynthia has always believed Booty played a bigger role. This made her view Shawn as a victim, too, so she wrote to him seeking answers. The first letter—which Shawn kept—is dated April 9, 2013, and opens simply: “Hello Shawn. Hope you are well.” In the letter Cynthia goes on to explain to Shawn that God had led her to forgive him: “I am not trying to jump down your throat or anything. This is something I have to do to start healing.”
When Shawn received Cynthia’s letter, his attorney advised him against responding. He was in the process then of fighting his conviction on appeal, and the attorney was concerned that anything he wrote could impact his chances. But nine years later, after his appeal had gone nowhere, Shawn decided that he had nothing to lose by responding. So he finally did. Shawn and Cynthia began to correspond. And, after a few letters, Shawn called Cynthia.
“I was nervous as I don’t know what,” he recalled with a smile. “I expected her to explode, but it wasn’t like that.”
Instead, Cynthia started to introduce Shawn to the real Antoine—not the gangbanger villain he’d been made out to be in court. She told of Antoine the doting father, the protective brother, and her caregiver after a debilitating surgery. Shawn apologized, and begged for her forgiveness.
When the fifteen-minute phone call was almost up, Cynthia told Shawn, “From this day forward, I’m going to be your mother.”
Cynthia can’t explain why connecting with Shawn eased her mind. But their relationship has helped her gain closure in a way that court proceedings had not.
“Shawn had a hard life,” Cynthia told me. “But if Shawn and my son had gotten to know each other, they would have been good friends.”
Not everyone has embraced Cynthia’s relationship with Shawn. A member of her family once confronted her: “Why are you talking to him? He killed your child.” But in her eyes, she forgave Shawn for her own peace.
Cynthia’s forgiveness eventually led to a phone call between Shawn and Antoine’s teenage daughter, who barely remembers her dad.
“I’m responsible for your dad not being in your life,” Shawn told her. “Don’t think he left you or neglected you. I took him.”
Now, Shawn feels responsible for helping her—like her own dad would have done.
Even though Cynthia didn’t use RJ methodology to meet Shawn, her desire to connect—and his desire to express accountability—illustrates the kind of yearning for violent crime reconciliation that’s addressed in RJ facilitations.
“Not everybody would be as ready as Shawn for that first call,” says Danielle Sered, an expert on restorative justice and author of Until We Reckon: Violence, Mass Incarceration, and a Road to Repair. “A lot of people go into it seeking something for themselves, but accountability means that you’re giving something more than gaining it. Shawn obviously understood that.”
Sered sees a survivor’s search for reconciliation without professional assistance as evidence that everyone wants peaceful closure. “Mothers of murdered children embracing the killers of their children is not uncommon,” Sered said during a phone interview. “It happens so much more than we’re led to believe.” However, she usually advises against meeting without professional facilitation, because unlike Shawn and Cynthia, people might not get what they want, and if they aren’t prepared, the experience could be excruciating.
In 2009 Sered founded Common Justice, a nonprofit that introduces RJ practices into violent court cases as an alternative to long-term incarceration and a way to seek closure. According to Sered, Common Justice has helped roughly 140 responsible parties and 300 survivors. Out of program graduates who enrolled in the last decade, just one was convicted of a new violent felony. Those numbers prove how RJ can lower crime rates, especially in a country with one of the highest recidivism rates in the world, where over 75 percent of people are rearrested within five years.
Sered’s work also focuses on the past harm that people who commit offenses experience as a major driver of their crimes. “When the most available way out appears to be violence, people often choose it just to quiet the intolerable sense of shame that otherwise agitates and haunts them,” said Sered.
During trial, Shawn testified about how he feared for his life during the heated argument between Booty and Antoine. Based on his history of abuse, the killing could be seen as an inevitable outcome of a broken man who fought to protect himself since he was old enough to walk.
RJ seeks to address these kinds of harms, too—so often the root causes of violence—while doing the work of healing the grief caused by violence.
Shawn often calls Cynthia, and she even plans to visit him in prison. At fifty-four, Cynthia still suffers from several health problems that began after her terrible loss, but now she can at least get a good night’s rest.
Shawn is currently earning a bachelor’s degree in pastoral ministry, and upon graduating plans to mentor other prisoners against committing violence. Shawn has also sought out psychiatric help to identify his childhood trauma and learn how to deal with it peacefully. He professes Christianity and has not fought in years.
“Ms. Williams showed me what a Christian is supposed to be,” Shawn said. “She embodies what I believe. She is the mother I never had.”
This essay was produced and published in partnership with Empowerment Avenue.
Image: Nader Ayman/Unsplash
