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Let me just keep it funky for you.
I'm a street niggah, a hustler, a certified gangster. Almost everything you heard about me is true. I got drunk and got high too. I robbed and stole, and yeah, I've even killed. I've been locked up and locked down. I've knocked a couple of birds on their asses and put a look in my mam's eyes that would make you crawl on your knees in shame. I've always been the kind to take what I wanted, and truth be told, they could've put me down a long time ago. If not for this, then for something else. Armed robbery, drug trafficking, money laundering... they don't send you to the penitentiary for being no choir boy. I was a criminal then, and I'm a criminal now. The streets are hungry and I've always paid my dues.
Difference is, this time I gotta pay with my life.
***
CNN was on it like white on rice.
First there was the Amber Alert. Then the ground search. Sympathetic white folks beat back bushes and crawled around in back alleys trying to find her. And two days later they did. In the basement of an
abandoned building, deep in the hood, far away from the apartment Terrie's father had rented for them out in Westchester.
Little Arielle was all busted up. Raped. Strangled. Brutalized. The public was on edge. A baby killer was officially on the loose, and the media yeasted the fear factor up as high as they could get it. The next few days dragged by. Front doors were double-bolted all over Brooklyn, and little kids slept under the watchful eyes of their protective parents.
But I gotta give it to the NYPD. They knew their shit, and forensics is a bad motherfucker. They ran some tests, put together a list of suspects, and the next thing I knew they came gunning for me like I was Osama bin Laden.
"You're under arrest for the murder of Terrie Mills, and the rape and murder of Arielle Mills!"
They bum-rushed me inside Mama's house, and you shoulda seen her face when they pushed past her and kicked down the bedroom door.
Rape? Murder? What the fuck?!
I denied that shit at the top of my lungs but the cops cracked me in the head anyway and it was on. I fought so hard it took six of them to cuff me and drag me outta that house, but it was Mama who really hurt me. When they told her what I was being arrested fro she hit me with a look so cold that it was her eyes, and not those billy clubs, that finally put me down on the ground.
Man, I looked like public enemy number one in my bright orange jumpsuit. They ran my mug shot on the front page of the paper, side by side with Terrie and her little girl, and next to all that blond hair, and those blue eyes and ringlet curls, I looked bigger and blacker and meaner than ever.
Six months later my man Gilbert mounted my defense and we pled not guilty, but man, the trial was a farce. Stricly for show. The jury stayed out for forty-seven minutes, and that was forty-six minutes longer than they'd needed. How they say that shit on CSI? The DNA don't lie? Well they must have figured that ex-cons and drug dealers like me can't help but lie, and four days after my trial began I got convicted and sentenced to death by an all-white jury of my so-called peers.
Tell us why? The question sat on everybody's lips. What kind of man could do something like that to a baby? They stared hard into my eyes, trying to find the beast that lurked inside me. Deborah. Mama. Strangers. To this day everybody still stares, and everybody still wants to know.
Why?
I just laugh.
Why? Shit, you tell me! I got a shitload of my own whys. But hey, I ain't never been the type to buck fate or throw up a whole bunch of bullshit excuses, so sitting here in the death house with the clock ticking down me, why start bitchin' up now?
