If Reid Was Cleared Why Is He in Jail Again
Where do you lot go later on 31 years in prison? He went to Walmart and brought his subscribers
Ramon Reid, who calls himself the Mod Caveman, is experiencing a lot of minor moments in life for the beginning time.
Ramon Reid is 51. He spent 31 years of his life in prison. In that location's a lot he hasn't experienced.
"For example, I had never been to Walmart or on a motorcycle or on a boat. Never been to the sea," Reid offered. "When new guys would come up in prison they'd say, 'You've never done that? Where have you lot been all your life, in a cave?'"
When Reid got out of prison in May and returned abode to Alliance, Ohio, in the northeastern part of the land, he started documenting his life to testify people what it's like to return to a community after years of beingness locked up. He shares these small moments with the nearly 7,000 subscribers to his YouTube channel, Modern Twenty-four hour period Caveman.
Viewers tin can witness his astonishment on his beginning visit to Walmart, see the meticulous cornrows he braids into his female parent's hair — a skill he learned in prison — and experience his frustration when he looks into the photographic camera and explains how he learned job applications are now largely submitted online, which doesn't offer him the chance to explain why he does not have a work history or to influence a potential dominate with his personality and sincerity.
Reid's start trouble with the judicial organization was in 1988, shortly after he graduated from high schoolhouse, where he was a star wrestler. Reid was attacked by a grouping of men, and he, in turn, shot i of the men in the group. He said he was beaten badly and stunned to wake up in a hospital, handcuffed to a bed and charged with felonious set on.
He and his mother both say the lawyer assured them Reid would be cleared. But on the twenty-four hours of his trial, Reid said, "The lawyer says, 'Face it, y'all are a Black human being who shot a white man in a white town. … You are not getting a jury of your peers.'"
"I took a plea deal, non knowing it would make me a second-class denizen," Reid said.
He served 89 days but was left with years of probation and discovered no one would rent him.
Of the years that followed, Reid admitted he made poor decisions and committed crimes. He began selling cleft. His probation was revoked after police constitute a gun in the glove compartment of his motorcar during a terminate. He was sent back to prison. When he was released, he was domicile just a few months before he got into a fight and was sent dorsum to prison again.
The adjacent time he was a free man, he robbed a bank. The sentence: 199 months, or about xvi 1/2 years.
Reid said he had a lot of anger — a mixture of regrets, anger at himself, anger at the style he was being treated — equally an inmate.
"I was always fighting," he said. The prison surroundings bred violence by crowding immature, angry men together, he added. "You were predator or prey, and I was non going to be prey."
But ane twenty-four hours, his female parent said he called to tell her he had been "saved."
"I knew who he used to be, so when he told me he was saved I asked, 'By who and what from?'" Marion Holly said. "He said, 'By God, the claret of Jesus Christ.' I heard it in his voice. That's when I realized he had changed."
Reid began preparing for a new life, taking on leadership roles and learning new skills in prison house.
"I realized guys were leaving and going back to the same neighborhood, dealing with the same people, doing the same thing," he said. "My plan was to go to a new environment and meet new people and do new things. I armed myself with knowledge."
This time, he arrived in Alliance with a plan to do something different. In August, he will begin culinary school in Cleveland. He hopes to go a food truck 1 solar day and subsequently ain a restaurant.
In the meantime, though, he said he started his YouTube channel "to show guys who come up out from prison and have to acquire how to navigate this globe, how I did information technology."
His most pop video thus far is his first trip to a Walmart. Just inside the door, he stops to chat with the greeter. "How do I get to the cereal aisle?" he asks.
At the aisle, while his son videotaped him, Reid exclaims, "Dude, expect at all this cereal!"
He steps upward to the alley, then steps back every bit if to get a better view of the expanse of shelves. His son begs to buy his first box of cereal, and Reid picks the heart-shaped Beloved Nut Cheerios. And so he asks to see the chip alley.
"I tin purchase a wallet in hither besides?" he asks, incredulously, in the video.
What viewers do not see is the panic attack he had in Walmart, overcome past the sheer magnitude of the identify and choices and all the bustling activity.
"It was just overwhelming, all the activity. It was simply too much," Reid explained in an interview. "God did not give me a spirit of fright. I got dressed and went to Walmart in the middle of the day and stayed until I felt acclimated."
Viewers learn about some of the serious challenges faced by a person who's been kept out of society for years. Reid talks most a guy bumping into him at a Chipotle without proverb anything.
"I'm trained to respond in some ways," he said, referring to how a bump might turn into a violent atmospherics in prison. "That accident showed me [life outside] is going to be an adjustment," Reid said, adding that he still harbors some trauma from existence attacked in his slumber.
In some other video, he sits exterior his mother'southward house one quiet morning, talking about the peace he feels in that neighborhood.
"A hummingbird flew right past me and hovered," he says, fluttering his fingers by one ear. "I was afraid to move. I need this peace."
During this video, Reid somberly shares he is "having issues. In prison, I was very useful. Out hither, at that place are a million of me. I'm trying to conform. I need a job. I demand something to do."
In another video, he says the last time he was employed was 20 years ago.
"For my previous residence," he supposes, "do I put 'prison?' I'chiliad struggling with this. On newspaper, I look like a menace. Who wants a vehement felon?"
Commenters offering Reid encouragement, urging him non to get discouraged: "At the end of the day," one viewer wrote, "you tin can be honest when yous're at the interview and you've made a practiced impression."
Off the screen, Reid has the back up of friends and family auspicious him on.
Donnie Gesaman, a tattoo artist who lives exterior Charleston, S Carolina, served fourth dimension with Reid, and they at present speak regularly.
"I knew him at his worst and at present we are back in contact, and I meet him at his best," Gesaman said. "I don't think there'south anything he can't accomplish."
Reid's son, Jordan, gave his begetter a GoPro for his YouTube channel. The two had only seen each other once in the terminal 20 years.
"When I was fiddling he would write me letters every Sunday. He called it Son-24-hour interval," said the younger Reid, 24, who is a DJ and producer in Columbus, Ohio. "I never wrote him back. I hated writing. He kept sending the letters."
The messages and some hand-drawn cards kept the immature Reid connected to his father.
"It was weird," he said. "I knew I had a dad, but I didn't abound up with him. … I look at peers in school who don't know their dad. I know exactly who my dad is, and he did everything in his power to permit me know I was thought about, cared for."
They did non see each other for years, though, until Jordan was 18 and his father had been transferred to an Ohio establishment. He said a relative brought him and one of his ii half-sisters to visit their father. The elder Reid "cried like a baby" when he saw his children.
"He'due south a phenomenal man," Jordan said. "I'1000 super proud of him."
That one-half-sister, Ashley Bradshaw, is 34 and a home health aide who lives in Alliance and now visits her father regularly.
"He likes to spend time with my daughter," said Bradshaw, whose girl is 4. "I allow her go play with grandpa. I took them to get library cards, and that was a big to-practise for both of them."
Bradshaw said she never felt deplorable for her begetter.
"He made bad choices, and they affected everyone around him," she said. "I've talked to him well-nigh it multiple times. One matter I learned from him is to never give up."
Reid'due south youngest daughter, Nyiesha Hall, 33, had no memory of her father when she visited him for the first fourth dimension in prison near 3 years agone.
"I was looking at him and I said, 'Oh my God, we expect so much alike.' I couldn't stop staring at him," Hall said. "When he came domicile, it seemed unreal — and still does, to really be able to impact him."
Hall, a mother to her own five children, said her father has "become my all-time friend. I talk to him about everything."
Even Reid's mother is getting to know her son.
"When he left he was in his 20s, merely stepping into manhood. Now I'g getting to know him as a grown man," she said.
Reid said his life is full of experiencing constant "firsts." He helps his parents around the house, including working in his mother'south garden and taking tasks his father, who has chronic obstructive pulmonary illness, is unable to practise. He cooked grilled cheese sandwiches for dinner one nighttime, and his mother proclaimed them "perfect." Reid realized for the first time in his life that he had cooked while talking on the phone.
Reid was eventually hired for a job: a security baby-sit at an addiction recovery center for men. A couple of weeks afterwards, he was offered a suite in the center to live in.
He nonetheless tries to post a video most nights. A subscriber sent him a laptop that is much faster than his female parent'due south reckoner he once depended on.
He is also learning how to edit his videos and accumulating tips from his new online friends, whom he calls "family unit."
"God," Reid said, "is blessing me."
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Source: https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/go-31-years-prison-went-walmart-brought-subscribers-rcna1383
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