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YA's STORY
THE STORY THE SANTA ROSA PRESS-DEMOCRAT REFUSES TO PRINT!
Yaribu
Malik-Al Din Damu, Reformed Gang Member and Free Press Correspondent,
seized by State on Dec. 21, 2006
From San Quentin State Prison, Virgil Wilkins writes long letters home to Rohnert Park, to the wife he calls Suga.
This is a story about what Wilkins, once a Blood gang member, has done — and why — since he made parole in July, about why he’s back in prison and termed a dangerous man.
It was in 1992, a judge sent Wilkins, then 21, to prison for a gang-related attempted murder in Los Angeles. He stretched his 10-year term with offenses in prison: possession of a controlled substance in 1997, and possession of a weapon in 2001.
Now he’s charged with violating his parole conditions by communicating with gang members in prison and sending one a cell phone.
State parole agents and Sonoma County gang task force investigators arrested him December at his job stocking shelves at Target in Santa Rosa.
His lawyer acknowledges that, on the face of it, a violation seems to have taken place.
Attorney Alfred Mondorf, representing Wilkins for the nonprofit California Parole Advocacy Project, said: “One of the conditions of his parole is to have no contact with other known gang members, no communication with other gang members, apparently there was, from what I can tell from his file.”
But Wilkins supporters say that what he’s done since leaving prison is try and turn others from that life, and that he doesn’t deserve to be sent back.
“If he was deliberately breaking the law at his own peril, I would say that was a stupid thing to do, but it does not make sense to lock someone up for trying to help other people,” said longtime Sonoma County activist Mary Moore, who has worked with Wilkins on prison reform since he was paroled.
Wilkins, now 36, made parole on July 16.
He left Salinas Valley State Prison for Rohnert Park and life with his wife, Tish Rojas, an activist and educator with whom he began corresponding in prison and whom he married in 1996 in Folsom State Prison.
A freed man, Wilkins found an apprentice laborer’s job in Santa Rosa with Argonaut Constructors; last month he also found holiday season work at Target, on Santa Rosa Avenue.
He also took up a calling he said he found in prison: working for social change and urging youngsters to get their education and stay out of gangs.
“That was the greatest mistake I ever made in my life," Wilkins said in a KBBF radio interview during which he recalled how, as a 13-year-old in Watts, he’d joined the Bloods, and how, in prison, he’d become politically-minded.
On the surface at least, Wilkins went about his life since July in ways that seem at odds with the portrait authorities have drawn of him as a dangerous parole violator.
He formed a Sonoma County chapter of Education not Incarceration, an Oakland-based activist group that campaigns for investments in schools rather than prisons. He went to Mendocino County to speak to parents of at-risk Indian youth.
“He was willing to help, anything that we can use a helping hand with he was willing to go that extra mile,” said Cora Lee Simmons, of Round Valley Indians for Justice, an American Indian advocacy group.
In a letter to the editor published Dec. 22 in The Press Democrat, Wilkins joined a loud public conversation spurred by what police believe was a gang-related slaying in a downtown Santa Rosa parking garage.
He argued that disenfranchised youth are more likely to turn to gangs and violence, writing: “If young people in poverty were given opportunities to challenge their minds, many would make better choices.”
But on Dec. 21, the day before that letter was published, Sonoma County gang investigators arrested Wilkins at his Target job. They searched his and Rojas’ home, seizing letters that they said proved Wilkins violated parole conditions that bar him from gang participation.
Now Wilkins, who is 5-foot-11 with 2-foot long dreadlocks, sits in San Quentin State Prison, one of 35,000 inmates now in the state prison system — which faces federal intervention for being overcrowded — for violating their parole terms.
He is one of 153 parolees supervised by Santa Rosa-based agents who are in prison now.
His parole agent, David Aggio said he could not comment on the case. But on the report outlining the charges against Wilkins, Aggio wrote that Wilkins corresponded with a gang member in Folsom State Prison, that a cell phone and letters from Wilkins were found in the inmate’s cell, that a letter from the inmate was found in Wilkins’ home.
“Subject is a danger to others,” said the report, a copy of which Rojas provided.
Asked why Wilkins is considered dangerous, state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation Parole spokeswoman Carolyn Graham said: “You are aware of his commitment offense? And you still need to ask me that question?”
In fact, while it may have no bearing on his violation case, the Corrections department’s records Graham was referring to show that Wilkins was given 18 years for second degree murder. And they are likely wrong, Corrections spokeswoman Terry Thornton conceded.
“I know our system is not perfect,” she said, referring to inmate records. Go with the records of the Los Angeles District Attorney’s office, which said it prosecuted Wilkins for attempted murder, she said, for they are more likely right.
Rojas and Wilkins’ father, James Brown, of Los Angeles, said Wilkins was drunk and driving his car when passengers who were Blood gang members fired shots at someone. Only Wilkins was caught and charged, they said.
For now Wilkins writes his long letters home to Suga.
As for Rojas, she says: “I don’t know if I can make it.”
Her one-bedroom home is crowded with signs from July welcoming Wilkins home; photographs of him with her grandchildren — at the Sonoma County Fair, at Howarth Park; a photograph of Rojas’ son, a behavioral pediatrician in Boston, with his arm around Wilkins.
Rojas is a college-educated 61-year-old who says she’s too old, wise and broke to spare any effort for a dead-end case.
“I have been in prison reform for 25 years and I have been married to him for 10 years, and I am not about wasting my time,” she said. “My husband's all about eliminating the gang mentality and becoming legit.”
He rejected violence, gangs and the racial divisions they enforce in prison, she said, even as he railed against what he considers the violence of government policies that propose building more prisons as a cure for gangs and other social ills.
When a friend wrote asking what he wanted done about an inmate who’d stabbed him, Wilkins, said Rojas, replied: “I don’t even want you to speak to me about retaliation. I don’t want to know why, I don’t want to know who, I am done with that.”
Wilkins did communicate with inmates, she said, but because he wanted to “reach back to the guys he left behind.”
The letters he sent, she said, were along the lines of: “Hey brother, I’m doing good out here, I got a great job, you can do it, put down those prison politics, it’s possible to make it.”
She said he doesn’t know if he sent a cell phone to Folsom, but “I mean if the worst were true, it’s not bad,” she said. Told how Wilkins supports characterize his actions since July, parole spokeswoman Graham said: “I am certainly not saying maybe he doesn’t have some redeeming factors.”
If Wilkins has been doing good since paroling, she said, “Maybe that’s something, when he goes to the board (of Parole Hearings), he can present some mitigating circumstances.”
On the outside, say supporters he’s won over since July, he proved himself up to a task at which many parolees fail: staying on the straight and narrow.
“He was very, very motivated,” said Valerie Eterovich, the Northern Laborers Union apprenticeship coordinator who was responsible for monitoring his job performance at Argonaut Constructors.
Eterovich said that within weeks after she met Wilkins at a July 25 meeting where parolees are told about resources they can use, he’d found a company to sponsor his apprenticeship, borrowed $396 to join the union, and started a three-week training in San Ramon.
“I have worked with many ex-offenders and the Virgils are very few and far between,” she said.
His boss at Argonaut Constructors, Rod Wood, called Wilkins “a model employee.”
He said: “From the very beginning, I realized I liked him and I thought he was straight up and just wanted to turn his life around. If he came back tomorrow I’d put him to work.”