Michael's Tale: Why forgiveness is so powerful, yet so hard
Please note: This article is published as an archive copy from Philadelphia City Paper. My City Paper is not affiliated with Philadelphia City Paper. Philadelphia City Paper was an alternative weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. The last edition was published on October 8, 2015.
The shy young man walked up to the porch holding an unlit cigarette in one shaky hand. His eyes met those of the woman sitting there, then turned toward the ground, then met the woman’s eyes again. He was 15 minutes early for a meeting that was eight years overdue.
Janice Meeks stood up and called out, “Hey, Michael! How you doing?”
“I am so nervous you don’t even understand,” Michael Whittington replied.
“Why are you nervous?” she asked, puzzled. “Come here.”
He climbed the few steps to the porch and Janice opened her arms to him. The pair embraced, a long hug. It seemed that Michael had the harder time breaking off the connection.
Eleven years ago, an act of violence had changed both of their lives. Janice’s 19-year-old son — a good-natured young man with endless potential — was shot in the neck and paralyzed. He died three years later. Michael was part of the group arrested in connection with his shooting. He was 16 at the time, and was sentenced to spend what many consider life’s best years behind bars.
But time had passed, and much had changed. A few weeks ago, they met at Janice’s home in Tacony to talk about that horrible night — and more. Michael had lost a brother to violence, too. Would he be able to forgive another as Janice had forgiven him?
It was approaching 11 p.m. on June 24, 2003. Janice’s son, Kevin Johnson, and his cousin were waiting for a trolley at 52nd Street and Chester Avenue in West Philly. A group of five teenage boys, Michael among them, approached the pair. Later, the news media would say Kevin and his cousin had been shot “execution-style,” a dramatic way of saying “at close range.”
In city lore, the incident became known as “the shooting over the Allen Iverson jersey,” which Kevin was wearing at the time. In actuality, the jersey had little to do with the violent crime. The reality was much more complicated, involving a girl’s flirtations with either Kevin or his cousin, and the jealousy that it stirred in another partygoer. The result, however, was the same: Kevin was shot in the back of the neck and paralyzed from that spot on down. His cousin took a bullet to the jaw, but largely recovered.
Michael didn’t know the cousins or have a problem with them. He did not pull the trigger. But he was there when the pair was shot. He was there the last time Kevin ever stood, the last time Kevin could breathe without the aid of a machine.
Michael and the four other teenage boys were arrested and incarcerated for their roles in the shootings. In 2006, when Michael was on work release, he visited Janice and Kevin in their home. The two young men became fast friends. The conversation was light-hearted, mostly sports talk, Iverson versus Kobe. They played a video game together, Michael worked the controls while Kevin gave tips.
Janice hovered nearby, occasionally pushing Kevin’s glasses up his nose. She brought Michael a heaping plate of spaghetti, Kevin’s favorite dish. Michael forked in the pasta heartily. Kevin would eat later, when the family was alone again and Janice would feed him.
Not long after that meeting, Michael had a repeated problem at his halfway house, and, as punishment, was put back behind bars to serve the rest of his sentence. A few months later, Kevin’s breathing machine failed and he suffered irreparable brain damage. His family let him pass on, and honored his wishes of donating his organs. Janice divorced, moved and married again. They lost touch.
This reconnection, on the front porch of Janice’s home in early May, was the first time they’d seen each other since 2006. It was a reunion both had longed for, although Michael had been hesitant to make the first call. He hadn’t seen Janice since her son’s death. He was afraid of her anger.
He need not have worried.
“Kevin started it,” Janice said. “He wanted me to forgive. When he died, I wanted to be mad all over again, but it was too hard. I didn’t have it in my heart.”
Her relationship with one of the men who played a role in her son’s pain and suffering and eventual death puzzles many of those around her.
“It’s hard for my family to understand how I care about Michael,” she said. “They think he’d be a hoodlum or a gangster to be involved in something like that. But Michael’s not a bad kid — I mean, a man.”
In fact, she said, “He reminds me of Kevin, with his shyness and his smile. … If he’d took the time earlier to get to know Kevin before this happened, I could have seen them as friends.”
I met Janice and Kevin in 2005 when I was a staff writer at the Philadelphia Inquirer. Getting to know them was one of the most amazing experiences I have had during 20 years of reporting.
I was writing an article about the forgotten victims of gun crimes, those who had survived but found their lives forever altered. Kevin, who once loved racing up and down the basketball court, now spent much of his time moving only between his bed and a wheelchair. He didn’t like to go outside often, he said, because people would stare at him. Nearly all of his friends fell out of touch.
But his mother was his near-constant companion. His beloved little sister, Jade, rushed back to the family’s Lower Northeast home after school each day to sit on the edge of his bed so he could help her with her homework.
All this, and Kevin wasn’t angry. He was kind, friendly, frequently smiling. Sometimes, he admitted, he let himself cry, always at night when others slept so they wouldn’t become upset, too. He’d let the tears flow — and then not having use of his arms — he would let them dry in place. He’d try to refocus his brain, he said, on happy thoughts before he fell asleep so he would have pleasant dreams. In most of those light-hearted thoughts, he was playing basketball.
In fact, Kevin took what many would have considered the end — his paralysis — and turned it into a new beginning. He made it a point to publicly forgive the five teenagers whose actions injured him. He and his mother spoke to local school groups and at anti-violence rallies, providing both a “this could happen to you” cautionary tale and a lesson in the power of forgiveness and absolution.
That forgiveness, Janice said then and now, did not come easily to her. She was used to striking back, a lesson she’d learned as a child. Kevin showed her that forgiveness was better for everybody involved, that the hate she had inside was hurting her the most.
I remember visiting Kevin and Janice after my first article about them had been published, about three years after he had been paralyzed. I told them about the man I was dating — now my husband — who worked as a public defender. Janice mistakenly thought I meant a prosecutor and seemed unhappy when I told her he defended indigent people who had been charged with a crime. “How can he do that?” she asked. “How can he help those people?”
Then Kevin stopped her train of thought. “Everybody deserves a fair trial, Mom,” he said. “It’s an important job.”
He told me he’d been watching a lot of courtroom dramas on television. He was thinking about taking online law classes. I remember thinking, “This kid is incredible.”
Janice told me that Michael seemed different from the other suspects when she saw him in court for the first time. He was a teenager, but she refers to him as “that little boy” when talking about it now. He looked “innocent.”
“He seemed like a good kid, shy. He had a shirt that was way too big and a tie that was too big,” she said. “He was nervous.”
What most convinced her of Michael’s inner goodness, though, was the fact that he apologized to Kevin in the courtroom. Michael’s mother did the same, and then asked the judge for permission to give Janice a hug. The two women embraced. The other four teens involved in the shooting did not reach out to her and Kevin, nor did their families.
“I knew Michael was from a good family,” Janice said. “You could see he didn’t come up that way. He was just trying to fit in with the other kids.”
Thinking back on his life right before the shooting, Michael wonders what would have happened to him if he’d stayed on the streets of Southwest Philly, sometimes known as “the Wild, Wild West.” That’s fair, he said, because the people around him “were into everything.”
They were selling drugs. There were shootouts every day. “I survived,” he said. “I was never hit, but I was right there and stuff would happen. I was young and when you’re young, you’re dumb.”
If he’s stayed on that course? “Honestly, the way I was back then, I’d probably be dead,” he said.
When Michael was behind bars, Janice wrote him letters. He wrote back. In every letter, he asked how Kevin was doing and he apologized for his part in the events of June 24, 2003.
While incarcerated, first in a juvenile facility and then an adult one, Michael realized how amazing it was for Kevin and Janice to forgive him, what a precious gift they’d given him by accepting his apology.
“There are a lot of people in jail and they’re wishing for forgiveness for the bad they did towards people. They’re praying because they can’t sit right with themselves,” he said. “To know you were part of something so messed up … the guilt, you think about it every day, you relive the whole situation, it’s bad.”
Kevin and Janice said and did things that showed Michael that he mattered and that they cared about him.
“How could I have lived with myself,” he asked, “knowing I played a part in this crazy situation that turned out so bad?”
Something else helped him, too — his involvement in the city’s Mural Arts Program.
Michael began working on MAP projects soon after his incarceration. He connected with executive director Jane Golden, who learned of his story. In January 2006, Golden drove him to Kevin and Janice’s home.
Kevin and Michael stayed in touch by phone. It was 10 months later, while Michael was in lockup again for a minor infraction, that Kevin’s breathing machine failed and he died a short time later. Michael said he asked prison officials if he could attend Kevin’s funeral, but his request was denied.
Not long after Janice buried her son, she began working with the Mural Arts Program on a memorial to Kevin. She joined a creative process that involved bringing together Graterford prison inmates, most of them lifers, with juveniles from St. Gabriel’s Hall and the city’s House of Corrections, for art and conversation.
“Her story is so amazing that it was hard for the men and kids to believe that she could forgive. They would love to have forgiveness, but that doesn’t happen very often,” recalled Robyn Buseman, who at the time worked at St. Gabriel’s and is now — oddly enough — Michael’s supervisor at Mural Arts.
But Buseman understood Janice’s decision because she, too, has lost a child and she, too, chose forgiveness. In 2003, her 25-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. The girl’s boyfriend was driving at the time.
“If someone would tell me that I could forgive that kid, a young man at the time, for falling asleep at the wheel and killing my daughter, I would say, ‘No, no, I’d have to kill him,’” Buseman said. “Janice and I had a common story even though (mine) was a negligent act, not a violent one. Anybody that loses a child kinda has an immediate bond.”
Forgiving is not easy, Buseman said, and it doesn’t mean forgetting, and it definitely doesn’t mean never again being angry or upset about losing someone you love.
“But it’s one less thing you have to deal with. You just can’t carry that hate around,” she said. “And the person that you’re forgiving, it allows them to hopefully move on and not do the same thing again. It’s a win-win, but I understand everybody can’t do that.”
The finished mural, titled Forgiveness, covers a wall at 13th Street and Erie Avenue. It features Kevin’s face, the image taken from his high school graduation photo. Janice is standing nearby, watching over him.
In some ways, it could be an injustice to Michael, who has worked so hard to turn a negative into a positive and to live a productive life, to even bring this story to the public’s attention again.
A teenager then, Michael is now 27. He has a full-time job as a supervisor with Mural Arts, working with at-risk youth. He’s been out of jail for five years and off parole since 2013. He says he hangs out with his cousins and other family members, avoids the street scene, stays out of trouble. He plans to ask the state for a pardon.
Michael has an apartment in Northeast Philly. He has a girlfriend and three children — two daughters, ages 4 and 3, and a 1-year-old son. He said he never planned to tell his children about Kevin and the shooting that changed so many lives. Then he agreed to talk to me for this article and he realized he might not be able to keep the information from them. Still, he said he wasn’t worried about possible negative responses.
“I can’t,” he said. “Everybody has a story. Everybody. This is mine and this is what happened in my life when I was a different person. I’m a whole new person now. That’s my past.”
After his 2008 release from jail, Michael said he promised himself he would reconnect with Janice. It was at the top of his to-do list, he said. And then it didn’t happen for years.
“When I came home, I was going to do a lot of things, a lot of things. But I was going through a lot, too,” he said. “And the last time I seen her, Kevin was alive. So this would be, kinda … you know. I didn’t know what to expect. I was real nervous.”
Janice said she never stopping waiting for him to contact her again. She looked for him, she said, on Facebook and elsewhere. She didn’t know where he was and she wondered how he was doing.
After Kevin’s death, Janice met and married Dana Meeks. They live on a friendly street in Tacony where they can sit on their front porch and greet neighbors who pass by. When Michael arrived on May 2, Janice introduced him to Dana and their tan maltipoo, Cinnabon. Michael sat down and Cinnabon let Michael scratch her head.
“I think she likes me,” he said, smiling.
The conversation was casual at first. Janice talked about her youngest daughter — Jade is now 14 — and how she and Dana keep track of the girl’s whereabouts via the GPS on her phone. She was like any other mother, she said, just worried about her child.
Dana, meanwhile, worried about his wife. “He won’t let me drive my own car to work by myself,” Janice said. “He gets in the car with me, every night, rides with me to work, and then he catches the bus home by himself. Now who is going to be worried about who? I’m worried about him riding the SEPTA bus.”
After a half hour on the porch, Janice invited Michael inside. She showed him a corner cabinet that has been turned into a memorial to Kevin, featuring photos and the program from his funeral. She showed Michael a tattoo of Kevin’s face on her upper arm. “I want to get a dove every year, but I didn’t get one yet this year,” she said.
Michael seemed tense as he took a seat on the edge of the couch. Janice sat back, on the other end of the sofa. A basketball game was on the TV and they briefly talked sports before Janice said, “So tell me about your nerves.”
Michael took a deep breath and said, “I don’t know. It’s been a long, long time since the last time I saw you. I made it a goal to contact you but …”
Janice interrupted, rescuing him. “You have pictures of your babies?”
He pulled out his phone so Janice could coo appropriately at photos of his three children. She did and, learning one of his daughters was 3 years old, segued into a story about Jade, who was almost 3 when Kevin was shot.
“[Jade] was Kevin’s heart, and she was afraid to go into the hospital room when she saw Kevin with all that stuff on him,” Janice said. “Then Kevin talked to her and told her it was OK and then she was OK with Kevin being that way.”
Michael nodded, the story obviously affecting him. Then Dana came inside and the talk turned again to basketball, then boxing, then rap, then video games. A family member who Janice thought had already left for work came down the stairs, said hello, and then left through the front door. Janice would later say she was glad he left without recognizing Michael. The man had been Kevin’s favorite cousin, she said, “and he might not be comfortable with Michael being here.”
Janice decided to change clothes so she could demonstrate a rock-climbing game they had. “It makes you sweat,” she said. Michael went outside to finally smoke the cigarette he’d now held for an hour. He said he was feeling better.
“She keeps telling me not to be scared. I told her how scared I was. She told me it was OK now. It’s still hard for me, though.”
Janice rejoined Michael and Dana on the porch. Somehow, the conversation turned to the night Kevin lost his mobility and Michael lost his freedom.
“I don’t know if you know everything that happened,” Michael told Janice. “I remember it like it was yesterday. I think about it all the time.”
On June 24, 2003, Kevin and his cousin attended a house party in Southwest Philly. Among those present were three girls, one of whom had recently had a child with the boy police said shot and paralyzed Kevin. The girl was flirty with Kevin’s cousin, Michael said. The spurned lover talked about wanting to scare the cousins and needing a gun.
Later, when Kevin and his cousin were waiting for the trolley, the girls joined them outside, teasing and flirting. A trolley pulled up, but one of the girls held Kevin’s arm and waved at the driver and told him to “go on, go on.”
“If [Kevin] would have gotten on that trolley, this wouldn’t have happened,” Janice said. “And those girls wanted Kevin to invite my other son over, too. I do have one son left and I thank God for that.”
Janice choked up at times as she recounted some of the details of that night: She and her then-husband, Wayne Burke, had returned home from work after midnight, tired from hours of cleaning restaurants. She saw a piece of paper stuck to the front door and ignored it, thinking it was a restaurant advertising flier. She thought Kevin was home, asleep.
Then Wayne noticed that the paper was a police document, asking them to contact detectives. She called, but no one would tell her what was going on over the phone. Instead, the police told her to go the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. She tried calling her son and his cousin repeatedly, but neither picked up their phones. She jumped in a car with Wayne and a neighbor.
“I kept saying, ‘Something’s wrong. Something’s wrong.’ I pulled over, and my ex-husband said, ‘Nothing’s wrong. They probably just got into a fight.’ ‘But Kevin don’t fight! Give me another, give me something else.’ Now I’m about to cry. Now, I’m scared.”
Hospital officials led the group to a small room. They waited for 15 minutes, then 30, and still no one would tell them what had happened. Janice walked outside to get some air. A short time later, Wayne and the neighbor walked outside to get Janice.
“I’d never seen my husband cry like that. I mean, he’d cried, but not like that. … His eyes were bloodshot red. I guess he was trying to hold his tears in, but they just came out. His whole face was wet.”
The neighbor wrapped his arms around Janice. “He just starting squeezing me and he said, ‘They shot both of them.’ I fell to the ground,” she said.
Hearing this for the first time 11 years later, Michael looked anguished. “We didn’t know [the kid with the gun] was going to do that.”
Michael, too, has felt the pain of street violence.
On April 11, 2012, his brother was shot and killed when he walked out of a Southwest Philadelphia convenience store and into a gun battle. Markel Wright was only 22.
Like so many other homicides, this one received scant media attention, even though some early reports noted Markel was unarmed and was most likely an innocent bystander. The “undeserving victim” angle is one that usually garners news coverage. Markel’s death did not, possibly because he was killed in a neighborhood where violence is unfortunately common.
Yet like any death, his devastated those who knew and loved him. Buseman of the Mural Arts Program saw the impact on Michael.
“It was a real setback for him,” Buseman said. “Of course, we gave him time off and he didn’t come to work for a while. But he was pretty close to his little brother, and it still affects him. … His birthday’s hard, the anniversary of the shooting is hard, it’s just been really difficult.”
Michael does not like talking about his brother and, when asked about him, grows visibly upset. His responses to questions, while still polite, become more curt.
“He got shot one time and that was it. I’ve seen people get shot nine times or five times and they still survive. He got shot one time,” Michael said.
In December 2012, 35-year-old Leon Owens was arrested in connection with Markel’s slaying. His trial is scheduled to start June 2. Michael brushes off questions about his feelings toward Owens and anyone else who might be implicated in the case. Kevin, he said, was strong and was able to forgive. Michael doesn’t know if he can do the same.
“I stay away from it,” he said. “I don’t let myself get into situations. I stay away, be with my kids all the time.”
Michael told Janice about his brother’s murder during an earlier phone conversation. That day on the porch, after both had suffered through a retelling of the night of Kevin’s shooting, Janice brought up Markel’s death. She asked Michael if he could forgive the person who had killed his brother.
Michael seemed unable to speak for a moment. “The thing is, I never understood how (Kevin) did it. It takes a strong. … I don’t know. I don’t know.”
He paused, then finished: “I can. I can. If Kevin forgave me and you forgave me, come on …”
“That’s what I wanted to hear,” Janice said. “That’s good. That’s good.”
After a few hours, Michael said he had to go. Work, he said. Kids to pick up. He was smiling when he opened his arms to her. She came in for an embrace. Again, the hug lasted a beat longer than expected.
As Michael drove away, Dana told his wife that she was beautiful. Simply amazing.
After leaving Janice, Michael said he was “probably glowing that whole day. Just hearing it from her mouth that it was OK now, and then she sent me a real nice text.”
But some pain and guilt lingered. “ I still feel kinda messed up,” he said. He reflected on looking at the memorial to Kevin in Janice’s living room, “I didn’t know to be happy or sad. It looked good and it was good to see him. But he wasn’t there.”
Michael and Janice have kept in touch since that face-to-face meeting earlier this month via texts and emails. Janice said Michael is always welcome at her home. He mentioned not having a computer at his apartment. She has two, she said, and he could come over and use one whenever he wanted.
She’d also like to bring Michael closer, into her family, but she knows that could pose some challenges.
“I would love to have Michael come to a cookout and bring his kids and bring his girl. I would love that,” she said. “But some people don’t understand and we’d have to make sure the people we know and love — like my other son — are OK with it.”
Forgiveness is hard, she said. She isn’t sure Michael was truthful when he said he could absolve his brother’s killer. But she hopes he does, since she knows it helps with the healing.
“I didn’t see it in his face,” she said. “But it’s OK. Make sure you say that it’s OK. Not everybody can do what I did, not everyone can have the heart to forgive.
