CLEVELAND, Ohio — Tyson had skipped lunch and remembers being “really hungry” that day in April 2023. He had $6 in his pocket, so before basketball practice, he walked to a Little Caesar’s in Tremont to grab a pizza. When the man at the counter offered him two pies for the price of one, he thought it was his lucky day. Tyson took the boxes back to school and offered the first slice to a friend, who bit into the crust and found it “rock hard and not edible,” he says. He took the pizzas back to the shop but says the man behind the counter refused to exchange them or return his money. The 16-year-old got mad. He jumped the counter and yanked two new pizzas from the warmer. A 62-year-old cashier told police he tried to stop Tyson, but the teen “pushed him out of the way.” A cook, however, grabbed Tyson at the door, holding him “in a bear hug,” police reported. Tyson recalls it being more like a choke hold, which further fueled his anger. After a few minutes of struggling, the man let go, and Tyson ran away, empty-handed. A short time later, Tyson returned with friends looking for a fight. The employees saw him coming and locked the door. They called police. Tyson was arrested. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office charged Tyson with nine counts in the incident, including four felonies for attempted robbery and misdemeanors for assault and menacing. It was his first time being in trouble with the law. Tyson admits to losing his temper that day. He says he felt embarrassed because “I let him (the cashier) play me like that, and then he tried to get big on me, because he was not letting me get what I paid for.” But that didn’t make him the violent person that charges or prosecutors were portraying him as in court. “I might make mistakes, but everybody makes mistakes,” Tyson says of his lapse in judgment. “Nobody’s perfect.” Tyson is one of more than 50 juvenile offenders – referred to by middle name or pseudonym – who spoke to The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com about their recent experiences within the Cuyahoga County juvenile justice system, which puts more children behind bars than any other county in Ohio. Their stories, told over six weeks, illustrate influences that led them to crime, escalations from petty misdemeanors to violent acts and barriers that delayed or blocked their way out. The juvenile system is designed to offer youth second chances and opportunities for rehabilitation, understanding that impressionable young people, with their strong wills and still-forming brains, are not only prone to errors in judgment, but also likely to learn from them. The court has a menu of services meant to facilitate that change and set youth on a better course. Those services are successful in most cases. However, life is not stagnant, and neither is rehabilitation. Sometimes, youth return home to the same situations that drove them to crime in the first place and fall back into old patterns. Other times, they’re faced with new challenges that tempt relapse. The situations leave many kids constantly teetering between recidivism and reform. But with the right support, mentorship and opportunities, there is hope for a fresh start. It was Tyson’s first charge, but the prosecutor’s office denied sending him to diversion. After a month, however, prosecutors offered him a plea deal that dropped all felony charges, which Tyson accepted. He says several teachers and an assistant principal had submitted letters vouching for his good character. A judge ordered him to write a letter about his experience in court, pay his court fees and complete 25 hours of community service – his mother doubled the hours. He completed the requirements in three months, and his case was closed. It was over, he thought. Temptation Growing up in Cleveland’s Buckeye-Shaker neighborhood, Tyson remembers being constantly exposed to crime and violence. But much of it felt justified, he says. “They want to make sure they have money for their kids, food in their belly,” he explains. He understands the struggle. His mother had him when she was 19 and has largely raised him and his three younger siblings as a single parent. He’s never had a close relationship with his biological father, and though he now claims his stepdad as his real dad, those parents have since divorced. Money is always tight. He resented wearing hand-me-down clothes – usually two sizes too big – and times when their heat, water or electricity was shut off. At times, he’d have to boil water for a bath. Food could be scarce, too. He remembers sometimes riding to the drive-thru with his stepdad and ordering a single chicken bite and french fry meal from Rally’s to split with his siblings. Meals come more regularly now, he says. But his mother admits that there are still times when their government assistance runs out before the end of the month, leaving them all a little hungry. On his toughest days, Tyson says it would be easy to turn to the streets for support, like so many of his friends have done. “I chose not to,” he says, crediting his parents’ at-times pesky nagging and strict rules for keeping him on track. Poverty led him to crime anyway. “If I wasn’t hungry, I probably wouldn’t have acted that way,” Tyson says. Still, he’d avoided criminal trouble up to that point, despite many temptations and influences. So, staying out of trouble for the remainder of his life seemed like an easy promise to make. He was a good student who trained year-round for football and spent weekends helping feed the homeless. He also moved schools after his arrest in search of more structure and a new friend group. His grandmother also tried to scare him straight, forcing him to talk to a man who’d spent decades in prison for crimes committed at 19. He warned Tyson about life in the criminal justice system – “Jail was not a place I wanted to be,” Tyson summarized the conversation. “I’m not going back” to court, he vows. A week later, Tyson’s 19-year-old cousin was killed in a brutal shooting on Cleveland’s East Side. Immediately, he considered retaliating. That’s what is expected when a family member is gunned down, he explains, otherwise you might look weak and become a target yourself. Soon after, a peer taunted him about the death, and Tyson challenged him to a fistfight after school. The kid didn’t show. Tyson braced for more comments. He thought he knew who was responsible for the shooting and expected to run into them at some point. A part of him wanted revenge. “I don’t know what to do,” he says. “I want to do something…” Mentorship Reeling with grief, Tyson started making empty threats. But he kept coming back to a lesson he’d learned just five days earlier. As part of the extra community service his mother required, Tyson linked up with mentor Antoine “Fahiem” Tolbert, who co-founded New Era. The grassroots group tries to deter crime with armed street patrols in the city’s most crime-laden neighborhoods. Many of the adult members wear bulletproof vests and carry assault-style rifles. On a drizzly Friday night in October, the group patrolled Buckeye Street, helping residents safely cross the street, singing Happy Birthday to a homeless man at the park and talking to residents about responsible gun ownership. Tyson walked with them. At one point they stood outside of a gas station, watching over patrons who stopped to fill up their tanks and a dad holding tightly to his toddler’s hand, as they walked away with a box of cereal. Tyson was uneasy. Numerous people have been robbed there, he says. One customer, who appeared high, kept walking in and out of the store, surveying the group. Fahiem watched him and once followed him back toward the door. Fahiem had a gun slung across his chest and the customer spotted his outstretched pointer finger resting near the trigger. The customer went off, taunting Fahiem to pull it and bragging that he’d survived six gunshot wounds already. He threatened to get his own weapon. He didn’t appear much older than Tyson. Eventually, the customer left, and Fahiem’s group finished their patrol. Back at their cars, they discussed the exchange. Their goal is to restore safety through compassion and respect, not force, Fahiem reminds them, but “while you’re in our neighborhood, we’re not just going to have lawlessness,” he justifies. Tyson was impressed. Had the customer treated him the same way, “I would have swung on him,” he admits to the group. “Don’t sacrifice your future; it’s not worth it,” Fahiem replies. “Mean words and name calling don’t mean anything. Just let it go.” Now put to the test, Tyson had to make a choice. His conflicting emotions came to a head at the funeral, where his cousin’s body lay in all white in an open casket. “As soon as I saw him, I couldn’t breathe,” Tyson recalls of that moment. He walked out, and his mother later found him leaning against the back tire of their car, clutching his chest. Tyson was having a panic attack, the first of many to come. They were triggered when listening to his cousin’s rap music, or after an Akron friend was later shot to death, or when his grandmother was briefly hospitalized for health reasons. “I can’t keep losing the closest people to me,” he says. During that time, however, the people he believes shot his cousin were jailed on unrelated charges. It brought him some relief, he says, “some form of justice.” He no longer felt the need to retaliate. “I let it go,” he says. “It wasn’t going to get me anywhere but dead or in jail.” He’s not sure he could have done so on his own. “I’m just lucky that I had people in my corner,” he says. “You need somebody in your corner.” Hope When Tyson was first arrested outside the pizza shop, he was proud of it. The charges were relatively minor compared to many of his court-involved peers, but it still bolstered his street cred and made him feel tough. Everyone was talking about it, even his teachers at school, he says. Stepping into a courtroom to face those charges, though, changed his attitude. “That was nothing to be proud of,” he says now. He suspected trust and anger issues contributed to his arrest. He asked his mother about seeking therapy, but worried he’d be paired with someone from a different background who wouldn’t understand him. “I want help, but I don’t at the same time,” he says. “It’s hard because I’ve been through so much. My way of dealing with it was becoming the way I am.” His mom didn’t know how to go about finding a counselor, so he dropped it. The two started fighting more at home. Tyson felt she was constantly holding his mistake against him. Things blew up at Christmas, and she temporarily kicked him out. Then she changed her mind, softened her tone. She started asking him questions about what he was feeling and taught him breathing exercises to manage his panic attacks. Their relationship greatly improved. “Sometimes you have to take a different approach, and I’ve been seeing it show some positive results,” she says. “Instead of trying to correct, I’m trying to connect.” Tyson agrees: “Now she’s like my best friend in the house.” Recently, he asked to attend a party at a rented Airbnb with friends from his old school. She said no, reminding him that such parties often escalate into violence. In a compromise, she offered to supervise a different visit in the future. Tyson says the counteroffer surprised him and encouraged him to wait. He stayed home. In February, Tyson brought home his best report card – all A’s and one B+. Most grades showed 97% or higher. Next year, he’s expected to become the first male in four generations on his mother’s side to graduate high school. After that, he’d like to learn a trade and start earning money for college, where he hopes to extend his football career. He hasn’t retaliated. He hasn’t reoffended. Today, he views his arrest as “an obstacle I was supposed to go through,” something to learn from before he turns 18 this year and becomes an adult in the eyes of the law. It wasn’t too late for him, he says. It doesn’t have to be too late for others, either. Kids need mentors in their communities, he says. They need job opportunities, access to therapy and safe respites from troubled homes. In short, they need hope. “Keep trying; don’t give up ever,” he encourages peers who might now be in or toeing the edge of the juvenile justice system. “There’s always hope somewhere.” Sam: When a second chance goes right Upset over the threat of having his Christmas presents returned, 14-year-old Sam typed “how to kill your parents” into Google and pressed enter. Pictures of chemical bottles popped up, giving him the idea to try poisoning. Over the next two weeks in 2020, Sam would test various poisons on his grandfather, whom he’d lived with half of his life, after losing his mother to cancer at age 2 and his father to prison for drug abuse by age 6. First, Sam started by pouring a little lime juice into his grandfather’s coffee creamer, thinking that might somehow harm him, but his grandfather just assumed the creamer had gone sour and spit it out, police reported. Next, he tried juice from a jar of peppers; again, the carton was discarded. The third time, police said Sam poured in Greased Lightning cleaner, but his grandfather noticed the oil-like substance floating at the top and threw it out. The fourth time, he sprayed wasp killer into the carton, which his grandfather noticed smelled like kerosene. At that point, the grandfather suspected Sam might be doing something to the creamer to try and harm him and his wife. They’d fought recently, after Sam had inexplicably shredded two new lampshades. His grandfather threatened to cancel Christmas and return Sam’s presents. But Sam, who appears years younger than his age, had never shown violence before. He comes across as sweet, with a soft voice and introverted demeanor. The grandfather taught him how to fish and signed him up for recreational leagues to support his interest in sports. Sam still speaks positively of those experiences. A quick scan of the search history on Sam’s school-issued computer, however, confirmed the grandfather’s fear: how to kill your parents. Sam told police he only wanted to make his grandfather sick enough to go to the hospital, so he could live with a cousin instead. He couldn’t articulate why he didn’t like living with his grandfather or why their relationship had changed. He told the officer he needed to speak to a psychiatrist, “to help him with his bad thoughts.” When police arrested him on attempted murder charges and his grandfather said he could never come home, Sam cried. Up to that point, a middle school detention for leaving lunch too early was the most trouble he’d ever been in. Now, he found himself charged with serious felonies, jailed in juvenile detention and facing transfer to adult court, where he could be sentenced to adult prison – a process called bindover. Because he was young and had never been in serious trouble before, Sam didn’t qualify for mandatory bindover. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office filed for discretionary transfer instead. In Ohio, prosecutors can request to transfer any juvenile 14 and older who they accuse of a felony offense. Unlike mandatory bindovers, though, which are required to be transferred if probable cause is established, discretionary bindovers are up to a judge, following an investigation into the child’s social history, education and family situation, as well as a mental health examination. If a judge finds the youth “amenable” to rehabilitation within the juvenile system – which runs until an offender’s 21st birthday – they stay. If not, they’re transferred and adjudicated as an adult. “I’m sorry for what I did,” Sam later wrote in an apology letter mailed to his grandfather but returned unopened (the grandfather assumes it was sent to their old address). “I’m learning from what I did seriously wrong…I’m learning to listen and understanding how people feel.” In past weeks, we sought to explain the mechanics of the juvenile justice system – the charging decisions, bindover process and amenability hearings that determine which kids get a shot at rehabilitation and which ones are tried as adults. We also explored the programs that are making a difference in the lives of kids accused of crimes, and we shared with you the experiences of victims and their families, who reflected on what justice means to them. But we end the series with stories of hope – the kids who, with the right support, eventually found their way to a better path and were able to leave the justice system far behind them. Kids like Sam. To this day, Sam has never fully explained why he tried to poison his grandfather. “I think I wanted to leave,” he says now at 17, without elaboration. Does he regret what he did? “Not really,” he says. Will he ever do it again? “No,” he shakes his head. “I don’t need to.” Exiting juvenile jail, Sam went to live with his biological grandmother, whom he hadn’t seen since his mother died. She and court officials who’d worked with him for over a year suspected he was being abused while he was living with his grandfather. The teen had told them stories of strict household rules and times his grandfather reportedly threatened that there was “a grave behind the garage with his name on it.” One staffer with the court reported the grandfather to the county’s Department of Children and Family Services for investigation. Sam’s probation officer later listed “the abuse inflicted by (albeit the victim) maternal grandfather” among Sam’s life traumas. The grandfather denies the abuse allegations and alleged threat. Regardless, Sam began to thrive in his grandmother’s care, as noted by his probation officer. The court questioned his competency, so he went to a remediation program to better understand his charges and the potential consequences. The court also ordered him to therapy and the Community Based Intervention Center, which focused on changing his thoughts and behaviors. By the end, a behavioral risk assessment concluded he wasn’t likely to harm others again, giving him the lowest possible score. In a plea deal that removed the option of bindover, Sam admitted to lesser charges of contaminating a substance for human consumption and was sentenced to probation, which he completed in October 2022. He continues to excel. He’s on the honor roll at school and works part-time at a pizza shop. He continues to meet with a therapist monthly. He joined the school’s golf team and twice has been named most valuable player. Next to his trophies, he keeps a letter from his coach, praising his sportsmanship – “That drive and determination will take you everywhere,” it reads. He hopes it takes him to college. Now settled in his new life, Sam says he’s happy. His grandmother teases him over his fashion choices. He teases her slow progress learning to play his favorite video game. Their biggest disagreement is over how long they’ve been reunited. Once, when his grandmother accidentally shortchanged the tally, Sam was offended. It had been two years, eight months and 26 days, he corrects. “I really like it here,” he tells her. Blake: From ‘ruthless’ to reformed In 2020, Blake stood before the judge, trying to look tough. Barely 16 and slightly framed, he wanted to prove he was no pushover. The boy was facing sentencing for a carjacking he committed at 15. The victim’s family sat behind him. At one point Judge Jennifer O’Malley asked if Blake had anything to say. He turned to face the family but said nothing. “I was being ruthless,” Blake recalls now. Blake had much to overcome, with childhood trauma at his back. And he entered the juvenile justice system having committed the kind of violent crime that has deeply undermined Clevelanders’ sense of safety in recent years. But his personal transformation while incarcerated is a remarkable example of what’s possible when the justice system builds second chances into a youth’s sentence – an opportunity to earn something back. For Blake’s crime, the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s office initially sought discretionary bindover. Before Judge O’Malley could review the case to make that determination, however, Blake accepted a plea deal that maintained his aggravated robbery charge but reduced the gun specification. Prosecutors withdrew the bindover request and instead sought a blended sentence under what’s known as the Serious Youthful Offender statute. In that scenario, Blake would serve time in a youth prison with the threat of an adult sentence to follow if rehabilitation were to fail. Blake expected the judge to give him a year or two in custody, maybe at an alternative placement facility, based on what he says his lawyer told him. But under the SYO, O’Malley sentenced Blake to juvenile prison for three to five years. If he got into trouble behind bars, his sentence could stretch to seven years in adult prison. Blake was shocked. The ruling marked the low point in his journey through the justice system. Life circumstances Though his probation officer called Blake an “overall good kid,” respectful with normal self-esteem, he already had struggles. He’d been raised with five sisters in a house in Cleveland’s St. Clair-Superior neighborhood. His mother had been convicted of attempted felonious assault, aggravated assault, riot and forgery. His dad cycled through jail much of Blake’s life. When Blake was a young teen, someone jumped him and beat him with a baseball bat, causing a concussion, his probation officer reported. Two years later, in an unprovoked attack at school, he was stomped in the face, requiring a plate to be installed in his jaw. By 15, Blake was experimenting with crime, resulting in delinquency – the juvenile system’s term for a conviction – for aggravated assault, related to a fight. He also stole cars with friends, for convenience and fun. He enjoyed “riding around in BMWs, pulling up on females thinking we were raw,” he says. He boosted about a car a week, ditching it before it got too hot. One evening in 2020, Blake’s group spotted a car for the taking in downtown Cleveland. This time, the vehicle’s owner was present. As the 26-year-old woman was entering her car, a member of Blake’s group pointed a gun at her hip, demanding keys. The youths hopped in the car and fled. “I was like, ‘Damn, I don’t want to do that,’” Blake recalls of that incident when he was 15. “But I didn’t want to seem like a punk.” Detectives watched video footage and recognized one of the teens, who had arrest warrants. Police found the group in a residential backyard and arrested them. Blake was 85 pounds entering jail but still instigated fights. His hair grew long and unkempt. Brimming with anger, he blamed his situation on his mother, his lawyer, O’Malley – anyone but himself. Following sentencing, Blake was booked in an Ohio youth prison in Massillon. He arrived in a cast, five days after hand surgery related to a fight, he says. He recognized several Cleveland faces. In the year that followed, Blake hit a growth spurt. To his surprise, as his body thickened, his anger thinned. He earned a job washing dishes, and officials rewarded his good behavior with extra recreation time, he says. Eventually, the facility made him an ambassador, allowing him to give visitors tours, he recounts. Blake thought his good behavior might shorten his sentence. It did not. On three occasions he applied for parole, but each time Judge O’Malley denied it, he recalls. After his third rejection, the teen felt the old anger boiling within. He warned his case manager to watch out – he was ready to punch somebody. “I was tweaking out,” he says. But with three months left on the minimum end of his sentence, he recalls, Blake made a fourth attempt at early release. Last summer, he stood before O’Malley and made his pitch, boasting about his high school credits and honor rolls. This time, O’Malley granted his release. “I was very impressed by everything he did with his time,” she says now. Rehabilitation At 18, Blake returned to his mother’s house, but freedom hasn’t been without its own challenges. Not long after, Blake was indicted in adult court on two counts of menacing by stalking and one count of obstructing official business. Police say he intimidated a Cleveland Walmart employee by staring her down on multiple occasions, accompanied by a woman suspected of murdering the employee’s family member. When police arrived, Blake and the woman unsuccessfully tried to flee. In retrospect, Blake says he instinctively ran because he fears law enforcement. Last month he pleaded guilty to menacing, a low-level misdemeanor, and the judge ordered him to pay court costs. Meanwhile, a jury found the woman guilty of murder. Blake’s mother is also in trouble again. In April she was convicted for trafficking and weapons charges and received probation. Last year, Blake’s father was indicted for aggravated murder. A trial is scheduled to begin this week. Through it all, Blake, now 19, is trying to relaunch his life. He worked to finish high school and is preparing for barber school. He hopes to cut hair at the Cuyahoga jail and other Ohio youth lockup facilities. “I love being connected with people going through the same situation I’ve been through,” he says, laughing about his unkempt hair when he was in jail: “Four months without a haircut, my people came in, seeing me looking terrible.” He has returned to his old prison to give a motivational speech. He’s also moving through juvenile court’s reentry program, which connects youths to resources to assist in their transition back to society. Each time Blake is in the courthouse, O’Malley comes to see him. “I really like (Blake),” she says. “I know it can be difficult to go back to the same house, same community, same neighborhood, but I think he’s doing a good job of trying to focus on himself and finish school.” Blake appreciates the support of a judge he once believed lacked mercy. “We got a good bond,” he says. Shakorie: Success possible, even after adult prison Two days after turning 18, Shakorie Davis was flirting with girls outside Cleveland’s South High School, when he spotted a kid with a gold chain around his neck. Just as he passed, Shakorie snatched it and took off. He didn’t know the kid, never even spoke to him in the exchange. And while the chain was valued around $300, Shakorie says he didn’t do it for the money. He had more than that in his pocket from selling drugs. “It was just me being a straight A-hole,” he says now, nearly 30 years in retrospect. “I never thought anything about it. I was just being a kid; I didn’t realize how serious they would take it.” The victim reported the theft to a nearby police officer, who arrested Shakorie and took him to adult jail. The Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office, then run by Stephanie Tubbs Jones, charged him with robbery, which would come with mandatory prison time, if he were to be convicted. To avoid that fate, Shakorie accepted a plea deal to a lesser attempted robbery charge that would grant him probation but still label him a felon. He remembers the judge, Nancy Margaret Russo, advising against the plea because of how it might affect his future, but his public defender didn’t show, and the attorney who filled in thought it was OK. Probation, the young Shakorie agreed, “seemed like a much better deal” than potentially spending years in prison. He didn’t realize then that a better attorney might have advocated for the charge to be further reduced or dismissed altogether. Shakorie took the deal and was sentenced to 18 months of probation. He also was ordered to pay the victim for the chain and finish his high school education, which he did. That was in 1996. Had the incident occurred a few days earlier, when Shakorie was still considered a juvenile under the law, he might have avoided arrest altogether. He never threatened the victim and didn’t use a weapon. And while his juvenile record wasn’t clean, reflecting at least two drug arrests and some traffic infractions, he had no history of violence. It’s likely his lifestyle would have led to adult court eventually, he admits. He’d been selling drugs since he was 15 and had no intention of stopping. But Judge Russo was right, Shakorie thinks now. That first felony started a chain of events that led him to cycle through probation violations and twice go to prison in his early 20s – until circumstances intervened to set him down a better path. Today, he owns Next Generation Construction, a multimillion-dollar company that counts among its clients Sherwin Williams, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Cuyahoga County itself. For decades, Shakorie has avoided speaking publicly about his criminal past in an effort to protect his business. He still worries how clients might view him, if they learn of his felony record. But he agreed to share his journey with The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com for the first time in hopes it will show youth now coming up through the criminal justice system that they, too, can change their lives and be successful – even if they have a felony record and spent time in prison. “It’s possible,” Shakorie says. He’s proof. Youth Like many youths who touch the juvenile justice system today, Shakorie grew up poor. Both parents worked for the city – his dad for the water department, his mom for the airport – but they lived in housing projects in Cleveland’s Central neighborhood, one of the poorest communities in northeast Ohio. Still, he says, he and his two siblings had food, clothes and security. Life seemed good. Then his parents became addicted to crack cocaine, and some of the care fell away. “It was almost like overnight it was horrible,” he recalls. When he was 11, the family moved in with his grandmother on Lee Road for about a year but then got a house in the Union-Miles neighborhood, where Shakorie says his life was confined to a city block. No one had a car, so everyone in the neighborhood hung out together. Shakorie tried to make the best of it. When his friends started selling drugs, he kept his head down and devoted himself to sports. His freshman year, he started getting bussed to James Ford Rhodes High School, where he was expected to be varsity quarterback. The summer before the season began, he recalls playing in one game where he threw two touchdowns and ran in a third, proving his potential. Everyone was celebrating him back on the block. His dad was proud too, but unwittingly the dad said something meant as a compliment that Shakorie heard as a death sentence. “When you graduate, I’m going to get you a city job with me,” Shakorie remembers him saying. Shakorie had just had his best game and was a decent student. He thought he had a shot at college and dreamed of being a lawyer, despite not knowing anyone from his community who had done it. The words landed like a reality check, he says, placing him in a box from which he felt he’d never escape. The very next day, Shakorie recalls quitting the football team and joining his friends on the street corner selling drugs. Soon after, he transferred to East Tech High School, though he skipped most days and had to redo his senior year. His life lacked purpose, he says, so he spent his days getting high and selling drugs – he could make $1,000 a day. “I was going to graduate to do what? Get a city job? We were still poor,” Shakorie says. “Why rush to live like I’m living right now with my parents?” It was around that time that he started getting into trouble with the law. First for drug possession, which prompted his first trip to probation, and then drug trafficking a year later, when he was 16. He was given a suspended sentence to juvenile prison and returned to probation. When he was 17, he added two traffic violations for driving without a license and crashing a borrowed car. That was in May of 1996. Three months later, he turned 18, snatched the chain, and was in the adult system. Cycling With six months left on probation, he tested positive for marijuana and was ordered to complete out-patient drug treatment and attend several substance abuse support meetings per week, records show. His probation was also extended another year, but he was caught using again before the end. In that period, though, Shakorie says his mother, who was drug-free by then, told him about an opening in the construction union, and he started a job as a sheet metal worker. He stopped selling drugs and was doing well, he says. But that April, he was arrested in a federal sweep of men who had sold drugs to an informant. Shakorie says the exchange had occurred nearly a year prior, before he’d stopped selling cocaine; he was just being charged late. When Shakorie’s name appeared in the paper as part of the bust, he lost his job. He went back to selling drugs until his case concluded, and, at age 23, he was sentenced to federal prison for a year. After release, he worked miscellaneous jobs, but he had three toddlers by then and gravitated back to selling drugs to make more money. “Nothing had changed. I was back in the same environment, with the same friends,” Shakorie says. “When you don’t have any purpose, what else do you do?” A year later, he sold a gram of cocaine to a police informant and was charged with drug trafficking. In court, he pleaded down to possession to shorten his prison sentence to 8 months. His judge, Shirley Strickland Saffold, however, added another 11 months. He remembers her pointing to some charge he wasn’t convicted of as justification, but he never knew what it was. It could have been part of his juvenile record or, he later learned, it could have been a car theft in which police listed him a suspect in 1997, though they never questioned him, and he was never charged. (Shakorie says he only learned of the alleged offense in 2022, when he requested his full criminal history, a copy of which he provided to The Plain Dealer/cleveland.com.) Just before he was incarcerated, he learned he had a fourth child on the way. While in prison, Shakorie says he “grew tired” and decided to make changes. He got married. He started taking typing courses and reading books. He won an essay contest on Black History Month, which gave him confidence in his abilities. And he found a strong faith, which gave him hope of something better. He returned home in 2004, at age 25. It might have been easy, then, to slip back into old habits, but he says his environment had changed. One of Shakorie’s closest friends was killed in a shooting prior to his return, and nearly everyone else he knew was serving time. He only had his wife and kids, who had moved out of his old neighborhood and were living in Shaker Heights. “It was the first time I was removed from the block,” he says. He leaned into his faith and tried a new approach. “Sometimes we expect people to just do the right thing, but we didn’t come from that world. You do what you know,” Shakorie says. But this time, “I finally had something to anchor on.” Rebuilding Life felt harder as a convicted felon, he remembers. But he didn’t give up. He first connected with an area businessman who gave him a job as a roofer and later introduced him to a cabinet maker. Shakorie spent three months learning to build cabinets on the side, without pay. “I believe in the power of knowledge over a dollar,” he says. Then he did a carpenter apprenticeship with a Bedford company. His first job was helping renovate a Cleveland Clinic facility. On the side, he started buying and flipping houses to build wealth. In 2009, he started his own company, Next Generation Construction. It flopped in three years. He knew how to do the work but not how to run a company, he says. Then he started losing his properties, including the house his family was living in, when the housing market crashed. He was able to sell his last building and use the money to buy his family a new house for $15,000. He went back to work with the Bedford company, earning $10 an hour, but this time he spent his days in the office, learning estimating and how to run a business. In the meantime, he renovated his house, which he eventually sold for over $100,000 before moving back to the Shaker Heights area. The sale provided the seed money he needed to relaunch his business. “I never looked back after that,” Shakorie says. Business exploded. Shakorie is still helping shape the East Side of Cleveland and the lakefront. He’s also responsible for renovating the Fanatics Sportsbook at Progressive Field, Cleveland Clinic’s InterContinental Suites Hotel and Loudville at RocketMortgage FieldHouse. Life is still challenging, he says. He avoids requesting key badges for most of the sites where his company works because it would require a background check, and in 2022, he was denied a small business loan with a major bank because he couldn’t prove he’d repaid the restitution for snatching the $300 gold chain. (He says his payment was required to close out probation, but there wasn’t a receipt, and he couldn’t track down the victim to repay him.) A smaller bank gave him a $1.5 million line of credit anyway, but he’s not sure he’ll ever be able to expand that to $5 or $10 million, without which it will be hard to grow his business. “It will always be a fight,” Shakorie says of the collateral sanctions that come with a felony record. But that’s the reality, he adds; there will always be things you can’t do. “The quicker you accept that, the quicker you can build your foundation on what you can do.” ‘Find your superpower’ Today, Shakorie says it’s almost comical to talk about who he was in his youth. “I was a totally different character from who I am now.” He’s been out of prison for 20 years. He’s married with four children, all of whom have graduated from college. He’s running one of the county’s largest minority-owned businesses, which was named the 2024 Northern Ohio Small Business of the year. He still gives back, where he can. He has served as past president of the Contractors Assistance Association and sat on boards for the Union Miles Community Development Corporation, Greater Cleveland Partnership and Cleveland Builds, among others. He and his wife also donated to University Hospitals and have a N.I.C.U Room named after them. Now, Shakorie has been turning his focus toward helping area youth build brighter futures and avoid some of the obstacles he faced. He partners with the Youth Opportunities Unlimited construction academy and ACE Mentor Program of Cleveland and recently taught the Construction Accelerators Program for the Urban League of Greater Cleveland and Sherwin Williams, helping introduce youth to the industry. (His mother now works with area youth as a corrections officer in the county’s Juvenile Detention Center.) Shakorie fears the county is losing youth to social media, absentee parenting and poverty. But by infusing communities with structure, job opportunities and recreation activities, he thinks it’s possible to change the trajectory. It will take consistency, parenting and love, he says. But if you give youth a purpose and opportunities to achieve it, they can thrive. As for kids already in the juvenile system or those serving time in adult prison, there’s still hope, he says. “Find your superpower,” Shakorie advises. “I have a felon label on me, but I provide a service that people want, and I’m good at it. If you find a superpower, people will overlook your shortcomings, and you can succeed. You can overcome.” Devonté: ‘Time ran out’ for him. Can we save others? As sophomores at Glenville High School, friends Devonté Johnson and a teen we’re identifying as JW already appeared destined to play football at the professional level. As a middle schooler, Devonté racked up so many awards in football and basketball that his family ran out of room to display them. In 2020, while playing for the Ginn Elite league, he was named Defensive MVP in an American Youth Football National Championship game. JW’s excelled in football and track. His second-place finish in the 300 hurdles helped Glenville win the 2022 Ohio High School Athletic Association Division ll state championship. Their football coach, Ted Ginn Sr., compared the pair’s talent to that of others he’d coached at Glenville High School, who went on to play in the NFL. Ginn said Devonté reminded him of Donte Whitner, a safety who played for The Ohio State Buckeyes and later, several professional teams, including the Cleveland Browns. Ginn compared JW to his own son, Ted Ginn, Jr., a wide receiver who also played for Ohio State before being drafted into the NFL. “They could have gone on,” Ginn says of Devonté and JW, but the friends lost focus and got caught in the justice system instead. Devonté was killed in a shooting in August 2022. JW is serving up to 11-and-a-half years in prison for an unrelated shooting that October. They “couldn’t see what I saw,” Ginn laments now, “that’s the problem.” The juvenile system is designed to rehabilitate kids when they offend, to prevent further harm, but sometimes interventions fail, or youth commit acts so heinous that they get transferred to the adult system to face adult sanctions. Other times, kids are killed before rehabilitation can even begin. Devonte’s story is a cautionary tale of what happens to young people, families, a community, when the opportunity to intervene in the lives of at-risk youth slips through our fingers. Questions One day in February, Devonté’s mom gathered gardening supplies and flowers and headed for the cemetery. In an alternate world, she would have been preparing a big celebration for Devonté’s 18th birthday. Instead, she was cleaning off his gravestone. “I shouldn’t have to be doing that,” she says, tearfully. She’d raised Devonté as a single mother after his father was killed in a home invasion in 2009, when Devonté was 3. But they’d always had support from extended family, who described Devonté as a “nice, gentle, kind and loving kid.” Growing up, they were constantly shuttling him to different sports. It was “smooth sailing” for years, Devonté’s aunt recalls. Then he reached high school, attending at Ginn Academy, and something changed. His friends quit their sports teams and soon, he was skipping football practice and getting into fights at school. In November 2021, the family’s house was shot at while Devonté, his younger brother and a teen cousin were inside, police said. No one knew whether the family had been targeted – possibly over one of Devonté’s fights – or if they were just victims of errant bullets that frequently ripped through their Glenville neighborhood. Four months later, Devonté faced his first charge in Cuyahoga County Juvenile Court. He was accused of unauthorized use of a vehicle, a misdemeanor, related to carjacking in late August 2021, in which police suspected Devonté and a peer of holding a woman at gunpoint. (His mom says it was later determined that Devonté was a passenger in the vehicle sometime after the carjacking but was not involved in stealing it, leading to the lesser charge.) Around that same time, Devonté quit football altogether and transferred to a high school without a team. His family thought he just needed a break; he’d been playing sports year-round since he was 7. Coach Ginn kept calling, though, urging him to come back. Eventually, Devonté did return, and even started conditioning, albeit sporadically. In July of that year, he pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge and was ordered to community service, freeing him up to devote attention to football again. But on Aug.17, 2022, Devonté made plans to trade guns with an 18-year-old, who was later determined to be out on bond for charges in two armed carjackings, according to the Cuyahoga County Prosecutor’s Office. There was a struggle, and the older teen fired at Devonté until his clip emptied. The family didn’t fault Devonté for seeking out weapons. Everyone his age carries a gun, they say, and their neighborhood had become so unsafe that his mom won’t even take out the garbage without her sidearm. Guns are part of inner city living, they justify. But that still doesn’t explain why Devonté was killed, they say. In adult court, the shooter accepted a plea deal to a lesser charge of involuntary manslaughter, denying Devonté’s family a trial – and answers. They may never know why he was killed, Devonté’s mom criticizes, “I just know how many times my son was shot.” Sixteen. At the shooter’s sentencing, Devonté’s mother described the irreparable harm and unending grief she now faces after the loss of her son. The shooter would be sentenced to a combined 31 years in prison for Devonté’s murder and his two prior carjackings. The day after that hearing, Devonté’s house was shot up a second time. His mother has never returned home. “They practically left me homeless,” she says. ‘Everybody has to come to the table’ In hindsight, Devonté’s family thinks peer pressure and too much idle time between sport seasons contributed to his death – as well as Cuyahoga’s proliferative gun violence. To prevent other deaths, teens need stability and mentors, Devonté’s aunt, who works with at-risk youth, argues. If they can’t get that support at home, she stresses, then those resources need to be stronger in schools and the wider community. “Once you lose their interest, they’re gone,” she warns of teens. “It has to be a collaborative effort. Everybody has to come to the table.” Coach Ginn says he’s trying to fill the gap Devonté’s aunt described. He founded Ginn Academy, an all-boys affiliate of Cleveland Metropolitan School District that has a reputation for educating at-risk teens. But more work needs to be done in the home, he argues. In the past, youth shared a dinner table with their families, where they learned values and accountability, but now, “there’s not enough tables in the community,” he says, and the perception of “bad” Black and Brown kids from the inner city hinders outreach. “They’re not bad, they’re misguided,” Ginn says of youth. They need teaching, not incarceration: “I just think locking people up is not correcting anything. You lock them up, but you never work on correcting the problem.” At Devonté’s vigil, Ginn told local media he’d been trying to get the star player back on the team to give him direction and support. He’d seen Devonté’s life taking a dangerous turn and believed football could set him right again. “We were fighting to get him, and eventually we probably would have gotten him, but time ran out,” Ginn said at the time. Two months later, JW was involved in a shooting, bound over to adult court and sentenced to prison. Two good friends and star players were gone. That fall, in a teaching moment to the remaining teammates, Ginn held up Devonté’s jersey, 23, while he preached from Romans 12 about how God has bestowed each person with a gift, but individuals must stay committed to unlock their full potential. Then Ginn held up JW’s jersey and track cleats – dirt still clung to the bottom, representing potential never to be. The neglect that youth are experiencing in their homes, schools, communities and the justice system is “costing our children’s lives,” Ginn now says. “We cannot just sit back, as leaders and educators, when we see kids going wrong,” he says. “We can’t just walk past them. We have to put our hand on them; we’ve got to try to make a change. “If we don’t,” he finishes, “then we’re part of the problem.” – This concludes our series Delinquent: Our System, Our Kids. Thank you for reading. Please consider supporting journalism like this by joining our community of subscribers. With a paid subscription, you gain access to everything published by a team of journalists committed to providing accurate information on news, entertainment and sports in Northeast Ohio. Please subscribe here. — Chris Quinn, Editor
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