Every inmate eventually witnesses a prison murder and has a story to tell. This is mine.

Seventeen-year-old Damico Watkins lived upstairs in cell #144 of the Adams Alpha juvenile unit. I remember the last morning he trundled down the stairs rubbing sleep from his eyes, a tablet of paper in one hand and a No. 2 pencil in the other. He dropped into the chair across from me at the corner table of the day room as he had for months.

The dayroom doubled for a classroom, and the echoing din of the steel and concrete canyon made it hard to hear.

“Good morning, Damico,” I said. “Did you bring your homework?”

“What?”

“Did you bring your homework?”

“No.”

“Well, can you get it, please?”

“No.”

Damico made me want to quit my tutor job on more occasions than I cared to admit, but I stayed. At first, I didn’t understand why.

I stayed because his struggle felt familiar—I, too, once earned a GED. Deep down, I felt he was a good kid. What kid walking down a 25-year sentence is ever in a good mood?

I could not have known that the next morning, Thursday, April 25, 1996, would be his last.

Clutching razor-sharp shanks, which are prison-made knives, five self-professed members of the Aryan Brotherhood stormed Adams Alpha juvenile unit.

“Drop your keys and radio and get the fuck out,” they told the big guard.

The angry mob snaked for the stairs leading to the barricaded door of cell #144. Inside, a terrified Damico Watkins awaited.

In the Beginning

The guys here call me “Moni” (Mah-knee), a respectful play on my last name. I hadn’t planned life as a GED tutor.

My first prison job had me slaving the cellblock as a porter, assigned the job by my then self-loathing unit manager. It was bad enough that my youth attracted old-school predators lusting after my ass that I fought hand and fist as often as I scraped crap from the bathroom walls.

When the tutor position opened, I fled for it.

In the mornings, while the cool and crisp air caressed my skin and the calm of the yard prevailed, I tugged open the heavy iron door to Jefferson Alpha juvenile unit. My GED students—teen boys, some just barely—called the unit home.

I soon discovered the kids were like other teens: funny, broody, and at times aloof, save for the fact that life had dealt them losing hands. Damico Watkins was one of my students.

By a cruel twist of fate, I also knew the monsters who would alter my life and that of 120 juveniles forever. They lived in my cellblock.

Crooked Guards, Drugs and Alcohol

Red led the Aryan Brotherhood here. At 6’2″, he was an imposing figure. He wore a shaved head and was a puppet master to the men who followed him.

Red had a crooked guard in his pocket. The guys had nicknamed her Grand Mah-Ma. Grand Mah-Ma reminded me of that feared third-grade teacher who cracked fragile knuckles with sturdy yardsticks. Her pinched 1960s framed glasses balanced precariously at the end of chipmunk nostrils.

I was careful not to cross her.

“Go clean the restroom,” Grand Mah-Ma told one of the new intakes.

“That’s not my job,” he snickered.

“That’s not your job?”

“Nope.”

“I’m sorry to bother you then.”

An hour later, I saw the new intake on his hands and knees, toothbrush in hand, scrubbing toilets. Someone had raccooned his eyes. An angry red knot ballooned out from his temple.

“Hon,” Grand Mah-Ma had said to Red, “will you assist the new intake? He needs to clean the restroom.”

“Sure Mah-Ma.”

For years, Grand Mah-Ma smuggled in all manner of death for Red and his goons. Jack Daniel’s flowed like the Mississippi, and cocaine blew like a blizzard year-round. “I take care of my boys,” I once heard her say.

When I wasn’t tutoring, I riffled cards with Red and others in my unit. Our cellblock was naturally segregated. “Whites” were at one end, and everyone else stayed at the other. So I played at their table because that’s where I was expected to be—no more, no less. For the same reasons that I played there, they also accepted me.

Red liked young boys, and I don’t remember much else except that fact. One morning, a Black juvenile jumped Red’s “boy” and made off with a Hustler magazine. I wondered who the offending juvenile was.

Although the juveniles lived in a dedicated unit, they were allowed to intermingle with adult convicts to their detriment. Like the famous monkeys that see, hear, and speak no evil, the State of Ohio turned a blind eye to the rampant extortion and free-for-all sexual assaults the kids endured. This unofficial “Monkey Policy” stayed in force until the Aryan Brotherhood blew the doors off that house of horrors.

“Get the damn magazine back,” Red ordered his boy.

“Okay. I will.”

The boy returned wearing raccoon eyes and swelled lips for his effort. Several Black juveniles had jumped him. This landed on Red and his cronies like bird shit.

For the next two weeks, Red raged at the card table.

“This won’t go unanswered!”

“Who the hell do they think they are?”

Red tipped back cup after cup of Jack Daniel’s and, half the time, incoherently raged about something. He did this so often that I thought little of his rantings.

Murderous Plans Are Laid

“Hey Moni,” said Nelson, my cellie.

“What’s up?”

“Did you hear?”

“Hear what?”

“Spider told me that he heard from someone in maintenance that there’s going to be a killing.”

“A killing?”

“Yeah.”

“You mean like a white-on-white type of thing?”

“No, dude. Like a white on Black type of thing.”

I wondered if the rumor was true and connected to Red’s rantings—his cronies worked in maintenance.

Death Strikes

The chow hall clock ticked noon.

My friend Tony and I grabbed our lunch trays and staked out a table with a view of the yard near an exit. We had done this for days. The entire prison knew something was brewing, and only the administration seemed oblivious.

From the corner of my eye, I caught Red and his henchmen in the distance. The group closed ground tight and smooth like a drop of mercury, flowing across the prison yard with deadly efficiency.

As if blown by unseen hands of fate, the group veered at the crossroads and came upon the juvenile unit.

“Shit,” I said. “It’s going down. Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

Through the window, I caught the Jefferson Alpha cell block officer darting out from the unit’s front door. The big guard frantically flagged his arms at the chow hall. He snatched, in exaggerated motions, the empty radio holster and missing keys on his hip.

Panicked voices from nearby radios caught my attention.

(“Man down! Man down! Jefferson Alpha–“)

(“–Jefferson Alpha what is–“)

(“All radio listening units! Man down, Jefferson Alpha!”)

I sprinted for the exit.

Before the door slammed shut behind me, my last memory was of hundreds of agitated and confused convicts moving quickly about the chow hall.

Afterward

That was 29 years ago.

By the miracle of God, only one juvenile was slain: Damico Watkins. At night, when it’s most silent, I sometimes can still hear his voice.

“Will you explain fractions to me?”
“Sure Damico. Imagine for a moment you
have half a donut–”
“Why the fuck would I want only half a donut?”

“Do you want to throw the football after class, Christopher?”
“Okay, but you need to finish your assignment first.”
“You always say that; you’re not my dad.”

“I’ll go long — throw it, Christopher, throw it!”
I winged the pig skin high and long. I can still remember the grin that cracked across his face.

That was April 24, 1996. It was the last day I would ever see him again.

My time inside has forced horrors upon me, and I am the keeper of secrets birthed from darkness. I’ve muffled the screams and erased the images into the far depths of my mind. Will I ever be allowed to set these traumas free? Was Damico Watkins’s life in vain?

May you rest in peace, Damico.

*Christopher Monihan is a Society of Professional Journalists Stillwater award winner and a Prison Journalism Project student and Contributing Writer.

This story first appeared in Prison Writers at prisonwriters.com.

 

 

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