Marcos Escalera ran through the soft evening light of a strange part of town last week, one in a fast pack of skinny boys at flight in Washington Park, the centerpiece of Denver’s leafy, coveted south side.
Black, brown and white, they sped through the evening traffic of high- performance baby strollers, bicycles and in-line skates with even, deliberate strides and determined faces.
Escalera, 18, has several relatives and friends in prison. He is free, but that’s new. He doesn’t sell crack anymore, he says. He’s done stealing cars for the rims. Instead, he runs – something for which he had to be locked up to discover he did well.
Escalera is fast. Fast enough, maybe, to win a race he was never expected to enter. The finish line is in a promised land called college – invisible to the street tough he says he used to be.
Facing, breaking the cycle
Escalera came to the Team XC running-club practice at Washington Park via Ridge View Academy, Colorado’s privately run reform school for boys. In June, he finished a 19-month sentence after failing drug tests that were part of his probation for a car-theft conviction.
Forced to participate in sports at Ridge View, he came out of nowhere last fall to make a strong showing at a regional cross- country meet. And this past spring, he finished third in the Class 4A 3,200-meter run at the state championships.
Before the state finals, he said, he felt like the established stars dismissed him as a wannabe, not a contender.
“You can tell a runner,” Escalera said, recalling that moment. “You can tell by the way he warms up. By the way he looks. He’s got a serious mean face on. He looks like he’s going to squish you. Then I go out there and show them what I really got.”
Escalera is fast enough, observers say, to earn a full-ride college scholarship if he continues to do well in competitions, steers clear of trouble and finishes high school. He has one semester to go and recently enrolled at South High.
“He’s going to be one of the top 25 kids in the country this year,” predicted Brad Barnes, coach of Team XC, which includes some of the state’s top distance runners. “I saw him race at regionals (in cross country last year). That kind of told me the story right there.”
Everybody runs at Ridge View. Three miles, at 11 a.m., on courses called Stamina, Adrenaline and Windmill. Escalera ran faster than everybody else and eventually wound up on the track team.
“When I’m running, sometimes you go into a mode where you don’t even know what you’re doing,” he said a couple of weeks before his release. “You’re just running. You’re just somewhere out in the world, running. Sometimes you think about things that have happened. Other times, you just think to win – keep your eyes on the back of the person in front of you, to pass them on the last 100.”
Escalera is the oldest of five siblings. His mother, Elvira Cardiel, is a Wal-Mart cashier. His stepfather pours foundations. His father is out of the picture, Cardiel said.
His Uncle Joe was a senior member of Escalera’s gang and an influential male role model before a conviction on drug charges sent him to a federal prison in Texas.
While he was at Ridge View, Escalera received a letter from his uncle.
“Look at all of us,” his uncle wrote. “We’re all locked up. We need to change. We need to break this habit of going to jail. All of our family is stressing over us. All I can tell you right now is to (be) cool and stay out of trouble, so you can get … out and back to your family.”
It is unknown whether Escalera will be eligible to race for South this fall. But even if he is ineligible for interscholastic competition, Team XC participates in national-level events.
That’s where Colorado’s surprising new standout student- athlete should be able to attract the attention of college scouts, Barnes said.
Barnes, a volunteer coach for South and the creator of Team XC, is a private college adviser by trade, hired to help ambitious kids get into better colleges.
In Escalera, he sees a unique opportunity to teach the world something about human potential, he said.
“I told Marcos, ‘You stick with us and focus, keep your grades up, you’re going to college, and you’re going to college for free,”‘ Barnes said.
Change is rarely easy
Right before his release from Ridge View, Escalera said he thought it would be easy, this transformation. The school’s program consists of long, intensely busy days of athletics, classes and counseling. The system encouraging peer enforcement of behavioral rules has worked, he said.
Managed by the state Department of Human Services’ Division of Youth Corrections, Ridge View opened in 2001 as a public-private effort to rehabilitate young criminals. The 500- bed residential facility, as a Denver Public Schools charter school, also can deliver high school diplomas.
According to its first recidivism report, released last fall, more than 60 percent of its students stay out of the criminal justice system after leaving.
But change rarely comes easy, say experts such as the Rev. Leon Kelly, a gang outreach specialist in Denver.
“At Ridge View, anybody in that type of environment, with that type of support, they make great strides,” he said. “But the issue is, when they get out, how are they going to follow up?”
Last week, a few weeks into Escalera’s freedom, that was a difficult question to answer.
He is hanging out again with his old friends. There are nights when he does not come home, his mother said.
And he missed the first Team XC practice of the summer last Monday.
As the practice went on without her son, Cardiel said she was worried.
“I don’t know where he is,” she said. A Ridge View MVP trophy and a picture of Escalera at a track meet sat atop her television. “He comes, and he goes. I thought maybe something was going to change, and maybe it’s not.”
But Escalera showed up for the team’s second practice Wednesday.
More important, Barnes said, he showed up at a Littleton light-rail station at 9 a.m. Friday for a team run in Roxborough State Park.
“The way I look at it, this was the test today,” Barnes said after the training run. “Any kid who gets out of bed at 6:30 on a Friday morning during summer break … to go on a 7-mile run is serious. He easily could have come up with an excuse.”
Escalera said he missed practice Monday because he had been out looking for a job.
He and Barnes talked about it on the phone Tuesday, they said.
“I told him, ‘This is a job, and it pays better, if you do it right,”‘ Barnes said. “It’s called a full- ride scholarship.”
Though he expects he’ll never leave his friends and relatives who remain in his east-side gang, Escalera said he expects to go to college and become a police officer.
His friends are not a problem – they are encouraging him to run, he said. And he is not going to get into trouble again, he said.
“I’m not going to be up in that,” he said. “I’ve been in jail too long. If they want to go back, they can go back, but I ain’t trying to go back.”
Staff writer Jim Hughes can be reached at 303-820-1244 or jhughes@denverpost.com.
