Eric Stevenson, 12, sat against a tree in a South Central Los Angeles park with a 12-gauge shotgun in his arms, smoking a stick of PCP.
Older homies told him he didn’t have to pull the trigger, just make sure the rival Rollin 60s and Tray Gangsters Crips who passed through saw him representing his neighborhood.
“I yelled out my name and my ‘hood,” Stevenson said. “And then, boom!”
Stevenson – then known as “Bugsy” of the Six Deuce Brim Bloods – didn’t want to hesitate during his initiation, so he pulled the trigger when he saw the enemy approach. As far as he knows, no one was hit.
“I dislocated my shoulder when I fired,” Stevenson said. “After that, I became really rebellious.”
When he was 19, Stevenson came to Denver – after his mom moved here – and began selling cocaine, PCP, crack and marijuana. By 1985, Stevenson was bringing gangsters from Los Angeles on a Greyhound bus into Park Hill and teaching local Bloods how to sell drugs.
“Back then in the ’80s, it was about getting high on coke,” Stevenson said. “I had it – girls, the money, the cars. But I was addicted, and I didn’t know it. I did an 8-ball (an eighth of an ounce of cocaine) a day.”
Stevenson said he shot people over territory or bad drug deals.
“It was either him or me,” Stevenson said. “I never got over the fact that it happened like that. The coldest thing you could ever do is lay somebody down.”
He was shot twice – once during a drive-by in Park Hill, another time when a drug deal went bad at a motel on Broadway.
“The top money was real, and the middle was paper,” Stevenson said. “The guy shot me in the hip; it hit the bone and came right back out.”
In 1990, Stevenson smoked crack for the first time. The drug changed what he thought was the glamorous life of a drug dealer into the sorry existence of a crackhead.
Stevenson went to prison in 2001 and was given a seven-year sentence for dealing. Today, he’s out on parole.
“I’ve been wanting a functional life of my own,” he said after spending the afternoon mentoring kids at Wyatt-Edison Charter School. “If I don’t make the right decisions, I’ll go back there.”
The quest for self-esteem
Stevenson, now 40, is a youth worker for the Rev. Leon Kelly, the founder of Open Door Youth Gang Alternatives. He’s trying to persuade at-risk kids to stay away from the life he led.
He’s also battling prostate cancer and the emotional impact his crimes have had on himself and others.
“This is my everything,” Stevenson said as he looked around the classroom. “I feel like I have to give back to them because I took so much from them. I destroyed a lot of lives.”
Stevenson said he didn’t necessarily decide on a life of crime. As a kid, he said, he didn’t have the self- esteem or the family support to become a man.
“All those years, I think I had a problem with succeeding. I was used to failure,” he said.
The violence began when Stevenson was 12 and his older brother shot a high school basketball star who was secretly a rival Crip.
His brother fired two shots into the Crip’s neck in front of other students at school and ended up in prison for life. In 1992, his brother died behind bars from pneumonia.
“I missed hearing my brother come home and tell me stories at night,” Stevenson said. “They were really into the gang life.”
Stevenson looked so much like his brother – and he was in the same ‘hood – that it was just expected that he was a Blood.
“I think I didn’t have enough attention,” Stevenson said of his childhood. “My mom was working two jobs. There was no one person there. My dad would say he was coming and then not show up for three to four days.”
Stevenson felt unloved, and his self-esteem dipped.
“Then these cats every day were looking for me, telling me they loved me,” Stevenson said of the Bloods in the neighborhood.
He sees the same need in the kids who are involved in gangs now. In many of those cases, he said, Mom is on crack, Dad is in prison for life, or a relative has turned them on to the gang.
Stevenson tells them that his homies are either dead, in prison or their brains are fried from drug abuse.
“It’s not just about getting in a gang. I tell them that there are other emotional issues they are going to have to deal with,” he said.
Stevenson has trouble sleeping at night, thinking about his past and worrying about his future. The hours he puts in with the children at Open Door keep him focused. Their struggles are still his own.
“This is my incentive to keep going,” he said. “This is my test. This is what is going to get me a better life.”
Staff writer Felisa Cardona can be reached at 303-954-1219 or fcardona@denverpost.com.
