The first time Gary Bailey was shot in a gang fight, it was front-page news.
Photos in May 1988 showed 19-year-old Bailey carted away on a gurney after the shootout in front of Manual High School.
He got hit in the neck by several scatter shots as school was letting out.
The second time Bailey was shot, seven months later, it was mentioned in a three-paragraph story in the back of the newspaper. The third time went unreported.
By 1991, Bailey said, he had to get out of Denver and away from the gangs. His parents had died within a month of each other, cancer victims.
He moved to Dallas and lived with relatives.
“I felt like if I was still here and going the route I was going, I probably would be incarcerated or wouldn’t be talking to you today,” he said. “I’ve still got all my limbs.”
He gravitated toward the Crips gang in 1985, along with several neighborhood friends, including leader Phillip Jefferson.
He said he still occasionally talks to Jefferson when he visits Denver.
The transition from gang life was not easy. He spent two years in prison in Texas for a probation violation for assault. Before that, he got probation in Denver in 1990 for drug offenses.
But he said he has stayed out of trouble for the past seven years.
“I knew I had to make a choice,” he said. “We’re all getting old, and it’s starting to show.”
