James “Boo” Williams sat on his porch in northeast Denver, dominoes sprawled in front of him on a white metal table. He pulled out an empty half-pint whiskey bottle from a plastic grocery sack to use as an ashtray.
“If I had known what I know today about gangs, I would have listened to my momma,” Williams said.
The 43-year-old has been partially paralyzed on the left side since he was 20 years old. His left foot is mangled, with virtually no toenails.
He can’t control the fingers on his left hand.
He lives on Social Security disability, with his mother, helping take care of a nephew and two nieces.
Williams said he still relives the night he was shot. It was Juneteenth 1986, the day after his friend and fellow gang member Matthew Vick had wounded a Denver police officer.
He and other Crips had been fighting with rival gang members when police unleashed tear gas in Five Points. Everyone began running, he said. As he approached East 28th Avenue and Franklin Street, a car with rival gang members pulled up to him. The first shot glanced off his head, and the second became embedded in his skull.
He woke up two weeks later.
“I was mad at the world,” Williams recalled. “I just wanted to get high, beat the crap out of people and take their money.”
Within a week, he had been arrested for assaulting a bus driver who he said kept stopping and starting the bus, throwing the partially paralyzed Williams off balance.
“I slapped that bus driver,” he said.
Williams came to Denver in 1985 from Gary, Ind., where he was a fledgling gang member. He said he had assaulted a police officer there and authorities escorted him to the bus station to move to Denver with his mother.
In Denver, he embraced the Crips.
In 1988, he began a constant trek in and out of prison that lasted for 13 years, mostly for drug dealing.
When he was released in 2001, he said, he vowed to turn his life around. He said he joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses church and proselytized door to door for the next two to three years.
“I even wore a suit and coat,” he said.
However, he tired of the strict regimen and left a couple of years ago.
Just last year, he ended up in jail again in a suburb outside of Detroit. He said he had gone back east to visit relatives he had not seen since he left Gary as a teen. He served 266 days in jail in Michigan for bouncing checks. He keeps the paperwork from the jail stint in a manila folder.
Now, he spends his days playing dominoes and drinking. He may have to start using a wheelchair, as walking has become more difficult.
He has two sons, 20 and 24, whom he hasn’t seen since he went to prison in the early 1990s. When he got out of prison in 2001, he sent them a message that he wanted to talk to them.
He said he never got a response.
“They’re living in Minnesota.”
And his message to his 6-year-old nephew and other kids in the neighborhood?
“I’d tell these kids, ‘Stay away. It’s not all that glamorous.’ ”
Still, when is asked if he is still a Crip, a big smile erupts on his face.
He nods.
