Video Transcript: Duche Bradley - iamsecond.com
You know, I think about my young life growing up, the one thing that always sticks out to me is how desperately I wanted to have the love of my father. Growing up, I was always angry, and anger for me always turned into violence, and violence always had always ended up with me getting into trouble. I started getting involved in real low level sale of marijuana. Low Level sale of marijuana turned into pounds of marijuana, and pounds of marijuana turned into cocaine. I started dating a former girlfriend, and the next thing I know, we're pregnant with a son, and I'm just a teenager with really no prospect of anything positive in life. Colleges wasn't an option, and all of a sudden, my dreams went from playing sports to being a kingpin, a drug entrepreneur, something that I thought was for losers. I am now somehow morally justified because I didn't use drugs. I can remember going into Harlem, New York, and being the only person on the block that looked like me, and going into elevators with men with Uzi machine guns and shotguns. And I can remember the adrenaline rush that I got there wasn't a fear. It was a sort of a rite of passage that I was experiencing by going into these tough and possibly harmful environments. And I can remember going to the back room and seeing a man sit at the table where I would drop a bag full of money, and I would walk away with a bag full of cocaine. I would start taking that cocaine, and I would begin chopping it up with saran wrap it around my legs all the way up to my torso. Put on a double breasted suit with a silk tie, put on a pair of Italian loafers, grab a briefcase, and I'd walk straight through the airport metal detection, daring somebody to stop me because I was angry. What's amazing about the world of illegal narcotics and drug entrepreneurship is that I didn't trust anybody. I can remember chasing my best friend down the street with a baseball bat and trying to break his ribs when I finally caught him, because I found out that he had went into my son's mother's pocketbook and had stolen from her. It's all an illusion. And so I never had anyone that I felt was truly a friend. When I was in that world, I flew from New York to Atlanta, I got in my car, and I was driving back up the coast, and a state trooper pulled me over, and when he came to the driver's side door of the car, and he had a nine miler pointed straight at my head, and he said, Boy, put your hands out the window of this car and climb out onto the ground, or I'm going to blow your head off. I put my hands out the window and I climbed out the car and I laid on the ground of the interstate. The police officer would come and he'd he'd tie my hands behind my back as well as my feet together. He would find blocks of cocaine in the trunk of my car, and this time, I knew I had been caught red handed, and I knew I was going to jail. I remember watching as my son was born, just thinking to myself, I'm always going to be here for you, son. I want you to know that I'll always be here and I'll never leave you. So at two o'clock in the morning, I called home to the one person who always, always took my phone call and always, always got me out of trouble. Mothers worry about the children. My mother, who saved me from everything, couldn't save me this time, but she cried out to
somebody who could. She looked up into heaven, and she said, God, if you exist, will you please help my boy. The next morning, I woke up, an inmate came and he punched me right in the square at my back, kind of sending a message to everybody in there I run. This block, nobody's coming in here to take over my thing. And when he did, I grabbed a food tray and I tried to break his head off into the wall of the prison. That was natural for me. I was angry, and anger always turns into violence for me, and violence always ends up with me getting in trouble. Then something very unusual happened. They sent the man who hit me back to his cell in isolation, and normally, that's where I'm supposed to go too but they look at me and call me by my last name. They say, Yo Veneta. You want to go to church? The church was a six by nine prison cell. There was one other inmate who was sitting in there with me. He handed me a little, small brown book. It's called a Gideon Bible, and he looked at me on the floor of that prison, and he said eight words that changed my life forever. He said, You look burdened. Can I pray for you? I don't remember the words of that prayer, but I do remember it ended in Jesus name, and as I would walk out of that six by nine prison cell, the other inmate who was with me, Andrew had asked me about my son, and I told him I'd Have a one and a half year old son, and I made him a promise that I would never leave him, that he would never have to grow up not knowing who his father was, and here I was doing to him the very same thing that I promised him I would never do well. I didn't realize how much trouble that I was in until I go from the prison to the courthouse to find out how much time I'm looking at and I remember sitting there, and there was a bunch of guys that were attached to me with chains. When their name was announced, they would say, well, you're looking at six months probation, you're looking at three years, you're looking at a year and a half. And then they announced my name, and they told me that I was looking at 25, to 40 years in prison, and I remember hearing the guy say, man, what did you do? And all I could think of was my little boy growing up not knowing who his father was. Reality for me had set in. So I started to pray, and I remember the only prayer that I had made to God wasn't that I wanted him to get me out of what I had gotten myself into. My only prayer was before I go away, let me go and say goodbye to my son. I didn't ask him for justice, but I cried out for mercy. I would then call my attorney. He says, You're never going to guess the news that I have for you. I said, what the DA said that they're going to null process my charges, which means you've been arrested, but you're never going to go to trial. You're never going to face conviction. And 12 to 24 years that I was guilty of was wiped away. I couldn't believe it. I ended up doing a total of two and a half years in prison. That's for every set of charges that I had, and all I can remember is him looking at me and the smile that he got on his face when he would see his daddy and lifting him up and holding him and feeling his little feet dangling from me and him trying to tell me everything that he had done since I had seen him last, and I remember just the great joy that I
got in hearing my son talk to me and Knowing that my son loves me, and knowing that my son misses me and for me, it just translated into how God must feel when I reach out to him. On my way here today, my son writes to me in a text, pop, I'm proud of you, and I'm glad that you allow me to be a part of your story. And I say, Son, I wouldn't have a story if it wasn't for you, the benefit for me of being a father is it gives me the desire to be a better man, and it gives me the desire to know that I have to live a life that is an example for my own son. My name is Duche Bradley, and I am Second.