“They was like, ‘Well, Mr. Young, you know, you not going home no more. You gonna die in prison.’ I’m like, ‘Who gonna die in prison? I ain’t dying in prison.’ So I was in denial because it happened so fast. It’s like one day, I’m 15 years old and I’m in society. And the next I’m not, and you telling me I ain’t never gonna go home?”
So begins “15 to Life: Kenneth’s Story,” a riveting PBS documentary tracing Young’s quest for release from prison after he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms without parole for his role in four armed robberies of Tampa-area hotels in June 2000.
Young would tell a public defender — and years later, a judge at a resentencing hearing — that his mother’s then-24-year-old crack dealer had threatened to kill her unless the boy helped rob the hotels. The dealer, Jacques Bethea, who had a long criminal history, made the threat because Young’s crack addict mother had stolen drugs from him, Young said.
[For more of this story, written by Gary Gately, go to http://jjie.org/15-to-life-chr...fe-at-age-15/107440/]
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