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A prison conversion
By WAVENEY ANN MOORE © St. Petersburg Times, published January 7, 2001 For Johnny Jermaine Simmons Sr., New Year's Day was the first in four years spent in freedom. The 24-year-old father of two can recite to the day his time in prison. "Four years and eight months and 13 days," he says precisely. And, he vows, never again. Simmons, who like many young African-American males discovered Islam while in prison, is counting on its values and discipline to help him keep his pledge. He has close ties to St. Petersburg's Masjid Al-Muminin Inc., or the Believers' Mosque, at 3762 18th Ave. S. "I always used to observe the Muslims. Their conduct and character were always on line," Simmons said recently of the faith he adopted in 1997. "It helped me realize that the world isn't against me," he said. "There was a great deal of importance put on accountability." A drug dealer and a thief since the age of 15, Simmons was sent to prison in 1996 and served four concurrent sentences, three seven-year and one five-year sentence -- for cocaine sale, manufacture, delivery and possession and robbery with a firearm. That life is behind him, said Simmons, whose Muslim name is Rafi Mwita Salim. With the vocational training he received in prison, he has been able to get a job as an information technology specialist for Greatstone Mortgage in Tampa. His dream, he said, is to continue his studies. "I'm not really trying to convince anybody that I've changed," he said. "I know that I have changed." Before resolving to turn his life around, he said, "I only saw three endings to my life. Either that the police were going to kill me or one of the people in the street was going to kill me or I was going to be arrested and go to prison for the rest of my life. . . . That's the way I lived my life. I was being real selfish." But the transition has not been smooth. In October, he separated from his young wife of about six months. They had been married while he was in prison, and the split came just a month after his release. The breakup with the mother of one of his two sons means that Simmons has had to return to his old neighborhood and its temptations. Doris Ford, his mother, worries about the lure of familiar haunts and old buddies. "He seems very determined in what he wants to do, but that fear is always in my mind, that he may start being with these people again and be easily swayed by them. I pray that he doesn't, but that is always a possibility," she said. "So sure, I have to be afraid. I have to be." Simmons says he hopes to move into an apartment in another neighborhood this week. As his mother tells it, her only son was a normal, happy child, bright and an avid reader of Hardy Boys books. Most of all, said Mrs. Ford as she sat at the kitchen table in her home in Tampa's Jackson Heights, he yearned to become a professional athlete. "School was always the most important to me," said Mrs. Ford, a collections manager for Time Warner Communications. "I always encouraged him to study and to read so that if he didn't make it in sports, he could be successful in whatever field he chose to go into," she said. But her son preferred to clown around in class and was an average student. Mrs. Ford recalls exactly when he started getting into trouble. "It was the summer he went from 10th to 11th grade. All the years prior to that, I always had him in a summer program. He begged me not to send him that summer, that he wanted to stay home, that he was too big to go to the summer program," she said. "I let him stay home, and that was the year." Simmons attended Hillsborough and Chamberlain High School. He dropped out in the 11th grade. "I got injured. I thought, if I can't play football, I'm not going to school," he said. "I would leave early in the morning. My father had given me a car. I'd park my car at my friend's house and I'd sell crack all day long." A steady hangout was the corner of 34th Street and Chelsea Avenue, in front of the Honky Tonk, a bar that's now closed. "That was one of the biggest dope spots," said Simmons, who added that he had long envied neighborhood drug dealers for their seeming wealth. "I had made up my mind when I was maybe 11 or 12 years old that I was going to sell crack. I said, that's what I want to do if football and baseball don't work out. My mama always said to have something to fall back on." He was 15 when his mother found his gun and drugs stashed in his room. She called his father. "My mom and dad didn't even speak," he said of the parents who were separated at the time. "My daddy is saying, 'What is this?' He grabbed the crack I had in two pill bottles. He knew it was mine. He said, 'I'm not mad at you. I'm disappointed in you.' " His father, Johnnie Edward Simmons, died on May 24, 1997, while his son was in prison. "That's when I changed my life. That's when I woke up. That's when I got my reality check," his son said. "I used to say, when I go to hell, when I get there, the devil is going to have to move out. When my daddy died, I broke down and I cried. I was 21 years old at the time. My sons, one was 2, and the other was 1. When I finally quit crying, I asked myself, 'Why did this happen?' My daddy was healthy. He ran the streets like he was young. He was only 49. The answer was that God took my daddy from me to show me the importance of a father to a son." Coincidentally, his father was in prison when he was born. "I think his father went to prison, I believe three times," Mrs. Ford said. "I don't remember how much time he spent there, but it was quite a bit. So the first seven years of his life, that's where he knew him from, from prison. I used to take him to visit. We went every weekend to see him." It was a pattern that was repeated with the younger Simmons' sons, Johnny Jermaine, now 6, and Johnny Jasean, 4. Simmons was 18 at his first arrest. Charged with armed robbery, he was given probation. "I got out of the county jail at 6 in the evening and at 6:45 I was back at the Honky Tonk with crack in my pocket," Simmons recalled. His father helped him to get a job. "I kept smoking weed. Eventually, I quit my job and I was out there selling full-fledged again." The money helped to take care of his son, he said. But he also bought pricey Nike sneakers, baseball jerseys, electronic games and gold jewelry. "I might go and spend about $1,800 on a chain and wear it and then sell it to one of my homeboys for a grand. I'd buy a car and put music in it," Simmons said. It wasn't long before he was in trouble again. "I sold crack to the police. I went to jail that night. I had some money in a shoebox. I only stayed a couple of hours," he said of the August 1995 incident. He compounded his troubles by not showing up to court as scheduled. "They were looking for me. They would go to my mother's house at 2 in the morning, all times of the night, making everybody lie on the floor," Simmons said. "I didn't go anywhere like out of town. I stayed right there in my same neighborhood, still selling dope, still robbing. I had to continue surviving. I was playing with the police. I had a fake ID. . . . I stayed on the run for eight months. From Tampa to St. Pete, wherever my mind told me to go, I'd go. What eventually happened was my sister's boyfriend turned me in." It was then that he glimpsed the effect his behavior was having on his mother. "I didn't realize until they sentenced me, and she started crying," he said. "I used to tell him before he started getting into trouble, 'You better be good, because if you go to prison, I'm not coming to see you. I won't be there,' " said Mrs. Ford, who has two older daughters and has remarried. "I told him, 'If you go to jail, pick up the phone and let me know where you are and don't call me again. I'm not going to be there for you.' But needless to say, I was there for him in any way I could be. I loved him and I felt that he needed somebody to be there for him. That's my heart. That's my baby." A Pentecostal Christian, Mrs. Ford said her faith has been her comfort. "If I hadn't been strong in my faith at the time, I don't know where I would have been. I mean, that really, really helped me. Many, many, many nights, I cried myself to sleep. I prayed myself to sleep. Every waking moment, I just prayed," she said. "I believe God answered my prayers, because I used to pray that God would put him someplace that he would have time to think and reflect on what he was doing and make a change for the positive, rather than taking him and laying him in a casket so I couldn't see him but one more time. And God answered my prayer. I knew that if he stayed out there, nothing good would happen. Either he would kill someone, someone would kill him or he would be crippled or maimed for life, and I didn't want that for him." It pleases her that her son has found his own path to God. "When he first went to prison, he still had that mentality that had got him into trouble. He was very rebellious, very argumentative, short-tempered. . . . I used to cry and tell him please stay out of trouble. I told him to pray," she said. Nonetheless, she was unhappy when she discovered he had turned to Islam. "The only thing I knew about Muslims is what I heard, and nothing had been good," she said. "But I noticed that once he started practicing Islam, his attitude seemed to change. He was a lot calmer. He could think things out clearer and he started staying out of trouble. . . . If it keeps him on the right path, then I can accept it." On Sept. 1, the day he was released from prison, St. Petersburg's Masjid Al-Muminin Inc. was one of Simmons' first stops. He was back again the next day, cuddling his sons as he sat on the floor and participated in a lively discussion about the Koran. At the request of a prison chaplain, he had been married months earlier by the mosque's imam, Wilmore Minkah Sadiki. Sadiki, a master electrician for Florida Power, has become Simmons' mentor. "I started teaching him over the phone," he said. "He was a good student, and I took a liking to him." He said it is not surprising that many African-American men turn to Islam while in prison. "It appeals to African-Americans and to others because it explains things and makes life a lot clearer, which in turn gives a greater meaning to their lives," Sadiki said. "Most people in the street think that the street life is the only way, and so what Islam does is give them a better understanding of themselves and when that happens, it causes them to have a change of heart." He "never, ever, ever" wants to be sent to prison again, Simmons said. "All of it was bad, but I believe the worse part was missing my family and only being able to talk to them for 10 minutes, and then the phone just cuts off. I used to like my children to visit, but the worse thing is when 3 o'clock came and they had to go home. I didn't like not being able to be in control of my own life. I never want to go through that again." He knows that the odds are against him. "I spent a lot of time talking to old men in prison," he said. "Every time, it was that they didn't feel they would get caught." -- Times researcher Caryn Baird contributed to this article.
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