The Making of a “Shooter”

One Man’s Story Highlights the Elements that Create – and Prevent – Killers

August 2026

BY KIM WHITING

“There’s a shooter in the mall!”

These days, when we hear “shooter,” we often picture a mass shooter—a child or young adult male, often White and from a suburban area, unleashing bullets in a school or public place. But nine years ago, when I first wrote about this subject for The Reporters Inc., it seemed like many of the “shooters” in the news were more often young minority men, mostly shooting each other, mostly from underserved urban neighborhoods.

For many years, until his death from COVID in late 2020, I was exceedingly close with what you might call a “street shooter.” He was one of my dearest friends. When I met Tay, he was 43-years-old, serving a life sentence in maximum security prison. The two of us co-authored a book chronicling his journey into, through, and ultimately out of violent criminal life.

Because I knew this man’s life story, and because I’m a psychotherapist by background, it occurred to me that while the demographics of mass shooters and street shooters are generally quite different, what spurs them into violence is, for the most part, the same.

I began befriending life-sentence inmates more that 16 years ago, and with some I’ve collaborated on memoir-centered articles and books. These friendships have served as informal, yet highly revealing, case studies—illuminating the factors that play a central role in the creation of killers, and in the potential for violence more broadly.

In this update on the subject, I use Tay’s story to put a face to the statistics and show what turned a gifted, “golden child” into a violent criminal.

I also look at the progress of programs, implemented about a decade ago and designed to keep street shooters from shooting, to see what’s worked and what hasn’t.

Most importantly, I’ll share what helped Tay become a healthier, happier, more stable and peaceful person—because just as the elements that create a shooter are much the same across demographics, so are the elements that heal, uplift, and keep people from pulling the trigger.

The First Kill

Tay Ramey handled conflicts and emotions with guns. He grew up in the 1970s and ’80s in a small, violent enclave outside San Francisco that, like Tay, grew more violent with time.

In his own words:

When you’re young and successful on the street, you’re a target. I was 14 and had a thriving drug business when a guy who had just gotten out of prison started hanging around. It didn’t take him long to notice I was making good money. He asked for a bag of weed and a loan of $6— innocent enough—so I wasn’t careful to hide the wad of about $300 in my pocket. He noticed, and says, “Looks like you’re doing good out here, Lil’ Nigga.” And so it began.

He had a violent reputation and was feared on the streets. He started coming to me daily, asking for weed and cash—first $10, then $20. I could tell by the way he asked that if I didn’t give him what he wanted, there’d be a problem, and that he’d keep asking for more. One day my girlfriend and her friends stopped by with lunch, and he walked up and says he needed $35 and four bags of weed. I was on display in front of her, so I needed to man up. I told him I didn’t have it. He yanked me by my jacket and says, “I’m coming back in 30 minutes and you’d better have it.”

Six weeks before, I’d found a gun in a ditch, and one of my “street uncles” had given me a clip for it. I had it hidden behind a store dumpster. I knew if I didn’t end this guy’s harassment, it would only get worse—and I couldn’t just pull the gun to scare him, because he was the real deal. He would kill me. The only way to stop him was to stop him from breathing. That terrified me, but I didn’t see another option.

About 10 minutes later he showed up. “You got that for me?” “Yeah, walk with me to get my stash behind the dumpster.” As I pulled the gun on him I was terrified of what he’d do to me—but as soon as I pulled the trigger and watched him fall, I felt pure power and control. I felt so much rage going into that bullet. I know it was mostly rage that belonged to my father, and maybe a hundred other things, but in that moment, I just wanted people to stop messing with me. It didn’t even matter if he got back up. I still felt like, with a gun, I had the upper hand and no one could hurt me again.

That was the last time anyone ever just took something from me.

It’s well known that street shooters hail almost entirely from impoverished communities. But what is it about these communities, specifically, that cultivates this kind of violence? What was it about Tay’s community that had him established as a drug dealer at 14—and that propelled an older, violent man to terrorize him?

The Breeding Ground: North Richmond

Tay’s story is centered in North Richmond, California—a tiny unincorporated town outside San Francisco with a population of about 4,000—where Tay spent most of his upbringing. North Richmond and its larger neighbor, Richmond (population just over 100,000, where Tay also lived and attended school), were breeding grounds for homicide and violence from the early 1970s until the early 2010s. Bay Area journalist Robert Rogers, who wrote an in-depth series on North Richmond, once called it “one of the most murderous handfuls of blocks in the entire United States.”

Because of its small size and unincorporated status, North Richmond’s homicide numbers get folded into Richmond’s data, and from there into Contra Costa County’s. But Rogers tracked the town’s homicides from 2005 to 2010 and found five killings a year in a population of under 3,000, a rate of roughly 217 per 100,000—nearly 10 times Chicago’s rate over the same period.

Neighboring Richmond averaged about 40 murders a year between 2003 and 2010, almost double Chicago’s per-capita rate. By 2017, when I originally wrote about this subject, that number had dropped to between 20 and 30 a year, roughly on par with Chicago.

Tay says all but one of the guys he grew up with did prison time; two of his cousins, also raised in North Richmond, were in his own cellblock. He estimated about a quarter of the friends he grew up with were killed, most before age 20.

How the City Became This Way

In 1941, a massive wartime shipbuilding effort brought tens of thousands of new residents to Richmond, many from rural Texas, Arkansas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Mississippi—a large share of them Black, including Tay’s great-grandparents. Both the Black and White newcomers brought their regional prejudices with them.

As journalist Robert Rogers put it, in a 2011 article for Richmond Confidential, “The area that became North Richmond was, geographically, an unstable place to live—a flood plain surrounded by industry and pollution—which made it ‘the place to push and ghettoize the new wave of Black residents.”

By 1943 it was almost entirely Black, wedged between a refinery and a garbage dump, with unpaved streets, no streetlights, inadequate fire protection, no junior high or high school (still true today), and a single county sheriff spread across the whole area.

Local leaders lobbied for more police protection as early as 1943 and kept lobbying for decades, but the town remained chronically under-resourced. Sacramento State historian Shirley Moore (interviewed for Rogers’ article) traced the postwar unrest between Black, Latino, and White residents in Richmond to exactly this kind of inequity, in housing, schooling, and public services—with Black residents watching other groups receive resources they were denied.

The isolation of North Richmond compounded things. Rogers, who also spent years coordinating services in North Richmond, described it this way:

The unincorporated status has fed into the violence because law enforcement comes from the county—sheriffs who patrol distant places and make arrests, not city police who provide interventions and support. There’s one school in town, an elementary school called Verde, and it’s always been underfunded, only recently getting a real increase in resources after seven decades. Geographically, North Richmond is boxed in—refinery on one side, landfill on another, railroad tracks limiting the roads in—and that isolation has fed feuds, especially between North Richmond and Richmond proper.

Once kids leave Verde for junior high in Richmond, they’re stigmatized as “the North Richmond Blacks”—seen as country, dirty, poor—and are intimidated and harassed. Most don’t make it through Richmond High, another underfunded school. You don’t deprive generations of people, identifiable by skin color, of basic resources and then expect them to start the race at the same point as everyone else.

The Divide Between “Haves” and “Have-Nots”

Research conducted in the decade since I first reported on this subject backs up what Rogers and Moore observed—that it’s inequality that fuels violence, not just poverty. While there’s a strong link between poverty and street shootings, studies have found no such link between poverty and mass shootings; in both cases, the common thread is inequality.

Income disparity has been strongly linked to violence. U.S. counties with a steady but higher level of income inequality experienced five times as many mass shootings as those where inequality declined. Counties where inequality increased experienced nearly six times as many.

This tracks with the background of another of my inmate friends, whose family was working-class but not struggling. He grew up in Berkeley, California, a city with a stark line between the very affluent—living in the hills—and lower-income residents on the flats. When the disparity is visible every day, a constant reminder of the privilege and ease others enjoy compared to one’s own life, it can fan a fire of disgruntlement, rage, and— more critically—low self-worth.

Research on this dynamic adds an uncomfortable fact—that wealthier people living in communities with a wide income gap tend to see themselves as more deserving and more entitled to community resources than those with less. And this adds yet more fuel to the fire, but from other direction.

The divide isn’t only economic. A 2013 American Psychological Association analysis found that an inability to meet social expectations around masculinity is one of the most common threads in school shooters’ backgrounds. Yet in Tay’s world, masculinity was earned through fighting and criminal success. “It wasn’t a big deal if a guy lost a fight, but it was a big problem if he backed out of one,” Tay says. “In the ‘hood, no one likes a weakling. Most of us didn’t believe we had the option to earn respect the way society said was worth something, so fights and criminal success became a way to move up the social ladder.”

A 1999 Time article published after Columbine documented the same “have/have-not” dynamic in a different setting: the outsized social power and favoritism shown toward the jock and cheerleader cliques there, which deepened the outcast cliques’ sense of injustice and powerlessness. One student interviewed about his own high school near Atlanta saw the same problem: “The jocks and cheerleaders get out of punishment—even with the police. Joe Blow has a wreck and has been drinking, and he gets the book thrown at him. The quarterback gets busted, and he gets a lighter sentence.”

Social media has become its own have/have-not community, relentlessly broadcasting the lives of the affluent, beautiful, successful and popular, making the disparity harder to escape. That may help explain a June 2026 NBC poll, in which 81% of respondents said they see a bigger divide than ever between the haves and have-nots.

Feeling like a “have-not,” personally

Lying beneath comparisons driven by money or status often sits something more painful: not measuring up, feeling inadequate, or irrelevant. Tay was always chasing a sense of relevance (his word) in a world he believed saw him as not just lacking value, but as undesirable. And the criteria society uses to sort people into “haves” and “have-nots” spread beyond income into such traits as physical appearance, athletic ability, “school-smarts,” conventional masculinity, mental health, and race.

My friend Mickey, an incarcerated man who was my first coauthor, is another case in point. Born to teenage parents struggling with addiction, he inherited his mother’s clinical anxiety and her epilepsy. An elementary school teacher once told him he was “a parasite from a family of parasites” who would never amount to anything. In his words:

I hated school. I was introverted, quiet, un-athletic—the last one picked for the team. After my first seizure in kindergarten, I was labeled a freak, called “spaz” and “retarded.” Both the teacher and the other kids were afraid of me. Fear becomes contempt when you see some kid on the floor flopping around during class. School was a place where I felt badly about myself and badly about my fellow humans. They were cruel.

Mickey was addicted to opiates by 14 and ended up being incarcerated most of his life. His description of himself broke my heart:

I was a loser from a long line of losers, and that’s how the world saw me too. If I couldn’t lift myself any higher, I would endure my low state from a chemically induced high.”

This was society’s loss, as well as his. Mickey was one of the kindest, most unconditionally loving and wise people I’ve ever known.  

Tay’s community offered something Mickey never experienced, which was real belonging.

There was a strong feeling of community pride. Our town was so isolated I assumed everyone lived the way we did, until I got older and went outside it. I know now my neighborhood is scary to outsiders, but I loved it—kids playing dice, people talking in their yards, elders who were like everybody’s grandma or uncle.

It wasn’t until junior high in Richmond that he became aware of how the wider world saw “kids from North Richmond.”

Every time a stranger crossed the street to avoid passing me on the sidewalk, or a store clerk eyed me with suspicion, it added another stick to a fire that had started as hurt and grew into rage.

Joe McCoy, who grew up in North Richmond during the same era as Tay, remembers a similar rude awakening while on a school field trip to San Francisco. He says that older White kids taunted his group with prejudicial insults, ending in a fight that the chaperones blamed on his side. “We had heard about the Black Panthers and Martin Luther King, but we were isolated in North Richmond and hadn’t really had an experience with racism before that,” says McCoy. “I went home with a bad vibe. It was the beginning of an awareness that even Blacks from other towns considered North Richmond kids to be poor and dirty. Yes, that had an impact on me.”

Tay summarized the effect that society’s judgements had upon him:

I grew up in a world that preferred that poor Black boys like me weren’t in it, and that affected me. My grandfather owned a construction company that built about a third of the houses in Richmond—he modeled that Blacks could be very successful—but thug life still seemed like the only option for me. I didn’t believe I belonged in the legit world, which in my mind was the White world. I didn’t believe that world would give me a chance.

Tay felt this despite the fact that he had real, legitimate achievements. He actually had been a “golden child” at the start of his life. He skipped two grades, won a middle-school math scholarship that got him into computer programming and engineering classes at the local refinery, starred in a school play, and got a congratulatory handshake from Roots author Alex Haley, which he says, “meant the world to me.”

But he’d also excelled early in the drug trade, starting at age nine, using entrepreneurial instincts that could easily have gone another direction, had he believed the legitimate world would give him the chance.

It’s very difficult for a person to feel valuable when the majority doesn’t value them.

I’ve been asked why some people from underserved neighborhoods succeed by society’s standards and others, like Tay, don’t. My answer is that we can only rise as high as our level of self-value. Some are lucky enough to have people who really value and believe in them, enough to counter the world’s low opinions and lift them up. This is a difficult task when most of the world is saying, “We don’t think much of you.”

Trauma Added to Social Rejection: A Highly Combustible Mix

Like most kids in his neighborhood, Tay was exposed to violence early and often. At about eight, he watched his friend Booker get shot walking down the street with him—not killed, but bleeding on the ground in front of him. Around the same age, he was walking to the mall with his beloved aunt when her ex-husband shot her in a drive-by; Tay had to leave her bleeding in the parking lot to run for help, not knowing if she’d be alive when he returned.

But it wasn’t neighborhood violence that most fueled Tay’s anxiety—it was what happened at home. Tay was raped and molested by his father from age seven until his mother left when he was nine. A couple of years before the abuse began, his father—until then, Tay says, a decent and involved dad—started beating his mother.

When I was five, my father declared war on his own family. He lost his job, spent his days drunk on the couch, and when his agitation mounted, he took it out on my mom, physically and sexually. From behind the closed bedroom door, I’d hear the sound of flesh pounding flesh and my mom crying. Some days he beat her so badly she’d beg him to kill her and get it over with. I’d cry because I felt completely helpless to help her.

Research bears out the connection between poverty and domestic violence: in New York City, the most impoverished neighborhoods accounted for over 42% of intimate-partner domestic incident reports in 2020, despite comprising less than a quarter of the city’s population. And women living in poverty nationally are five times more likely to experience partner violence than higher-income women.

But it doesn’t take a study to see how neighborhoods saturated with low self-worth, hopelessness, rage, and addiction would also be saturated with abuse. Pain needs an outlet, and with few constructive channels available, it often comes out destructively.

Repeated exposure to violence, or even a single violent event, can devastate a child’s psychological development; researchers have documented PTSD symptoms even in babies and toddlers. Furthermore, trauma in underserved neighborhoods isn’t always as dramatic as a shooting. People experiencing extreme food insecurity show measurably higher rates of PTSD symptoms, and non-physical bullying (relational, social, cyber) is linked to PTSD at strikingly high rates—57% of those bullied this way meet the clinical criteria. In recent years, researchers have also found a strong correlation between society’s negative view of one’s group, and Complex PTSD.

Like water slowly eroding rock, it can erode self-esteem so gradually it goes unnoticed.

Two PTSD symptoms in particular stand out in both street and mass shooters:

• Negative changes in beliefs and feelings (the world seems entirely dangerous, no one can be trusted, relationships feel unsafe), and
• Hyperarousal (constant alertness, irritability, needing to sit with your back to a wall in a restaurant).

Tay experienced both. He wouldn’t sleep until he knew a loved one had made it home safely.

As much as he loved having visitors in prison, he forbade anyone to make the drive to visit him if it was raining, and he was highly anxious when loved ones traveled anywhere unfamiliar. He’d learned that good situations turn bad fast, and that people you trust, like his father, can turn on you without warning. Even while in mid-conversation with him, I’d notice his eyes continuously scanning the room.

Growing up, school and his grandmother’s house were the only places Tay felt safe.

I got sick to my stomach hearing the school bell ring at the end of the day, not knowing what state my father would be in.

Grandma’s house, and her church, and the weekly trips to feed the homeless in the neighborhood park were his sanctuary. He believed her death, when he was still a boy, ended his last hope that a loving God was watching out for him:

I decided right then there was no God…From that point on I felt only distrust and hatred for the world. It would be two decades before I’d even begin to trust again—and by then I’d done a lot of damage.

The post-trauma instinct to reach for a gun for control, whenever life echoed his childhood helplessness, extended even to how Tay thought about his own death. In juvenile detention and later in prison, without access to the perceived safety of a gun, he attempted suicide

I wasn’t afraid of dying. I took pride in my fearlessness—that’s how I saw myself. But I was carrying a toxic fire of hurt, shame, and rage, and the only way I could see to put it out was to put myself out. My plan, from the time I was a kid, was to die by pulling a gun on the police so they’d have to shoot me. I didn’t see that as suicide—I saw it as taking control of my destiny.

It’s not hard to see the parallel to a young person walking into a school with a gun to discharge rage and end the agony on their own terms. According to National Threat Assessment Center, 80% of assessed school shooters had been bullied by classmates—but only 34% reported it themselves; their classmates were the ones who noticed.

Tay explains:

In the streets we were taught that exposing yourself as a victim of anything exposed a weakness that others would exploit.

A separate study found the reverse pattern in 60% of shooters, who had not been bullied but had themselves been the bully. This had been Tay’s instinct, too, seeing a violent image as a deterrent to being preyed upon.

I understood that by pushing people away I wasn’t giving myself the chance to get to the core of what was going on with me, but I didn’t feel like I had a choice. I held it all in and let it fester. Anger was the only emotion acceptable for a boy in my neighborhood, so I channeled everything— grief, hurt, pain, hopelessness—into anger.

Clinical social worker Dr. Jennifer Tolleson of the Clinical Social Work Institute in Chicago interviewed five Black teenage gang members serving time in juvenile prison—boys on the same path Tay had walked. She found that because violence is chronic and woven into these boys’ lives from birth, their relationship to it differs fundamentally from someone entering a violent environment later in life, like a war veteran.

The adaptations for those exposed to violence early, and often chronically, become part of their personalities—not just their coping strategies. As she puts it, the violence “organizes their development from the beginning.”

One of her subjects, a 17-year-old named Kujo, told her: “I always had courage because I was already dead when I was little.”

Tolleson describes him as plagued by a “psychic obliteration” that he tried, wildly and violently, to rid himself of. She says that for boys like Kujo, watching a victim suffer also unburies childhood trauma, bringing it back to conscious life.

Tay’s own account echoes this. When he killed the man preying on him at 14, it recreated the emotional dynamics of his father’s abuse—only this time he was the victor, not the victim. The relief was so overwhelming, so ironically healing, that afterward he wanted a gun on him at all times. He also describes something close to a physiological explanation found in research.

A 1994 Harvard Psychiatric Review found that repeated exposure to trauma prompts the body to produce its own morphine-like chemical, which numbs pain and rage but can leave a person feeling deadened—pushing them to seek new high-stimulation situations just to feel alive.

Tay says he felt most alive “outsmarting” cops or rivals, experiencing “a heat and excitement in my belly” that, whatever its cost, proved to him, again and again, that he could survive.

Finding Safety and Belonging—in a Gang

Knowing the effects of trauma, as well as the damaged self-worth caused by low-valuation from others, it might be easy to understand the pull of gang life. Tay explains:

I was so impressed with the brotherhood, loyalty, and respect they showed each other. I fell in love with the sense of family, working toward something together. I believed I could do something positive for the Black community within the organization. People see the violence and think our values are totally twisted, but we also did real good—sold-out fundraiser concerts for the homeless and people coming out of prison, buying and reopening the Boys Club after it lost funding, hiring local contractors, addicts, and homeless people to fix it up.

The safety of gangs mattered just as much as belonging. Says Tay:

When you live in a community where violence is commonplace, it’s alluring to have people who’ll always have your back—with the gang, we didn’t have to face the streets, or prison, alone.

Looking back, though, Tay sees the paradox:

It felt like we were building strength by joining together, but by splitting into groups that opposed each other, we actually weakened our whole community and increased danger for ourselves. At the time though, we didn’t see another way to feel protected.

The broader numbers support how central a factor trauma is to street shooters and mass shooters alike. The most comprehensive analysis of mass shooters found 42% had a documented trauma history, 31% severe childhood trauma—rising to 68% for shooters under 18.

Street shooters aren’t typically studied as their own category; they’re folded into the category of “juvenile offenders,” and according to the Department of Justice, 90% have experienced a traumatic childhood event and up to 30% meet the criteria for PTSD.

Tay believes the real number is higher, since many—especially survivors of molestation—never disclose it. He was 25 before he told anyone, and that person was his mother. He never told a professional.

What Helped

North Richmond and Richmond’s homicide rates have been declining since 2010. Rogers credits the decrease to two primary developments:

• The relocation of residents from the Las Deltas housing project, which housed almost a third of North Richmond’s population in notoriously crowded, underserved conditions. When residents were finally given vouchers for newer, better housing, homicides dropped that same year. It’s not a stretch to think that being seen, finally, as worthy of decent housing sparked a bit of self-value, as well as hopefulness, and that helped quell the rage.
• Richmond’s Office of Neighborhood Safety (ONS), however, is more directly linked (by studies) to drops in shootings. The office opened in 2007 to prevent gun violence. ONS identifies the roughly 50 people in the city most likely to shoot someone or be shot themselves, and then offers them a spot in a program with a cash stipend of up to $1,000 a month over 18 months, for demonstrated behavior change—plus opportunities to travel beyond Richmond.

The program utilizes street outreach workers, many of whom were formerly gang members, to help make the identifications. These outreach workers, along with others, also provide mentoring and engage with the highly at-risk youth.

In other words, ONS introduces these kids to people who they respect, who believe in them and care about them, and who treat them like they’re worth something.

Joe McCoy, who grew up alongside Tay, became an employee of ONS, and says, “Having other people be proud of me, especially my mom, and being proud of myself, has been my greatest motivator.”

Once again, an increase in self-worth was at the center of recovery.

For Tay, rehabilitation didn’t come through the prison system, it began with his former wife, Laura, a clergywoman he met in county jail when she’d been sent to tell him two of his nephews had been killed. Their relationship evolved from counseling into friendship, then marriage. They were together 11 years, and remained close friends until her death a decade later. Says Tay:

Laura loved me when I thought it wasn’t possible for anyone to love me—especially not a White, highly educated woman like her. I was this thug in prison, tattoos everywhere, metal in my teeth, hair to my waist, and I wasn’t making it easy. But she wasn’t afraid or intimidated. She let me be me. She helped me see the underlying good in me, and in others.

Tay was clear about why Laura’s regard, and later, my own, mattered so much. He related that we were exactly the kind of person—White, educated, affluent—who he expected to cross the street to avoid him.

Laura’s ability to see who he really was gave him, he says, “a turbo charge to his self-value.” He told me that it was no coincidence that he chose two older, White, well-educated women from comfortable backgrounds as his closest confidants. Laura and I were, for him, an antidote to the demeaning views he’d absorbed from the wider world.

Over the years that I visited him, as he disclosed more of his history—the abuse, the shame he still carried, his many crimes—he saw that I still viewed him as the gifted, kind-hearted person he was. And I watched him change.

He smiled more and his eyes were brighter. He increasingly looked for ways to feel proud of himself. He stopped dealing drugs in prison and took his first “legit” job sewing garments for fellow prisoners. It surprised both of us that he loved it—especially when told he’d done a good job. He enrolled in classes and support groups, coached the prison’s football and softball teams (despite the fact that their tempers and fragile egos drove him nuts), and mailed me every certificate of completion, glowing with a pride you’d think was reserved for a doctoral diploma:

I spent my whole life being destructive, and now I want to be constructive in some way. I want to do something positive for the world.

What Can Be Done

Dr. Tolleson believes that anyone working with violent youth needs to see the violence for what it is: “a culturally mediated adaptation to a specific set of psychological experiences”—and to look at the trauma underneath it. The people best positioned to help, she says, are those who aren’t afraid, who stay calm and clear-headed, and who can “gaze unflinchingly at the insidious transformations of mind which come from living a life endangered.”

I’d add this: people who can see the humanity under the angry and troubled surface. That’s exactly what Laura did for Tay.

Joe McCoy describes ONS’s approach in similar terms: “The most important thing for these kids is love from others and love for themselves. Most don’t have positive role models, so we surround them with people who believe in them and see their potential. We go out into the community, because we can’t get them into programs otherwise. We don’t push our beliefs; we let them get there themselves, and once they believe differently, they act differently. We’ve had shooters who are now in college, working. Our main goal is just to keep them alive. If they pick up other skills along the way, great, but survival comes first.”

ONS also takes kids who are doing well out of Richmond entirely—to places like Africa, Paris, Mexico—and brings them to speak to foundations about the organization and what helps stop the violence, trading on a staff reputation the kids already trust.

Tay’s own prescription, from someone who has lived every part of this cycle:

These kids need environments where they feel valued for who they are— a place where they can make a difference, feel a sense of pride, stand out and shine. They need people who see the good inside them. They need to feel safe and understood enough to talk about their feelings instead of pouring all of it into rage. And they need something to feel hopeful about— a future bright enough that they want to stick around and put their energy into living it fully.

Tay passed away in 2020, a victim of COVID.

During his final years, he derived fulfillment and, more importantly, a critically needed boost to his self-value by supporting and working together with his fellow inmates.

We remained friends until the day he died. And in the end, I believe Tay finally attained a meaningful level of true self-love—and peace.

Kim Whiting is a Reporters Inc. advisory committee member. You can read more about her here. Kim can be reached at whiting444@gmail.com.

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