Right turn from streets

WORCESTER – By the time he was 13, Derrick Kiser had experienced marijuana and alcohol. Later, he was selling drugs and smoking crack cocaine.

As fate would have it, the teen, who at 7 moved from Pennsylvania with his family, and his older brother were often left to their own devices while their mother worked two to three jobs on 12- to 16-hour days in order to provide for her boys.

Their father left the family soon after moving to Worcester for a railroad job. Eventually, the father joined the growing number of drug dealers in the city, becoming one of his own best customers. Years later he gave up the lifestyle and mended his relationship with his sons.

Mr. Kiser, who has also turned his life around, said his experiences have made him the man that he is today. He has broken the family cycle with his 19-year-old son, who has never been in trouble and is a straight-A student at UMass-Amherst. To help steer other youths from the type of life he led, the father of four recently launched Fresh Start, a 90-day diversion and re-entry to society treatment program.

Mr. Kiser grew up in Main South and would often skip school to hang out with friends on Kilby Street, where they were able to use and sell drugs. The youths moved on to cocaine after a couple of the boys managed to steal some from their fathers, who were in the drug trade. Some say drugs began to creep into the area as early as the 1970s once the factories began to close, leaving minorities with few job opportunities.

After police began calling the tough bunch of juvenile delinquents the Kilby Street Posse, they embraced the notoriety they were learning to admire from watching “Boyz n the Hood," "The Godfather" and other violent drug and crime movies, and listening to “gangsta” rap music during the 1980s and 1990s.

“They wanted us to be a posse, so that’s what we became,” said Mr. Kiser. He and one of his main partners, Michael Earielo, who lived on Kilby Street and followed his father into a life of crime, are known to have formed the first gang in Worcester in 1985. After that, other youths formed bands to fend off the Kilby Street gang. And some Kilby Street gang members splintered off and started other gangs.

By 2017, 20 gangs were operating in the city with approximately 1,000 members, 400 of whom were younger than 25, according to the Worcester Police Department’s Gang Unit.

It would be many years filled with violence and death before the two friends found their way to turning their lives around and end up becoming shining stars to others. Both operate nonprofit programs that help people whose lives are similar to what theirs were.

Worcester Police Deputy Chief Edward J. McGinn Jr., who was a rookie cop in 1985 and assigned to the Kilby Street area, said he is proud of how the two friends' lives have evolved to give back to the community.

"I got to know both of them. To be perfectly honest, I didn't hold out a lot of (hope) they would survive or not become incarcerated for a long period of time ...," said the deputy chief. He serves on the board of directors of the Boys & Girls Club on nearby Tainter Street, which was not around years ago as a positive alternative for gang members.

In the 1980s and 1990s, as he dove deeper into the gang life, Mr. Kiser was arrested and went to jail numerous times and managed to survive several attempts on his life. But several of his friends in the gang did not survive. He has immortalized 12 of his friends – two of whom died in his arms - with tattoos on his muscled upper left arm with their names, birth and death dates.

“It was dangerous times. We were involved in some dangerous stuff at an early age,” Mr. Kiser said. “I never killed nobody, but it wasn’t for the lack of trying.” He pointed out that his mother never gave up on her sons.

From Ds and Fs to straight As

At 15, at the urging of his mother and probation officer, Mr. Kiser went into a rehab facility and was able to beat a cocaine addiction. But he was still living the gangsta life and ended up being kicked out of South High School in the 9th grade after getting into a fight with the principal. He was sent to St. Casimir’s Alternative School, where through strict discipline and compassion, he received help to go from getting all Ds and Fs to being a straight-A student, and doing calculus by the time he graduated in 1991.

Mary E. Reynolds, 65, who retired five years ago after teaching for 40 years, vividly and affectionately remembers her former student. The ninth-grader with an infectious smile would come in her classroom in the morning and rest his head on his desk because he was “hung over as hell,” she said. But that didn’t stop him from often being the only student to yell out the correct answer to her questions.

“He was definitely unmotivated. But it was obvious he had this spark of intelligence. He was really a bright kid with a very good heart,” she recalled.

Sometimes, when he didn’t show up for class, Ms. Reynolds said she would drive to Kilby Street to get him to come to school. His friends would warn him: “Here comes that white lady,” they would yell, Ms. Reynolds recalled with a chuckle.

She said her young student became motivated to attend school regularly and get good grades so he could play football for South High. He excelled on the field, and in his senior year was captain of the football team and athlete of the year.

Police Capt. Kenneth Davenport played football with Mr. Kiser. They hung out together a couple of times until they came to a crossroads and embarked on different paths in life. He remembers Mr. Kiser being very intelligent and having street smarts.

He recalled a house party the two went to together after a game one night, and Derrick and some of his friends said they were going out to take care of some business.

“Derrick told me, ‘You just stay here. The Rev. wouldn’t be too happy if I brought you with me,’ ” said Capt. Davenport. “Having my father as a preacher and our religious background, Derrick respected that and didn’t invite me into that type of life."

After he graduated from high school, Mr. Kiser worked a job his mother got him for two months. But he was still involved in criminal activity. Someone tried to stab him in his back at a party, and ended up stabbing him three times in the back of his head. He recuperated and tried to retaliate a month later, but was arrested for gun violations and assault and battery and was sentenced in 1992 to two years in the Worcester County House of Correction in West Boylston, where he says he continued to sell drugs. Three charges of attempted murder for trying to shoot his suspected assailants were dropped.

Epiphany that changed his life

It was four years later, while serving another stint in the county jail, that he had an epiphany that changed the trajectory of his life. He read the book "The Enforcer: The Story of 'Happy Jack' Burbridge,” about an underworld enforcer who gave his life to God.

“When I finished it, I got on my knees and asked God, 'If you get me out of this situation, I will turn my life around … no more gang-banging,' ” he recalled during a recent interview.

Two days later, he was released on bail. As soon as he got out of jail, his brother, who is two years older and also in the gang life, was sentenced to nine years in the county jail related to a murder.

Mr. Kiser kept the promise he made to God and got a factory job where his mother worked. He quit at lunch time because he didn’t like the work. He didn’t want to return to the streets, but he didn’t know what to do. Some colleges were looking at him for football scholarships, but nobody in his life had ever encouraged him to go to college. A friend suggested that he try to get into the former Worcester State College, where the coach knew about his outstanding football career. He got in and became captain of the football team and was eventually selected as the defensive MVP. That stopped in 1999 when he was arrested after police, without a warrant, pushed in the door to his mother’s home to get to him. The charges were dropped after a ruling by the state Appeals Court in 2000.

He earned a bachelor’s degree in communications from Worcester State in 2003.

That same year, Mr. Kiser said the Worcester Police gang unit and federal law enforcement agents raided his house on Pilgrim Avenue where he was having a party. They charged him after finding two small bags of marijuana that Mr. Kiser said someone had left from a party. The charges, he said, were later dropped.

He moved to Springfield to stay off the radar of the local police and worked as a behavioral specialist. He later worked as a teacher at Fanning Alternative School in Worcester. He was also the in-school suspension room teacher at Worcester East Middle School. He worked at Martin Luther King Charter School in Cambridge for five years and in 2013 earned his master’s in psychology. He later worked as a counselor at the MultiCultural Wellness Center, a nonprofit mental health clinic on Front Street. A year ago, he was certified as a mental health counselor. The first six months this year, he was a clinician for the Safe Sound Youth Initiative, where he counseled members of different gangs across the city.

Fresh Start for gang members

He saved his salary from that program to fund his Fresh Start program. The nonprofit is a 90-day diversion and re-entry to society treatment module that serves typically resistant youths, ages 13-25, who are involved in the criminal justice system. He opened his office at 16 Austin St. this month. He helps young people to work on turning their lives around, get job training and find employment.

Last Friday, he and a 19-year-old former gang member who survived being shot nine times and is now being trained to become a mechanic were scheduled to speak to eighth-grade students at Seven Hills Charter School. Before schools were closed because of snow Friday, the two were to speak about their experiences and let students know that anyone can overcome obstacles to find success. Also on Friday, Mr. Kiser and some clients delivered turkeys to help clients at Spectrum Health System’s Everyday Miracles Peer Recovery Center on Pleasant Street, where Mr. Kiser’s childhood friend and former gang member Michael Earielo is the program director.

Mr. Earielo, 48, said it was Mr. Kiser’s success that inspired him to finally turn his life around seven years ago. Mr. Earielo’s father died in prison from HIV complications in 1991, while serving a sentence for distribution of heroin in jail. Before he died, he and his son spent about six months in the same prison in Shirley. Mr. Earielo went to Westfield State College and earned a degree in drug and alcohol counseling and completed a recovery coach program.

Mr. Earielo just completed a pilot adult diversion program with the Worcester Police Department and the Worcester district attorney’s office. Both he and Mr. Kiser point out that in order to help young gang members to leave the criminal life behind, their underlying mental health issues must be addressed. Many of them, like himself, have post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental health problems from the environments they grew up in.

According to the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, underlying mental health issues or behavioral disorders are contributing factors for children and adolescents to join a gang.

Between Sept. 30 and Nov. 5, there were about 8,565 inmates in state custody, of which 3,300 were believed to be gang members. On Sept. 30, 2,925 inmates had an open mental health caseload, with 653 of those identified as seriously mentally ill, according to the state Department of Correction.

“We have to embrace this generation differently than the old ways, and a well-run mental health court will have a positive effect, and then we can focus more on prevention,” said Mr. Kiser.

Mental health courts

The state operates three Mental Health Courts within Boston Municipal Court and four in District Courts, but none in Central Massachusetts.

Judge Roanne Sragow, who presides over the court in Cambridge, said Mr. Kiser is “absolutely right.”

“People with a diagnosis of mental illness in the criminal justice system should be treated differently in that the system has to take into consideration the fact that due to the mental illness they are criminally responsible. But, the mental illness is certainly having an impact on the decisions they make,” Judge Sragow said by phone last week.

The special court’s team includes specifically trained police, an assistant district attorney, a probation officer, three defense attorneys and social workers who screen the defendants to determine if they are appropriate for the program; a group of registered nurses who go to clients’ homes and can administer medications and help with their prescriptions and insurance problems; and several college interns. The program does not accept defendants who have charges involving extreme violence or of any kind of sexually related offense.

“Not only are they stable mentally when they leave us, they’ve been able to gain employment and housing, and they have the support they need,” the judge said.

The two-year-old Mental Health Court is so busy that the number of participants is now capped at 30. Judge Sragow said she does not think there have been any participants who reoffended.

“We’ve had several graduations where each (participant) is asked to speak,” she said. “It’s just an amazing thing to watch. There isn’t a dry eye in the house as they speak about how this has changed their lives.”

Erika Gully-Santiago said the state trial courts is in the planning stage to open another Mental Health Court session, but does not have an announcement at this time.

Worcester County District Attorney Joseph D. Early Jr., who practiced mental health law for 17 years, said he would love to see one established in the county.

He also praised Mr. Kiser for the work he is doing to prevent youths from getting into trouble and to help turn around the lives of gang members.

“Derrick is doing great work in the city. More than most he is aware of the impact gang life has on an individual and the other people in that individual’s life. There’s a very good chance that gang members will listen to Derrick because he has street credibility,” Mr. Early said.