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Dwayne Debrow: 'If anything, people kind of blamed the mother. But I always thought, well, where was the father?'

As Everett got older, he was afraid to suit up in gym class, ashamed of the bruises. He and his sisters had a grim sort of drill. They'd hear the popping sound of gravel in the long driveway as their father came home from work. They knew they had about 20 seconds before Dad parked, grabbed his baseball cap from the seat next to him, and walked in the front door. By then, the tv had to be off, the dishes washed, every child hidden behind a schoolbook, eyes low but dead alert.

If anything was out of place, "It was on," Everett recalls. "He'd be smiling, telling a joke, and the next second just like a light switch he'd be throwing you out the door and kicking you. Me and my sisters used to joke about it; we called it flying lessons. Because he literally threw us around."

In school, Everett, a bright student, conjured up a range of distractions. He started drinking at 12 and soon he was smoking pot heavily. He'd steal stuff, skip school.

Everett's father makes an unusual admission on the phone. "There was physical abuse," he says of that time. "I have nothing to hide. I was accused of child abuse a number of times with the other kids, too. I considered them all serious discipline problems. I had no control over them. They never took those kids to a doctor. It was all a bunch of social workers deciding they'd been abused."

On July 24, 1995, Bill says, his father beat him, then grabbed him by the neck and choked him till he passed out on the front lawn. Martinez remembers that her brother called her, hysterical. He knew he had to get out. The next day, a lady from social services rolled up in her Honda and took 14-year-old Bill away for good.

"Bud" Everett says everything about his son's tale of that last encounter is untrue, except the date.

Debrow's true home was now the streets of San Antonio, particularly a corner called Jolly Time, where he sold crack. He was 11.

I started slanging dope which I considered living life in the fast lane and making a fast and easy living. ... I knew it was wrong but as long as it brought money to my pocket I didn't care.

Gang activity was real popular in San Antonio especially on the eastside. ... My oldest brother Dinky was in California for a while. When he got back [he was] a gang member of the Altadena Block Crips. He began to bang to the fullest. .... I wanted to be like him so bad I joined the same gang. ...

The eastside always stayed cronk [rowdy]. Robberies after robberies and killings after killings. My homies had no pity and they didn't value life either. ... In the back of our minds we were doing the right thing. ... When I got older I tried to explain it to adults who didn't understand. To strongly believe in something [it] had to be based on faith. Just like Muslims who believe in Prophet Muhammad, and Christians who believe in Jesus Christ. ... A man would die behind his beliefs and you could definitely put me into that category. I was dedicated to serve my hood to the utmost and with loyalty. ... Gangs was like your second family and you were taught to put your hood first.

After a while, ABC was the biggest Crip set in San Antonio. Now it was time to go to war. We often got into it with the Blood Stone Villains. It was either Do or Die... It was all about putting in work and doing good deeds.

On a sunny afternoon, Debrow recalled, he was hanging out at Jolly Time when a white van drove up and two Bloods "jumped out with guns shooting." Two of Debrow's buddies were wounded slightly. It was time for revenge, he wrote.

I was a little kid but I did a grown man's job. ... I knew them slobs who shot my homeboys and I knew where they lived. ... He [one of the shooters] would have to pay for his actions and if not him, then his family. ... Late one night ... we drove to [his house]. ... We turned off the lights and started driving up the street. As we got in front of the white house I stopped the car and opened fire. ... After that we drove off real fast and went to the East Terrace where we usually kicked it at.

I never heard if anybody got shot and I truly didn't care.

Dwayne Debrow steers his car toward the place they call Jolly Time -- just a ghetto street corner, with a gas station on one side and a skanky club on the other and winos and a few wizened crackheads shifting places around a Dumpster. Jolly Time, Debrow explains, got its name because it's where you go to get happy. To buy drugs.

He points to a patch of gravel beneath a street sign tagged in black with "ETG"--East Terrace Gangstas -- the spot where a scrawny, 4-foot-8 kid named Edwin Carl Debrow Jr. sold crack.

Jolly Time is in the heart of the East Side, a collection of decaying streets and small frame homes with roofs, walls, and porches warped and leaning. Here and there, mostly on the grounds of old brick schools and public buildings, a grandiose palm tree rises from a patch of desiccated turf.

Dwayne insists he didn't know Edwin was selling dope then. Dwayne was going to school while Edwin ran the streets. Dwayne's trail led to high school, then college. Today, the 22-year-old plays semi-pro football and runs a recording studio.

Edwin had no goals and, by sixth grade, no more school. Around that time, Edwin came over to Dwayne's house to stash some stolen candy bars. "I put it in my freezer, he walked off," Dwayne said, "and that's the last time I seen him."

By that time, Edwin had latched onto a new role model -- his big brother Herion Chase, known as Dinky, which he wasn't, in stature or boldness. Dinky, in fact, was brazen enough to run dope right from his mother's house. More than once, the cops busted down the front door and ransacked the house.

His mother couldn't seem to get her arms around the chaos. She'd lay a belt on Edwin, "but it didn't have no effect," he says. At times Seletha ran drugs herself, Edwin admits.

Edwin started carrying a gun at age 8 or 9, started "Crippin'" like his brother soon afterward. One time, a friend of his shot another man in the face. Edwin and his homies casually walked away -- "and went to Jack in the Box." He knew the killings were wrong, but they brought no reflection, no bad dreams. "It had no profound effect on me," he said.

One friend was an ex-con and distant relative named Floyd Hardeman, who'd recently been paroled after serving time on a murder conviction. Hardeman spent his time getting high and scrounging dope money, and he evidently saw an easy mark in the tiny neighborhood tough. "When I was 12," Edwin says, "my life had no purpose. ... I was just out there for that time, that instant. You know, where the goodies are."

Escaping his dad's abuse didn't put Bill Everett on Easy Street. He spent the next few years shuttling among foster homes, doing drugs, and getting into trouble -- like the time he burglarized his dad's house. One day, when he figured he was about to get arrested for another misdeed, he bought a bus ticket and headed to Mingus, Texas. He'd heard his mother was in the area.

He found his mom. Like it mattered. She had a new life, a new husband, and didn't want her son's presence lurking over her. "I felt like I'd been abandoned a second time," Everett says.

His meth habit helped ease the pain. Mingus and Palo Pinto County, like many rural areas in Texas, are havens for methamphetamine labs, and to hear Everett tell it, you can practically park yourself in the grass on the weekend and watch the noxious fumes arise from meth tents dotting the prairie.

But drugs don't come free. One night, Everett and some friends watched a video -- Heat -- and got it in their heads to rob a bank. They stole a gun. And so, on Oct. 5, 1998, the tiny municipality of Mingus, population 212, experienced its greatest excitement in some years.

From the counter at Mingus' only bank, the teller could see a tall skinny guy in baggy clothes, hat turned backwards, eyes sunken. His buddy looked just as scruffy, and they were banging on the glass door. "Hey! Let us in! Hey!" they hollered. They'd forgotten that the bank had two sets of glass doors and the second set was always locked. The teller reached for the button that unlocked the inside door, then pulled back like she'd touched a hot griddle. This didn't look quite right. The boys ran off. A post office worker saw them a while later, walking down railroad tracks with bandannas around their necks.

The bank robbery attempt "was a comedy of errors," says Palo Pinto County Constable Jim Roberts. "They were idiots." What might have been treated as a prank in Dallas, though, was serious business in Palo Pinto County.

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