A Path To Recovery

I was born and raised in Escondido, CA, making the All-Star team as a young baseball player and doing relatively well in school. My family moved to San Pasqual Indian Reservation during my sophomore year of high school and I dropped out of school soon after. Since my family wasn’t a part of the reservation community before moving, we weren’t aware of how much drug use and alcoholism existed on the Rez, with many young people smoking weed, getting drunk or doing heroin as a survival strategy. Although I was young, I'd been exposed to drugs and alcohol in Escondido, but not at the level in which these were being used on the Rez. I quickly fell into doing crystal meth and with it came a chaotic lifestyle, which I brought home. Soon I met someone who taught me how to cook meth at home on the Rez. Meth life is quick to fall apart, and within three years, exactly that happened. I ended up in California Youth Authority and then state and federal prison for bank robbery, armed robbery and auto theft. After an initial period of incarceration, I was briefly free before a felony DUI returned me to federal prison in 1992, followed by another conviction for an attempted bombing of a tattoo parlor. Fortunately, I stopped using in prison when I figured out that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life there, and I stayed sober through the final five years of incarceration by participating in sweat lodge ceremony and church, plus leading volunteer drug programs and classes.