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In Death, Kevin Johnson’s Story Becomes Cautionary Tale for At-Risk Youth

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Court records Kevin Johnson, shortly before his incarceration in 2005

Demetrius Evans knew one thing after he pointed a gun at a police officer’s head — that what he did next would change his entire life.

An officer had just found him cowering behind a trash can after Evans, 27 at the time, tried to evade police in a vehicle chase. He’d been “on the run” for nine months after missing a court hearing. With his criminal history and the police on his tail, he feared he’d have to spend the rest of his life in prison.

He started to cry as the officer pointed his gun and yelled, “Put your hands on the wall!” Evans complied, but when the officer reached to return his gun to its holster, Evans jumped to steal the officer’s weapon. He pointed it at the officer’s head as a police dog bit at his ankles.

Three more police officers arrived. Evans remembers them saying, “Drop it! You’re a dead man!”

At that moment, Evans weighed what to do next. He was “already prepared to die,” Evans recalls in an interview 26 years later. To him, death was preferable to life in prison, and he thought that killing or threatening to kill that officer would be the ticket out.

But then he thought of his unborn daughter, who was due in six months.

“‘I want to see my child,’” Evans recalls thinking. “‘I don’t want her to be like me and not know her father.’”

So Evans dropped the gun and took a beating from the police. He ended up with a 10-year prison sentence but was released in 2002.

click to enlarge Monica Obradovic Demetrius Evans poses for a portrait outside the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center.

Ever since then, Evans has devoted his life to mentoring at-risk youth. In 2017, he founded Sudden Impact I.C.U., a nonprofit providing resources for at-risk youth to help turn their lives around.

More recently, Evans has turned to teaching kids at the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center about how to make the right choices during moments of high stress. He uses his own life as an example — and also the life of Kevin Johnson.

Missouri executed Johnson on November 29 for the murder of officer William McEntee in Kirkwood. Like Evans, Johnson was wanted by police on the day of his crime. On July 5, 2005, Johnson’s 12-year-old brother Joseph “Bam Bam” Long died during a police search for Johnson. Johnson blamed McEntee for his brother’s death and killed him a couple hours later.

Whether Johnson’s murder of McEntee was spontaneous or pre-meditated was a point of debate during his trials, but Johnson always claimed he acted on impulse. In an interview before his execution, Johnson said he wasn’t thinking, that he “didn’t even know why the shooting happened.”

Still alive and free today, Evans knows how close he was to ending up like Johnson. Before Johnson died, Evans and Johnson’s former mentor, Pamela Stanfield, got his permission to use his life story as a cautionary tale for youth at the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center on what happens if you don’t think before you act.

“Me thinking is what has me here speaking out today,” Evans says. “They [the police] had the right to put holes in me, but because I dropped the gun and took the whopping, I’m here talking to the kids now.”

Stanfield’s relationship with Johnson began after his arrest in 2005. She met Johnson when she was his school principal at Westchester Elementary in Kirkwood, but their friendship didn’t develop until Johnson was 19 and locked up at the St. Louis County Jail for McEntee’s murder. Stanfield visited Johnson and helped him publish two books about his early life and time in prison. There is a third book on the way about his final days.

Stanfield and Evans started teaching their program, called Split Second Decisions, three months ago. Before Johnson died, Stanfield relayed all the legal moves of Johnson’s case up until his death and what it was like to witness his execution.

click to enlarge Courtesy Pamela Stanfield From right: Pamela Stanfield, Kevin Johnson, and Johnson’s daughter, Khorry Ramey.

“You just pray that it’s real for them, because it could change their lives,” Stanfield says.

The kids wanted to hear Johnson’s story, Stanfield says, and they wanted to hear his words.

As an older white woman, Stanfield admits her words may not hold much power for male teenagers at the juvenile detention center, especially Black male teens. So Stanfield read Johnson’s words to the kids from emails he sent her. Johnson wrote of his regret and how he’d do “a lot of things differently.”

“I would choose not to carry a gun,” Johnson wrote. “That’s first because as you’ve probably heard before ‘guns don’t kill people, people kill people’…Since being incarcerated, I’ve learned to think things out before I act or react.”

Having a male voice of wisdom is something Evans says he wished he had growing up.

Evans spent a large chunk of his childhood in the St. Louis County Juvenile Detention Center. At age seven, he started to run away from home (once, in an attempt to find his father). He got in trouble for stealing from grocery stores and taking cash from gas station registers.

By the age of 10, Evans says he’d been in the county’s juvenile detention center 22 times.

From ages 7 to 10, Evans says he was locked up with Kevin Johnson’s father, Kevin Johnson Sr., who was about five years older than Evans and protected him. “He taught me how to fight up in there,” Evans says.

click to enlarge Court records Kevin Johnson with his father, Kevin Johnson Sr. (left)

Now 53, Evans puts most of his energy into helping youth. After the end of his final incarceration in 2002, he started sneaking into the county’s juvenile detention center, with the help of officers who knew him, to mentor kids. His unofficial volunteer role eventually turned legit. He’s now a deputy juvenile detention officer.

The Split Second Decisions program he co-teaches with Stanfield has apparently already made a difference. In written statements provided by Stanfield, the kids shared what they learned from Evans and Johnson.

“Talking about Kevin has made me wanna think before I do something, or take time in your head to think like, ‘If I do this, what’s gonna happen to me or to my family and friends,” wrote one 15-year-old.

“It’s meant a lot to me and I need to stop being impulsive and think before I do something,” wrote a 16-year-old. “It’s hard for me to control my anger. This makes me want to keep working.”

“I’m trying to find myself,” a 17-year-old wrote. “This lesson done taught me a lot. I want to better myself sometime. I don’t think. But this lesson made me think about a lot of stuff.”

Another teen said Johnson’s story helped him look at life “from a different view.”

“I’m 18 years old and had my first born son at 17,” he wrote. “Hearing his [Johnson’s] story is sad and scary because he had a family he had to leave. Everyday, I think about my son and how I’m not able to be with him and it hurts me, it really does… This is not my life. Sometimes I wanna give up but I can’t. My life is in God’s hands. Everything I do now is for my son.”

Weeks after Johnson’s death, Stanfield says “it’s not real” to her yet.

Stanfield knows Johnson is gone. She remembers the blur of his funeral, his body in a casket — the slight smile on Johnson’s face, how she touched his shoulder. Still, the reality of Johnson’s death has yet to fully set it in, she says. It was normal for them to write to each other every few weeks, so gaps in their communication isn’t abnormal.

“It probably won’t register until all of a sudden my brain goes, ‘You haven’t heard from Kevin in forever,’” Stanfield says.

In a way, Johnson lives on in his words. Stanfield still has his writings from the last 97 days of his life. Johnson tried to write about his final days in diary-like entries.

Stanfield has yet to assemble all of his final passages into a book, but she noticed one passage in which Johnson wrote about a conversation the two had about guns.

“‘How can you tell a kid in a rough neighborhood to put down their gun when everyone else has one?’” Stanfield asked Johnson in the passage. Johnson wrote that he struggled to come up with an answer. He wrestled with the guilt of his brother’s death — and regret for owning a gun.

After that conversation, Johnson wrote he “hoped like hell that the youth out there could learn from my story and leave the guns where they found them so that they could live long prosperous lives.”

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Fenton Man Charged in Sword Attack on Roommate

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A warrant is out for a Fenton man’s arrest after he allegedly attacked his roommate with a sword. 

Police say that on Sunday, Angelus Scott spoke openly about “slicing his roommate’s head” before he grabbed a sword, raised it up and then swung it down at the roommate. 

The roommate grabbed Scott’s hand in time to prevent injury. When police arrived at the scene, they found the weapon used in the assault. 

The sword in question was a katana, which is a Japanese sword recognizable for its curved blade. 

This isn’t the first time a samurai-style sword has been used to violent effect in St. Louis. In 2018, a man hearing voices slaughtered his ex-boyfriend with a samurai sword. His mother said he suffered from schizoaffective disorder.

As for Scott, 35, the St. Louis County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office was charged yesterday with two felonies, assault first degree and armed criminal action. The warrant for his arrest says he is to be held on $200,000 bond.

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Caught on Video, Sheriff Says He’s Ready to ‘Turn It All Over’ to Deputy

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Video of St. Louis Sheriff Vernon Betts taken by a former deputy suggests that the sheriff has a successor in mind to hand the reins of the department over to, even as Betts is in an increasingly heated campaign for reelection. 

“I ain’t here for all this rigmarole,” Betts says in the video while seated behind his desk at the Carnahan Courthouse. “The Lord sent me here to turn this department around and I’m doing the best I can and I think I’ve done a good job. I’ve got about eight months and I’m going to qualify for my fourth pension.”

He goes on, “Right now I can walk up out of here and live happily ever after and forget about all this…and live like a king.”

The sheriff then says his wife has been in Atlanta looking at houses and that the other deputy in the room, Donald Hawkins, is someone Betts has been training “to turn it all over to him.”

Asked about the video, Betts tells the RFT, “My future plans are to win reelection on August 6th by a wide margin and to continue my mission as the top elected law enforcement official to make St. Louis safer and stronger. Serving the people of St. Louis with integrity, honor and professional law enforcement qualifications is a sacred responsibility, and I intend to complete that mission.”

The video of Betts was taken by Barbara Chavers, who retired from the sheriff’s office in 2016 after 24 years of service. Chavers now works security at Schnucks at Grand and Gravois. Betts’ brother Howard works security there, too.

Chavers tells the RFT that she was summoned to Betts’ office last week after Betts’ brother made the sheriff aware that she was supporting Montgomery. It was no secret: Chavers had filmed a Facebook live video in which she said she was supporting Betts’ opponent Alfred Montgomery in the election this fall. “Make the judges safe,” she says in the video, standing in front of a large Montgomery sign on Gravois Avenue. “They need a sheriff who is going to make their courtrooms safe.”

In his office, even as Chavers made clear she was filming him, Betts told Chavers he was “flabbergasted” and “stunned” she was supporting Montgomery. 

“I don’t know what I did that would make you go against the preacher man,” he says, referring to himself. He then refers to Montgomery as “ungodly.” 

Betts goes on to say that not long ago, he was walking in his neighborhood on St. Louis Avenue near 20th Street when suddenly Montgomery pulled up in his car and, according to Betts, shouted, “You motherfucker, you this, you that. You’re taking my signs down.”

Montgomery tells the RFT that he’s never interacted with Betts outside of candidate forums and neighborhood meetings. 

“I don’t think anyone with good sense would do something like that to a sitting sheriff,” Montgomery says.

Montgomery has had campaign signs missing and on at least two occasions has obtained video of people tearing them down. (Chavers notes that the sign that she filmed her original Facebook video in front of is itself now missing.)

One man who lives near Columbus Square says that he recently put out two Montgomery signs, which later went missing. “If they keep taking them, I’ll keep putting them up,” he said. 

Betts says he has nothing to do with the missing signs. In the video Chavers filmed in Betts’ office, Betts says that his campaign isn’t in a spot where it needs to resort to tearing down opponents’ signs.

“If you sit here long enough, a man is getting ready to come across the street from City Hall bringing me $500, today,” Betts says. “I’m getting that kind of support. I don’t need to tear down signs.”

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St. Louis to Develop First Citywide Transportation Plan in Decades

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The City of St. Louis is working to develop its first citywide mobility plan in decades, Mayor Tishaura Jones’ office announced Tuesday. This plan seeks to make it easier for everyone — drivers, pedestrians, bikers and public transit users — to safely commute within the city.

The plan will bring together other city projects like the Brickline Greenway, Future64, the MetroLink Green Line, and more, “while establishing new priorities for a safer, more efficient and better-maintained transportation network across the City,” according to the release. 

The key elements in the plan will be public engagement, the development of a safety action plan, future infrastructure priorities and transportation network mapping, according to Jones’ office.

The overarching goals are to create a vision for citywide mobility, plan a mixture of short and long-term mobility projects and to develop improved communication tools with the public to receive transportation updates. In recent years, both people who use public transit and cyclists have been outspoken about the difficulties — and dangers — of navigating St. Louis streets, citing both cuts to public transit and traffic violence.

To garner public input and participation for the plan, Jones’ office said there will be community meetings, focus groups and a survey for residents to share their concerns. The city will also be establishing a Community Advisory Committee. Those interested in learning more should check out at tmp-stl.com/

“Everyone deserves to feel safe when getting around St. Louis, whether they’re driving, biking, walking or taking public transit,” Jones said in a news release. “Creating a comprehensive transportation and mobility plan allows us to make intentional and strategic investments so that moving around St. Louis for jobs, education, and entertainment becomes easier, safer and more enjoyable.”

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