Rulers on wrists. Fingers wagged. Disrespect and disappointment. You may have experienced one, two, or all of these punishments. Or maybe you were labeled a “troublemaker”, a “delinquent,” a “bad kid.” All these brands and more, Jimmy M. used to wear on his skin like prison tattoos. They made him feel better than everyone…and absolutely worthless. But behind the chaos was a child desperate to be noticed in a world that had made him feel powerless from the very start.
Jimmy’s life began in Tujunga, California—a tough neighborhood and a tougher home. “My mom married a guy she thought she could change—an addict.” Some kids have core memories of family dinners or playing catch in the park, but Jimmy’s upbringing was quite different. “My first childhood memory is when when he was beating the shit out of my mom. She told me to call the cops. I was three or four years old, and when I went to grab the phone, he slammed my hand with the phone and said ‘Never call the cops.’ Then he left for the bar. My mom packed up our stuff, and we left.” She was 23, a single mother of triplets (Jimmy and two girls), without a penny to her name.
Enter Jimmy’s stepdad. His stepdad, by contrast, was a 25-year-old bachelor who sold his motorcycle, parked his El Camino, gave up drinking, and built bunk beds for Jimmy and his sisters. “He never once called us his stepkids.” They were his. In a world full of chaos, this was Jimmy’s first encounter with decency. He went to every sports game, helped his mother, and gave his family the security blanket they needed. In Jimmy’s eyes, he was everything a man should be. “He’s my hero.”
But even with a stable home, Jimmy drifted toward the bad—glamorizing the gangster life above all else. One of his friend’s older brothers was in a gang and instantly became an unlikely role model for a young and impressionable Jimmy. By fifth grade, he had started the “Bad Boys Club,” where kids would drink, keep knives on them, and walk with their hands in their pockets. Entry was earned by throwing rocks at passing cars. “I had to pay for a lot of windows.” He was smart, popular, funny—but he was angry. “I was the class clown and the bad influence. Everyone thought I was the good kid,” For now.
By 12, Jimmy was drinking and smoking weed more regularly. “It was an escape. I didn’t care. I would get in trouble or grounded, and I didn’t care.” Those preteen crimes started to rack up more and more. One day, he even yelled the classic stepchild line, “You’re not my real dad!” Hurtful to be sure, but what was more hurtful is when his mother followed up it with, “Your real dad raped me.” From that point on, Jimmy had one thought:
“I’m going to kill this guy.”
After running away from home at 13, Jimmy got caught by the sheriffs with a knife and charged with possession of a deadly weapon. This would end up being the first of many charges against him. A few months later, and he was in a parking lot with his mom when out of nowhere she froze.
“What is it?”
“…Your father”
Jimmy charged at his father with the knife, but luckily, there were cops around to break up the situation. Here comes his second charge: brandishing a deadly weapon.
Now on probation, Jimmy took this to mean that he should get into more trouble. So, he pretty much stopped attending school. His stepdad would drop him off, and he’d simply walk out the back door. Eventually, the misbehaving became too much for his family to take. So, his mom told him not to come home. She told him to stay with his father. The man he just tried to kill.
At 14, his mom dropped him off at his father’s motel room, and the second the door shut, his dad pulled out a gallon Ziploc bag of weed and some Jack Daniels—offering it to Jimmy. After leaving him for hours, his dad would return from the bar with two girls and a bag of meth—offering that to Jimmy as well. That night, Jimmy smoked crystal meth for the first time and lost his virginity to the middle aged woman his father left with him. “My mom thought I’d go there and come running back home. Instead, I was like, ‘This is life. This is what life’s about.’”
That night set the tone for the next 20 years.
He got beaten by his dad. Badly. He learned to stash the dope to keep him from overdosing—and got beaten worse for hiding it. At 15, he ran away to stay with his uncle—a devout neo-nazi. “I was brainwashed. My uncle taught me that our job was to go to prison and put in work for the white race.” And so he did. Juvenile hall, camp, prison. He wanted to go. He wanted to be like his uncle. Soon, he was hooked on heroin and behind bars. “I didn’t start doing heroin until I was 16…a late bloomer,” Jimmy sarcastically adds. But don’t worry, he made up for lost time.
It wasn’t until Jimmy became a father that something inside of him started to crack. And not just once. Jimmy has three kids—each of whom represented a new piece of his old self chipping away. The first, a daughter in Michigan. “Her mom got clean when she found out she was pregnant. I didn’t.” Chip.
He left it all behind—a terrifying but stable job fixing 620-foot-tall cell towers in extremely freezing or burning temperatures, a townhouse, and, most importantly…his daughter—all to get high in California.
The second was a son. Jimmy parented him for a while—even staying clean for chunks of time…but the criminal lifestyle took him away. Chip.
Finally, his third child was taken at birth by Child Protective Services after testing positive for drugs. Chip.
This is when Jimmy’s life of crime started to really catch up with him. He’d had his face shatter, been hit with guns, bashed in the head with golf clubs—It wasn’t the facial reconstruction surgery that made him unrecognizable to himself. It was his actions. The sentences he was facing were getting longer, and the running to prison slowly became running away from it. “My life was Catch Me If You Can. But I started to feel it. I started to see what I was becoming. In total, Jimmy would spend 12 of his 33 years alive behind bars—caged by the government and by himself.
“Even the people still in that life were telling me, ‘Dude, Jimmy, you’re done. You can’t keep running around.’” He remembers his friend once saying, “Man, we’re gonna go do good one day.” And now? That friend is four years clean. “We go to meetings every Monday night.” Beit T’Shuvah Alum.
Jimmy first came to Beit T’Shuvah ten years ago. He wasn’t ready. “I came here for the women. I put Baer through it, and Lance was my counselor. I was still all about that life.” It took another decade, another stint in prison, another kid, and another terrifying brush with being wrongly implicated in a murder for Jimmy to finally let go.
What changed?
“My mom sent me a post. It was my face, blasted all over Facebook. I never realized how much damage I caused. I thought I had morals. If I saw a kid’s room during a robbery, I wouldn’t touch it. I thought that made me a good person.” Then came the moment in prison. The moment that cracked through everything. His mom told him that his son came home from school and said, “I hurried up so you wouldn’t leave me like Mom and Dad did.” That was it.
He got clean on May 15, 2023, while stuck inside a prison cell…and this time it stuck.
Once released from prison, Jimmy was sent to a behavior modification center where that gang lifestyle was still alive and well. Knowing that wasn’t conducive to his recovery, he left. To show the judge he wasn’t running, he showed up to court the next day. Jimmy begged the judge to send him to Beit T’Shuvah, knowing this place would give him the foundation to grow in the way he knew he needed to.
If this Hail Mary failed, he’d be sent back to prison for ten years—but he decided to risk it all for a chance to be here.
Jimmy came back to Beit T’Shuvah not as a gang member, not as a tough guy, not as a boy trying to prove something. He came back as a father. “I want to be the dad my stepdad was to me,” he said with a full chest and a straight back, “I want to be the best dad possible. That’s my life goal.”
Today, Jimmy’s building a life—one that doesn’t require blueprints or prison rules. “Beit T’Shuvah has given me the opportunity to change my life. I have had the opportunity to get the tools I need that are going to integrate me back into society.” He’s working on his CADC, knowing that, whatever career he chooses, there is only one requirement: helping people. He works with Jessica Fishel in prevention to speak with groups of troubled youths. But above all else, he is back in his children’s lives.
He’s not faking it anymore. He’s not running anymore. He’s not trying to be anyone else. The xenophobic brainwashing was dissipated and blossomed into acceptance and gratitude.
“I don’t play the racist bullshit anymore. I don’t want to be a tough guy. I just want my kids to know their dad is home.”
And for the first time in his life, he is.
Jimmy is Beit T’Shuvah. Redemption personified. Because the truth is, Jimmy’s story was never about being a bad kid—it’s always been about becoming a good man.