Some people get a second chance; others are a cat with nine lives. I sat down with a young man who knows what it means to lose his freedom, battle a long lineage of addiction, and finally walk away from the life that was holding him hostage. Fresh off having his ankle bracelet removed, and determined to start over, he’s stepping into a new chapter with something he may not have had much of before: gratitude. As a resident of this community, he’s become known not for where he’s been, but for the kindness, humility, and genuine appreciation he brings to the people around him. His story isn’t about pretending the past never happened—it’s about proving that the past doesn’t get the final word.
Gabriel F. spent decades moving between addiction, crime, jail, and relapse. At 39, he is accepting that recovery isn’t about becoming someone else—it is about finally choosing where the road leads.
The first time Gabriel realized he might die from addiction, he wasn’t in a jail cell, a hospital bed, or a treatment center.
He was sitting in his car at MacArthur Park.
At the time, Gabriel was living in his car, hustling for enough money to put gas in the tank and drugs in his system. Around him, he saw people who seemed to have reached the final destination of the life he had been living for years. Then he saw something he couldn’t unsee: a dead body in a car, left to deteriorate in the California heat. “I saw that and just kind of like saw that that could be me,” Gabriel recalls.
For most of his life, the possibility of death had been strangely ordinary. He had watched friends overdose. He had watched people go to prison. He had experienced overdoses himself. He had been arrested repeatedly, gone through brutal cold-turkey withdrawals in county jail, and spent years navigating a world where drugs, crime and incarceration were not shocking—they were routine. “I became very jaded to the fact of people going away to prison and people overdosing and dying,” he says. “It just kind of became very normal.”
At 39, Gabriel is trying to make something unfamiliar feel normal instead: sobriety.
That journey began long before MacArthur Park.
Gabriel was born in Santa Monica and raised in Culver City, one of five children. His father was a real estate agent and his mother was a stay-at-home mom. Both parents had struggled with drugs and alcohol in the past but had been sober for decades by the time Gabriel was growing up.
As a child, he describes himself as shy and withdrawn. He played soccer, volleyball, and ice hockey. He skateboarded. He went to school and spent time with friends. But somewhere around middle school, something changed. “I started smoking weed when I was probably like 12 or 13 years old.” At first, marijuana seemed less like a problem than a solution. Gabriel had struggled to connect with people, and suddenly he felt more comfortable.
“I felt like I could laugh and I could be funny and things were just…everything just felt more fun.”
The difference between Gabriel and some of his friends became apparent almost immediately. While others could smoke and return to their normal lives, Gabe says drugs began interfering with his. He stopped playing sports. He started skipping school. His skateboarding became less of something he enjoyed and more of a way to get to wherever his friends were getting high. And he began gravitating toward people and places his parents had tried to keep him away from.
His childhood neighbors were a family deeply involved in drugs, gangs, and crime. Gabriel remembers the guns, the money, the constant activity and the sense of power surrounding those households. What attracted him wasn’t necessarily the destruction. At the time, he saw excitement.
“I just kind of wanted to be where the fun was.”
Eventually, that world of fun took a new direction when he met another family. A graffiti crew that began with tagging escalated into selling drugs, committing violence, and engaging in criminal activity. By 15, Gabe was selling marijuana at school and carrying a knife. After pulling the knife on someone who tried to rob him, he was arrested and sent to juvenile hall. He was eventually placed in a locked juvenile facility.
Then he escaped.
Gabriel and another teenager planned their way out, jumped the fence, and made their way back toward Culver City. For a week, he was essentially homeless, sleeping in laundry rooms and under a friend’s bed. Even then, drugs remained the priority.
Eventually, marijuana gave way to harder drugs. Crack became the first substance he describes as a true addiction. The high was followed almost immediately by crises.
“It was like five minutes of bliss and then followed by intense paranoia.”
He remembers tying doorknobs together with extension cords because he believed people were hiding inside the cabinets of his home. He went to treatment for the first time in his early twenties, completed detox and entered sober living.
Then he relapsed.
For Gabriel, relapse rarely meant a brief mistake followed by a return to recovery. Once he started using, he says, he committed fully.
“Once I had started getting high, I had just fully committed to getting high and getting drugs and finding a place to stay by any means.”
His relapses could last years.
Over time, crack became methamphetamine, and eventually heroin and fentanyl entered the picture. Selling drugs became a way to finance his own addiction. Arrests became increasingly common. Homes were raided. He spent months in county jail. And people around him kept dying.
His older brother, who had originally introduced him to Beit T’Shuvah, eventually died by suicide involving an overdose. An uncle died from an overdose while Gabriel was in treatment. Friends and acquaintances disappeared into prison or died from drugs.
Still, none of it seemed to be enough.
Gabriel experienced several overdoses himself, often after periods of incarceration or sobriety. He describes a pattern that became almost mechanical: get clean, get out, get high, overdose, refuse help, and return to the drugs. Even fear couldn’t compete with addiction.
“The consequences of my actions never really were enough to deter me from the feeling that I needed to remedy for the drugs.”
In one particularly serious case, he was arrested after pulling a gun during a confrontation while he was selling heroin. He spent time in county jail and faced the consequences of yet another decision made while living in the drug world. Looking back, he still struggles to explain how his life traveled so far from where it began.
Public defenders and others who encountered him sometimes asked the same question: How did a young man from his background end up doing these things?
Gabe says he never had a good answer.
“All I know is all the decisions and choices that I made in my life have landed me where I’m at.”
Eventually, he found himself living in his car near MacArthur Park.
That was different.
For the first time, Gabriel wasn’t simply hearing about the end of addiction from other people. He was seeing it directly. He saw people dying in their cars. He saw the physical consequences of long-term addiction. And then he saw the body. The image forced him to imagine his own future. “That could’ve been me.” He tried treatment again. And again.
Then another treatment center called him back.
“Hey, can you come in tomorrow?”
This time, something clicked. Gabe credits several things: the environment at the detox, the staff, medication, and being around people who made the difficult beginning of recovery bearable. Along the way, he had remembered Beit T’Shuvah. It had been 13 years since he had first walked through our doors. He had fond memories of the 18 months he spent here prior. It was the longest stretch of sobriety he had ever accumulated. Gabe worked at the BTS Thrift Store and was involved in the community, but once he started to distance himself, the descent began. Years later, all those memories came flooding back. He returned carrying years of what he calls “wreckage”: open legal cases, an ankle monitor, unresolved consequences, and the accumulated weight of a life spent running from one crisis to the next. But this time, he wasn’t simply trying to escape jail. He was trying to build a life.
Gabriel says he has begun noticing something that years of addiction made easy to ignore: time.
“When you’re getting high for so long, you just kind of lose track of time,” he says. “And I’m just noticing that I’m getting older, my family’s getting older, and everybody is growing up and living lives while I’ve just been in this dark world of crime and drugs.”
Recovery, however, hasn’t erased everything. Gabe admits that the criminal mentality is still there. He might see a set of car keys sitting somewhere and immediately think about stealing a car. The thought still arrives. The difference is what happens next. Now, he has a pause. He can play the consequences forward. He knows where the old decisions lead.
“The juice just really isn’t worth the squeeze anymore.”
That realization is perhaps the clearest measure of how much has changed. For years, Gabriel chased the immediate relief of drugs and the immediate reward of the criminal world without considering where either would take him. Today, he is learning to tolerate something that once seemed impossible: ordinary life.
Recently, he worked his first day as a production assistant on a commercial. He worked a 12-hour day and made $300. It wasn’t glamorous. It was honest and that mattered.
“I need to recognize and accept that this is normal life.”
The man who once knew how to make quick money selling drugs is now learning how to accept a paycheck earned over twelve hours. The man who once measured his days by how quickly he could get high is learning how to measure them by work, cultivating relationships, and responsibility.
He knows the old life is still capable of calling his name. But he also knows where it goes.
For now, Gabe’s dreams consist of wanting to return to music. He has recorded and made music for years and hopes to rediscover the creative drive that once came naturally to him. He also wants to become a licensed real estate agent and work alongside his father. There is something fitting about that ambition. His father was once stuck in the grip of his own addiction. Through sobriety and recovery, he built a successful career in real estate. Now Gabriel hopes to carry that legacy forward.
After decades spent trying to outrun his past, he is finally looking toward a future.
Not a perfect one. Not an easy one. Just an honest one.
Maybe that is what triumph looks like for someone who has spent years living at full speed toward destruction. Not becoming a completely different person. Not pretending the past never happened.
Just stopping long enough to choose a different direction.
To be grateful for his second chance.
Because this cat has plenty of life left to live.
