Wes Moore - The Other Wes Moore

This is the story of two boys living in Baltimore with similar histories and an identical name: Wes Moore. One of us is free and has experienced things that he never even knew to dream about as a kid. The other will spend every day until his death behind bars for an armed robbery that left a police officer and father of five dead. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. Our stories are obviously specific to our two lives, but I hope they will illuminate the crucial inflection points in every life, the sudden moments of decision where our paths diverge and our fates are sealed. Its unsettling to know how little separates each of us from another life alogether.

In late 2000, the Baltimore Sun published a short article with the headline Local Graduate Named Rhodes Scholar. It was about me. As a senior at Johns Hopkins University, I received one of the most prestigious academic awards for students in the world. That fall I was moving to England to attend Oxford University on a full scholarship.

But that story had less of an impact on me than another series of articles in the Sun, about an incident that happened just months before, a precisely planned jewelry store robbery gone terribly wrong. The stores security guardan off-duty police officer named Bruce Protherowas shot and killed after he pursued the armed men into the stores parking lot. A massive and highly publicized manhunt for the perpetrators ensued. Twelve days later it ended when the last two suspects were apprehended in a house in Philadelphia by a daunting phalanx of police and federal agents. The articles indicated that the shooter, Richard Antonio Moore, would likely receive the death penalty. The sentence would be similarly severe for his younger brother, who was also arrested and charged. In an eerie coincidence, the younger brothers name was the same as mine.

Two years after I returned from Oxford, I was still thinking about the story. I couldnt let it go. If youd asked me why, I couldnt have told you exactly. I was struck by the superficial similarities between us, of course: wed grown up at the same time, on the same streets, with the same name. But so what? I didnt think of myself as a superstitious or conspiratorial person, the kind whod obsess over a coincidence until it yielded meaning. But there were nights when Id wake up in the small hours and find myself thinking of the other Wes Moore, conjuring his image as best I could, a man my age lying on a cot in a prison cell, burdened by regret, trying to sleep through another night surrounded by the walls hed escape only at death. Sometimes in my imaginings, his face was mine.

Theres a line at the opening of John Edgar Widemans brilliant Brothers and Keepers about the day he found out his own brother was on the run from the police for an armed robbery: The distance Id put between my brothers world and mine suddenly collapsed Wherever he was, running for his life, he carried part of me with him. But I didnt even know the other Wes Moore. Why did I feel this connection with him, why did I feel like he carried part of me with him in that prison cell? I worried that I was just being melodramatic or narcissistic. But still, I couldnt shake it. Finally, one day, I wrote him a simple letter introducing myself and explaining how Id come to learn about his story. I struggled to explain the purpose of my letter and posed a series of nave questions that had been running through my mind: Who are you? Do you see your brother? How do you feel about him? How did this happen? As soon as I mailed the letter, the crazy randomness of it all came flooding in on me. I was sure that Id made a mistake, that Id been self-indulgent and presumptuous and insulting, and that Id never hear back from him.

A month later, I was surprised to find an envelope in my mailbox stamped with a postmark from the Jessup Correctional Institution in Maryland. He had written back.

Greetings, Good Brother, the letter started out:

I send salutations of peace and prayers and blessings and guidance to you for posing these questions, which Im going to answer, Inshallah. With that, I will begin with the first question posed

This was the start of our correspondence, which has now gone on for years. At the beginning of our exchange of letterswhich was later expanded by face-to-face visits at the prisonI was surprised to find just how much we did have in common, aside from our names, and how much our narratives intersected before they fatefully diverged. Learning the details of his story helped me understand my own life and choices, and I like to think that my story helped him understand his own a little more. But the real discovery was that our two stories together helped me to untangle some of the larger story of our generation of young men, boys who came of age during a historically chaotic and violent time and emerged to succeed and fail in unprecedented ways. After a few visits, without realizing it, I started working on this project in my mind, trying to figure out what lessons our stories could offer to the next wave of young men who found themselves at the same crossroads wed encountered and unsure which path to follow.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I discovered was that through the stories we volleyed back and forth in letters and over the metal divider of the prisons visiting room, Wes and I had indeed, as Wideman wrote, collapsed the distance between our worlds. We definitely have our disagreementsand Wes, it should never be forgotten, is in prison for his participation in a heinous crime. But even the worst decisions we make dont necessarily remove us from the circle of humanity. Wess desire to participate in this book as a way to help others learn from his story and choose a different way is proof of that.

To write this book, I conducted hundreds of hours of interviews with Wes and his friends and family, as well as my friends and family. The stories you will read are rendered from my own memory and the best memories of those we grew up with, lived with, and learned from. I engaged in extensive historical research and interviewed teachers and drug dealers, police officers and lawyers, to make sure I got the factsand the feelright. Some names have been changed to protect peoples identities and the quiet lives they now choose to lead. A few characters are composites. But all of the stories are painstakingly real.

The book is broken up into eight chapters, corresponding to eight years that had a decisive impact on our respective lives. The three parts represent the three major phases in our coming of age. Opening each of these parts is a short snippet of conversation between Wes and me in the prisons visitors room. It was very important to me that we return again and again to that visitors room, the in-between space where the inside and the outside meet. I dont want readers to ever forget the high stakes of these storiesand of all of our stories: that life and death, freedom and bondage, hang in the balance of every action we take.