Fern Stamps, Whose Son Was Killed in a Gang-Related Shooting, Shares His Life With Young Felons at High-Security Jail in Whittier So That They Can Hear First-Hand . . . : The Result of Their Actions

Fern Stamps is going on and on about her sons, her babies, her boys.

She is a guest here, in this place they call a school, the Fred C. Nells School in Whittier. It is a high-security jail.

The room is very quiet as Fern Stamps speaks. Her listeners, murderers, rapists, gangbangers, felons of all sorts, are rapt. They’ve just met this woman who is so easy with her words. They spill out, unedited, with lots of asides.

These guys relax with Ms. Stamps, as they call her here. They like her. They are growing to like her family, too. That is the plan.

There is a banner on the wall, above the window. It says, “Everytime a Bullet Flies, a Mother Cries. . .” Ms. Stamps is out to prove that this is not jive.

So she talks a lot. There is the story of the two years when all five of her boys, including her two stepsons, were living with her and her husband. “I went from one child to five . Can you imagine that? That’s when I started drinking,” she says.

Her audience is with her. The lady can joke.

They are watching her home movies now. These are spliced together on video for occasions such as these. Look at everybody bike riding, splashing around in the plastic wading pool in the back yard, on motor scooters, clomping along on those tired-looking ponies, in preschool.

But the twins! They were something else. The video doesn’t show the time they got into the Vaseline and smeared it all over themselves--you know how little kids are--but Ms. Stamps says she’s got that on stills.

“It was a joy in raising them,” she says. “They did everything together. They were best friends.”

Once Kimani picked up a snail and stuck it in his mouth, then soon as he saw his mother coming he chomped on it faster, figuring she’d try to pull it out. She did.

The murderers, rapists and the gangbangers laugh. Yeah, they know about little kids. They’ve got little brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces, you name it, even kids of their own, some of them. And it wasn’t long ago that they were children themselves; many still are.

The average age here is just under 18, although murderers can come as young as 14.

The kid who murdered Ms. Stamps’ son was 16 years old.

That was on Jan. 23, 1988. Kimani was 15, like his twin brother, Kwame, an honor student at Gardena High School.

Neither one of them was in a gang, although the kid who walked up and shot Kimani, point blank in the back of the head, was. He told the detective who arrested him that he was “practicing to be a shooter.”

Ms. Stamps has propped some mementos of her son on the chalk tray of the blackboard in the front of this room.

There’s Kimani’s honor roll certificate, the one from the national youth sports program, another from the Watts Junior Olympics, another attesting to his proficiency in computers. A yearbook from the “Who’s Who of American Students” is open to the page on which Kimani’s picture appears.

There are more details from Kimani’s life, so many that nearly three hours sail by. Details are very important to Ms. Stamps.

There were the house rules she posted on the back of the broom closet. The twins got their full allowance for doing their chores without being told. If she reminded them, she docked their pay. They didn’t like that.

There were the bomber jackets that the boys wanted. You remember when bomber jackets first came in style? Well, there was this trip to Hawthorne Mall. . . . Oh, and Kimani was a real finicky eater. Never did like ketchup. That would always hold up their order when they’d go for fast food. Always a special order for Mr. Kimani Stamps.

Then there was the night that Ms. Stamps got sick and took to her bed. It was probably the flu. She said sure the twins could get a pizza and watch a video down the street with their friend Ron. Kimani had called to ask permission. “I love you,” he told his mama on the phone.

*

The Stamps live in Carson. They’ve lived in the same middle-class neighborhood for 23 years. Ms. Stamps is an office manager, and her husband, Virgil, is an accountant. As parents, they are what the experts call “very involved.”

I’ll put it another way. They have given their children their soul. When one of them was murdered, a jagged piece of that was ripped off. Such a wound never heals.

Ms. Stamps is screaming now. This is not scripted at all. It just comes, this mother’s rage and desperation, when talking to this room full of felons who could have just as easily killed her son.

“His killer was so close that the bullet dragged through his brain,” she says. “It stopped right here in his forehead.” She points to her own forehead now.

“My son was 15 years old!” She produces an 8-by-10-inch black and white photograph of Kimani, handsome, with a smile that says life is good. She makes sure that everyone in the room gets a look.

“This was his last picture. He never even saw this picture! There wasn’t enough time to show him.” Then Ms. Stamps produces other photographs, in color, the same size. Kimani is in intensive care, attached to machines that are keeping his body pumping blood.

“This is what one bullet did to him!” she says. “It dragged through his brain. He couldn’t do anything. He couldn’t breathe, even breathe on his own. Swallow! Warm water was being pumped through his body. Everything on him was artificial. One bullet. One bullet !

“And one f------ kid goes out there and shoots him in the back of the head! Why? Why? Who raised him to do that? How could he do that? I want to know! I want to know!”

Ms. Stamps goes on, screaming, gesturing, hurting. This audience who had laughed at her jokes and correctly picked out which diapered toddler was Kimani in the pool, is under a spell of a different kind.

Some squirm. Most stare, mouths slack. At least one wipes away a tear.

But Ms. Stamps keeps on. The details of a happy home life, mixed with those of such savagery, chill. “I don’t understand this. What mentality would do this thing!” she says. “Why!? Tell me why!”

And Ms. Stamps wants to know why her son’s killer, sentenced in a plea bargain to 17 years to life, refuses to talk to her even though she has tried to see him many times. One of the inmates finally offers a reply.

“He’s probably burning up in the inside when he’s thinking about it,” he says. “It’s hurting him bad. I wouldn’t want to talk to the mother if I did something like that. Probably the expression on her face would tear me down. You know what I’m saying?”

Yes, Ms. Stamps does, but she doesn’t like it. His feelings! What about her own?

“I’m speaking for your victim,” she tells her listeners. “All of you have many victims!”

And these felons are getting it now. They say that they know what Ms. Stamps is speaking is the truth. They say that they like her and her family. They say they wouldn’t do them any harm. They are learning remorse.

Not all of them, of course.

Although the California Youth Authority calls this seven-week “Impact of Crime on Victims” program the most successful it runs, it knows it is not a cure to a cycle of violence staggering in scope. It is a start, begun in 1985, that is being emulated in many prisons throughout the United States.

At this Whittier facility, parole boards are requiring some 90% of the inmates to take it before they can get out.

What it is up against, however, is this:

One 17-year-old inmate says that he can relate to the pain of Kimani’s brothers because he, too, lost a brother to gang violence two years ago.

“I’m not thinking about the hurt. I go and get drunk. Then I go and make ‘em hurt. It takes off a little something. It takes off tension,” he says.

He doesn’t know who killed his brother, he says, but that doesn’t matter too much.

“I’m talking about a whole turf. I don’t know the one who did it, but one day I’m going to get the right one. . . . I want his mama to feel the same pain that my brother’s mama is feeling!”

Georgia Range, whose only two sons were murdered by gangbangers within a year of each other--the last in April of this year--is listening to this with tears in her eyes. Today is the first time that she has participated in anything like this, and she can’t talk too much yet.

“I wouldn’t want any mama to feel like that,” she says. “It’s a pain you can’t even explain.”

Ms. Stamps says, “It’s like losing your mind.”

*

At the end of the session, some inmates come up and give these mothers a hug. It hurts and it feels good.

“It took all the life out of me,” Georgia Range says. “It drained me.”

But, yes, she will come back.

In a letter that one inmate wrote to Ms. Stamps after she left, he told of causing the death of his girlfriend, who was eight months pregnant with his child. She was the only one there that day who had nothing to do with gangs. And she was the only one fatally shot.

“All I can say is now she’s in a better place,” he wrote. “I know I’ll see her again. Let me know how you’re able to talk about it. Every time I try, I just cry.”