One Strike Waiting

Ricardo Resendez is the kind of guy who’s always going to have a problem.

To begin with, 25 years in prison have filled his memory with the kinds of nightmares that haunt graveyards and battlefields.

They’re with him every waking hour and pursue him through a troubled sleep in sounds and images: the foreboding presence of guards, the clanking of steel doors, the screams of fellow inmates.

Then there’s the “three strikes” law that hangs over him on the sheerest of threads, warning that the kind of felony that might get another guy probation could send him back to prison for the rest of his life.

And, finally, there’s his oddly humanistic, faintly fatalistic willingness to help others. It’s what got him into trouble 33 years ago and, more recently, almost turned him into a poster boy for the “three strikes” law.

If good intentions pave the way to hell, Ricardo Resendez may be strolling down that very path . . . but that may be exactly where he’s always been headed.

I met him just after he’d gotten out of prison and was on the streets telling gang kids what it was like to be behind bars, how much of an animal you become.

It was a compelling message delivered by a man whose IQ had been measured at 142, but whose perceptions of acceptable conduct left much to be desired.

He went to prison in the first place for jumping in to help a friend and killing the attacker. Strike one. In prison, he wrestled with a guard who was killed with his own gun. Strike two.

Strike three was waiting.

*

Now 51, Resendez was living in a Skid Row hotel on a $600 monthly Social Security check when a woman tenant asked to borrow $40. He should’ve said no and that would have been that. The woman was a hooker and probably a drug addict. But he figured she needed help, so he loaned her the money.

She came around again later and offered him sex for $20. He accepted, but only had $10. He gave it to her and said, “Now you only owe me thirty.” In the convoluted logic of the street, the hooker figured she’d been short-changed and left in a rage. It wasn’t over.

She returned the next day and said a woman upstairs was being severely beaten by her husband and needed help. Resendez should’ve hesitated. He should’ve taken a minute to think.

But he told me once he knows what it’s like to need help, so he always tries to give it. That’s what he did this time. It was a mistake of almost awesome proportions.

When he got to the room of the woman supposedly being beaten, he discovered it was a lie. Only then did it flash on him that he was being played for a fool. He ran downstairs and found the hooker, his wallet and his money gone.

He called the police, they checked his background and wouldn’t even file a crime report. But then the hooker and a friend returned and taunted him outside his window and he chased them, cursing. They said he had a knife, he says they’re liars.

The cops were called again and this time they arrested Resendez. He was charged with two counts of assault with a deadly weapon, and one count of making terrorist threats, both felonies.

Strike three was on the way.

*

At first he defended himself, even participating in the jury selection, but then was joined by a public defender named Gustavo Bermudez, a kid raised in East L.A. who, like Resendez, always wanted to help people . . . but chose a different way of doing it.

Bermudez didn’t want to put Resendez on the stand. He felt his past would defeat him. But the lawyer hadn’t counted on the ex-prisoner’s ability to put his life in the proper context of anguish and regret.

“As it turned out,” Bermudez said, “it made him human. The jury understood his pain. When the D.A. asked if Ricardo were proud of his background, he pushed away the mike, leaned into his hands and cried, ‘No . . . no . . . no!’ There was a stunned silence.”

One of the jurors, a firefighter named Brian Luce, said that at one point Resendez was a single vote away from conviction. Luce was that vote. He didn’t believe the prosecution had proved its case to a “moral certainty,” and the others ultimately agreed. The third strike went awry. Ball one.

I talked to Resendez later and told him for God’s sake stop trying to help everyone, but he said he couldn’t do that. Because he hurts, he can feel the pain of others. He can’t let them suffer.

I don’t know that there will ever be a place in the world for guys who walk with ghosts and tamper with other lives. Resendez has spent his own life staring into an abyss and, to paraphrase the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, the abyss is beginning to stare back.

Strike three is still waiting to be pitched.