When a Man Falls . . .

The letter is written on yellow legal paper in the familiar syntax of a prison inmate. It says, in so many words, what they all say:

He’s been set up, railroaded, tried by a kangaroo court and falsely imprisoned. As God is his witness, he’s innocent. He needs my help.

I don’t know how many times I’ve seen letters like this from cons seeking a court of last resort. I tell them I’m sorry, I can’t help, and they slip back into the places where losers dwell. I never hear from them again.

This last letter is different. It comes from a man whose journey through light and darkness I have chronicled over a period of eight years and have come to know well.

He’s spent half of his life in prison but vowed the last time he walked free that he’d never go back. So much for vows. He’s back.

The man’s name is Ricardo Resendez and he’s doing time in Delano’s North Kern State Prison for . . . well, for being Ricardo Resendez.

Like so many of those who stumble in fate’s way, things just seem to happen to the guy. The way he sees it, bad luck embraces him like a lost child, welcoming him back each time to an enclosure with which he is all too familiar.

British scholar Thomas Fuller wrote that when a man falls, all will trod on him. Resendez, sure of his victimization, feels he’s living proof of that. By his measure, the whole world is trodding on him.

*

He was 18 when he went to prison the first time. He’d joined the Army to escape the influence of gangs in East L.A. and, in the process of trying to make it, killed a man he claimed was attacking a friend. He got 30 years.

That was in 1961. Five years later he tried to escape and a guard was killed in a manner he swears wasn’t his fault. He got life plus 140 years.

Resendez thought he’d never see the outside again, but laws change and, in 1986, he was released. I met him a couple of years after that. He was working steadily and living with a woman he loved dearly.

The story could have ended there. As a form of atonement, Resendez, whose IQ was measured in prison at 142, spent his spare time telling gangbangers to give up their violent lives.

“I tell them,” he said to me one day, “not to be like me.”

Oddly, it was that very perception of himself Resendez lacked. Haunted by his prison days, he couldn’t reinvent the man who seemed to want more than anything to live a normal life.

There’s a kind of destiny for guys like him, a path they walk through forests filled with emotional peril. At the height of his good fortune, he blew it by threatening the life of a colleague. He ended up losing both his job and the woman he loved. Resendez claimed he was framed.

He drifted aimlessly after that, drinking, losing jobs and living on welfare, but somehow managing to avoid fate’s attention. It couldn’t last.

Two years ago, in another convoluted effort to help someone, he was charged with attacking a woman with a knife. He said the cops knew his background and set him up.

Faced with a mandatory three-strikes sentence if convicted, he managed to convince a jury of his innocence. A juror told me later they felt the guy deserved a break.

And now this.

*

His letter, full of rage and indignation, says he was sent back to prison for three years for violating probation on a drunk driving charge. Once there, he held guards at bay because they wouldn’t return his legal papers. He faces another three-strikes trial for possessing a concealed weapon.

Resendez writes: “It was a piece of RAZOR BLADE which I never so much as threatened anyone with . . . and for THAT these so-called officers of the law want to have me sentenced to: TWENTY-FIVE, TO LIFE !?!” The letter, and another that followed, is filled with capitalizations, underlines and exclamation points. He wants JUSTICE, he wants FREEDOM, he wants somehow to relive his life, to be in a BETTER PLACE!!!

Near the end he says, “I feel like Job, Chapter 3.” I looked it up: “For my sighings cometh before I eat, and my roarings are poured out like the waters. I was not in safety, neither had I rest, neither was I quiet; yet trouble came.”

Job cursed the day he was born, and I suspect that Resendez, always just a step ahead of a pursuing darkness, has done the same. Now 53, his prospects are no better than they were at 18.

If he manages once more to win his freedom, the path through the forests of his life will, I’m sure, lead back to the cold embrace of a prison.

I’m afraid there’s nothing anyone, not even Resendez, can do to change that. Fate has him by the hand and won’t let go.

Al Martinez can be reached via the Internet at al.martinez@latimes.com