A Life Reclaimed

His daughter calls 10 times a day from New York, just to hear her dad pick up the phone. His sons hover close by his side, quietly studying the broad face they scarcely know.

Away from the world for 18 years, Eugene Sylve missed high school graduations, the births of six grandchildren and millions of more ordinary moments. Back home now in Long Beach, he swears he will not miss anything else.

Sylve, 57, is something of a miracle in California today--a convicted murderer out on parole.

Gov. Gray Davis has vowed that no killer will go free on his watch, but in a few rare cases, his hands are tied. Davis tried to keep Sylve locked up, but the parole board freed him Dec. 2, deciding that he had paid his debt for shooting a man who crashed a party for high school athletes at his home.

So here he is, starting over at an age when some men retire, hampered by ill health but grateful for a second chance. His wife of 35 years--a postal worker named Betty--can’t quite believe they will be together this Christmas, after so much despair and so much time apart.

Rejoining society has been surreal for the sturdy, soft-spoken Sylve, like emerging from a time warp. Mega-malls, cellular phones, the Internet--they are new wonders to someone sealed up all those years.

The beds are so soft that he can’t sleep. Drivers go so fast that he cringes while on the road. Accustomed to the loud bells that rouse prisoners, he still wakes at 5 a.m. each day. And every now and then he drifts into a daze, wondering, “Am I really out?”

“I can’t get those 18 years back. I’ve lost that time,” Sylve said recently, glancing wistfully at his youngest son, Ivan, who was 3 when his father went away. “But I made something good out of a bad experience. And I’ve got a lot of time left to live.”

The bad experience began on a November night in 1982, at Sylve’s ranch in Mead Valley, near Riverside. Sylve, a volunteer football coach, was hosting a party for his eldest son’s high school team. It was invitation only, so when Sylve saw a car arrive with three men he believed to be gang members, he asked them to leave.

One of them, David Carr, 20, punched him and pulled a knife, Sylve said. Sylve sprayed Carr with dog repellent and used his shotgun to fire a warning blast in the air. He then shot at Carr.

Sylve insists that he never intended to kill Carr. The ammunition in his shotgun was specially made to scare off--not injure--stray dogs that chased his livestock. But Carr was killed by the close-range shot, and Sylve--a booster club member and businessman with a good income and a house with a pool--was suddenly on his way to prison.

On the advice of his lawyer, Sylve pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. The attorney--who later resigned from the state bar while facing disciplinary charges in another case--told him he would serve maybe four or five years and go home.

Sylve is not one to curse his bad luck, or focus on regrets. He called his time in prison “a horrible, frightening experience” for a country boy born and raised in Louisiana, but said he viewed his time as a “mission.”

He became a tutor who taught other inmates to read. He mediated racial tensions and became a peacemaker between rival prison gangs. When he found weapons, he turned them over to guards.

His state file bulges with commendations from prison staff members. One officer talked of how Sylve had risked his life to administer CPR to a Latino inmate who collapsed the yard. Another twice wrote the parole board, recommending “without hesitation” that he be freed.

While Sylve tried to make amends from inside prison, his wife struggled to raise five children, ages 3 to 16 at the time of the crime. After legal bills cost the family their ranch, she moved to Paramount, then to Long Beach, where she works as a letter carrier.

She never considered divorce--”He was always a good man, a good provider”--and she made sure Sylve remained a force in her children’s lives. The children remember well the weekends consumed by long drives to Soledad or San Luis Obispo or wherever their father was.

It was hard, said Corey Sylve, now 30, having a father who missed his football games, missed his acceptance to college and missed his job promotions.

“But my father wasn’t one of those fathers who left by choice, who didn’t want to be with his kids,” said the son, the president of a vocational center that helps disabled adults find jobs. “So that made a big difference in how I felt.”

Through the years, family members bounced up and down on waves of hope and depression. In 1991, they finally got what they had prayed for--Sylve was judged suitable for parole. That was just the first hurdle, however, and it was nine more years before he finally walked out. They were dangerous years, because prisoners with parole dates face constant threats from those less fortunate.

“A lot of guys get very envious, and they’ll do whatever they can to mess things up for you,” Sylve said. Each night, he checked his bunk meticulously for knives or contraband concealed as part of a plot to set him up. He knew that one infraction--one misstep--could send that parole date up in smoke.

Sylve’s greatest worries, however, had to do with the bureaucratic minefield that remained in his path. The parole board can cancel a release at any time. And Gov. Davis had one final review.

That came a year ago, and, as predicted, the governor asked the board to reconsider the case and make the inmate serve more time. Because Sylve had initially been cleared for parole long before Davis took office, the governor lacked the power to block his release outright.

The parole board, however, could have done just that. Instead, after a hearing lasting nearly four hours, members upheld the earlier decision to set Sylve free.

“The board showed a lot of courage,” said Sylve’s attorney, Gary Diamond, who considers his client perhaps the most deserving of any inmate he has represented in his 10-year career. “They stood up to Davis and did the right thing.”

On his final night in prison, Sylve didn’t sleep a wink. The warden and guards showered him with congratulations, while inmates crowded around, staring, shaking hands, touching him as if some of his luck might rub off.

The next morning, his parole agent picked him up--as required by law--and went over the rules: meetings with the agent once a month, counseling, and no guns allowed in the house. On the trip home, Sylve became ill--overcome with nerves and unaccustomed to the motion of a car.

In Long Beach, the family waited in their modest condominium, which was bedecked with wreaths, Christmas stockings and ceramic snowmen. After an hour or two of tears, Sylve went to see his grandchildren, then joined Ivan at the grocery store, where he marveled at the moving countertop carrying food to the checker.

That night, Sylve cooked an old-fashioned bayou feast--gumbo, jambalaya and stuffed crab. The food was too rich for his system, which was accustomed to 18 years of institutional food, so he just sat and savored the joy of breathing in the same room as his kin.

Making Transition to Freedom

In the days of freedom that have followed, Sylve has been busy. He already has a job, working with his son at the vocational center, and he is recruiting board members for a nonprofit organization he is creating to support parolees and steer youths away from crime.

Just because he is out of prison, his sentence for killing David Carr has not ended, he said: “Life is a precious gift from God, and no one has the right to take another life. Through this organization, I’m planning to keep making amends and giving back.”

Sylve is also taking steps to resume a regular life--opening a checking account, renewing his driver’s license and visiting the doctor to get his high blood pressure and diabetes checked. Each stop brings a reminder of the 18-year hole in his life.

At the DMV, for example, the clerk wondered where he had been since his old license expired in 1983. Sylve politely told her, “but my wife kicked me and said I didn’t need to be sharing my business with everybody else.”

While Betty Sylve wants to protect her husband, Eugene said: “I don’t have anything to hide, and people don’t seem to hold it against me.”

Still, it is no small burden for an ex-offender such as Sylve to get a ticket out of prison these days. Only two other convicted murderers have been paroled since Davis took office. One got out the same way Sylve did--freed by the parole board over the governor’s objections. The other was released after Davis concluded that she had feared for her life when she killed her abusive ex-boyfriend.

Sylve says he knows why the governor wants to keep murder convicts locked up, regardless of the circumstances, regardless of what kind of people they have become behind bars. He understands that the political risk of paroling a killer is a risk most elected officials would rather not take.

“But my name is not Willie Horton,” Sylve said, referring to the Massachusetts inmate whose crime rampage while on a weekend furlough helped doom Gov. Michael Dukakis’ 1988 presidential bid.

“My name is Eugene Sylve, and I can do a lot of good for this world. I just wish the governor would look at us all individually, instead of putting us in one big pot.”