Death of a Warrior

Then Everett points to a mug shot of Jarvis. "Does he look like a fifteen-year-old to you? Look at that face, look at the creases on his brow."

Indeed Jarvis was mature, both physically and professionally. "Usually the younger kids, the fourteen- and fifteen-year-olds, are lookouts. It's uncommon for them to be sellers. But Jarvis had been out there and apparently [the dealers] felt they could trust him."

An older man recruited Jarvis into the trade when he was just fourteen years old. Since the days of Oliver Twist, adults have used juveniles to do their bidding. But such recruitment became widespread during the Seventies and Eighties, when prison sentences for drug dealing increased. Flocks of impoverished children rose to the call and procured guns to protect themselves. Although police have not linked Jarvis to any violent acts, friends say he carried a weapon while dealing.

As youth violence has increased across the nation in recent years, legislators have cracked down. Nearly every state in the country has passed laws lowering the age at which kids can be criminally charged as adults and sent to prison. In doing so they have redefined the parameters of childhood.

On a sunny weekday afternoon, NW 140th Street in Opa-locka is quiet. Eva Hilbert is sitting in her clean, sparsely decorated living room recounting Jarvis's short life. It hurts to tell the story, she says, but it's not the first time she's pulled her family through a trauma. In fact, between the heartache and the bruises, the men in her life have caused Hilbert much pain. As she talks, her sixteen-year-old daughter Charmaine curls up in a near-fetal position on the plastic-covered couch. While a soap opera plays on the TV, Charmaine sucks her thumb.

"I didn't raise Jarvis to be a hoodlum," declares Eva Hilbert, now 45 years old. Her voice is a soft singsong, polite but faint, almost distant. It's the voice of someone who has learned to disengage from the reality around her. "I raised him to treat people like you would want to be treated. You do that and God will bless you."

Above the TV three portraits are arranged in an arc: Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X.

Jarvis, his mother explains, was her "knee-baby boy," the second youngest in a family of five siblings. When he was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital on August 16, 1983, his father, Robert Lee James, was living with the family in an apartment on NW Twelfth Avenue and 58th Street.

"[Robert] was a nice person, but he had the temper, too, just like Jarvis," she comments. Hilbert met James when she was sixteen years old. "We got along well. He always helped with the children, he would take them to the park, walk them, and feed them. Back then he worked in construction."

James was a spottily employed brick mason. During the 1983 holiday season he was unemployed and anxious. "He started saying there wasn't enough money in the house and he wanted to get the kids presents," Hilbert recalls. On November 21 at 2:00 p.m., James held a gun to the head of New York tourist Humberto Perez in a parking garage at SE First Street and Second Avenue. James, along with his brother Ralph, took $500 in cash and $9200 in jewelry from Perez, then fled in the tourist's rented Lincoln. Ralph drove. Fifteen minutes later, when two Miami police officers spotted the car and gave chase, Robert James popped up out of the passenger side window and fired two shots into the police car's windshield. Neither officer was injured.

On December 8 police tracked down Robert James and arrested him. Several months later, after a jury found him guilty of armed robbery and attempted murder, James sent Judge David Gersten an anguished letter. Despite the misspellings and obvious attempt to explain his violent actions, it communicated the despair of a failed father. James asked to see his family before the sentencing. Eva was still recovering from complications after giving birth to Jarvis, who had seizures as a newborn.

"It's a medical ferlo I'm asking you for. Eva lost one baby, and Jarvis almost kill her. I am sorry for firing at the officers, but I pannic. I am sorry.... I wont to tell my son that what I did was wrong and him know he can do better. So please judge can I have this ferlo so I can have some time before you give me time? Please," he wrote.

The medical furlough was denied. Judge Gersten sentenced James to twenty years in prison; his brother Ralph got seven years.

"Jarvis only seen his daddy two or three times before he went to prison," Hilbert recounts.

In 1987 James died of AIDS-related pneumonia in the clinic of the North Florida Reception Center in Lake Butler, north of Gainesville. At age 34 he was buried in the prison cemetery. "I didn't have no money to send for the body," Hilbert intones quietly, almost guiltily.