Chances are that if you saw five-year-old Robert Ray walking around his neighborhood on Chicago’s South Side back in 1990, he wasn’t alone. Most days, at least five or six dogs trailed behind him, lured to his side by the black-eyed peas and string beans he snuck from the dinner table when his mom wasn’t looking.
But Ray’s early years were far from idyllic. He was still in kindergarten when he came across a dead body in an alley. Ray flagged down a passing cop to tell him what he saw, and the officer gave him a quarter for his good deed. Later, a gang member in the neighborhood found out about Ray’s disclosure and gave him a dollar bill in exchange for never talking to the police again. “I think about that now,” he says, “like, How did that seal my fate?”
Ray’s family bounced back and forth between Chicago and Denver, but illegal drugs, gun violence, and economic hardship always followed. “I never wanted to sell dope,” Ray says. “I wanted to be a veterinarian.” But days before his 10th birthday, Ray accidentally shot himself in the stomach with his brother’s handgun when he was doing his best impression of a cowboy. By 16, he was selling cocaine at the bus stop near his home in Aurora so he could buy a car. At 19, he was involved in a deadly shooting in Aurora’s Lowry Park. Four years later, in 2009, he was sentenced to death for orchestrating the murders of Javad Marshall-Fields (who was set to be a witness in the Lowry Park trial) and his fiancée, Vivian Wolfe…