He changed for the better in prison.
“Growing up in Texas, I had a huge imagination,” said Juan Martinez. “I always imagined someday I would be a pilot. Later in my teens, I wanted to be an architect but also considered that I may be useful helping troubled teens someday. I never imagined I’d be doing what I do.”
Today, Martinez is the director of development and communications at Kindway, a Westerville-based organization that helps people who are coming out of the state prison system.
First, however, Martinez took a very different path.
“I used marijuana as a teen and sold it to fund my habit. At that time, my girlfriend was 15 and I was 17. We dropped out of school to work in dead-end jobs to take care of her younger siblings, younger nieces and nephews and mother. After some time, child protective services came to our house to remove the nieces and nephews because we were unfit to care for them. So we struggled to find better work and a larger home to recover the children,” he said.