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Chapter One

SEVYN ‘LAW’ CRAWFORD

“Will there be any final remarks before I proceed?” Judge Bowden asked, as he sat behind the elevated bench, in front of the courtroom.

His tone was dry, as if there were a million other things that he would rather be doing right now, outside of giving the final verdict towards me, and what was getting ready to be my ex-wife in the next few moments.

When Judge Bowden asked that I knew that myself, nor my lawyer Trent, had any final remarks, so I glanced over at my wife, and her lawyer, that she was using to represent her.

The look that I was shooting across the courtroom at my wife was a cold one, and I was damn near antagonizing the fuck out of her, waiting for her to look my way, but she wouldn’t.

Her ass had been doing her best to avoid me for the last hour that we’ve been in court.

My wife’s name was Soraya. Everybody called her Yaya though.

I call her Boobie. Well, I used to call her Boobie, but the way me, and her been beefing these days, I really couldn’t tell you the last time that I’d called her Boobie.

Shit, fuckin around with me, I get around her and do my very best to call her anything outside of a child of God.

Yaya knew how to take me there. Her mouth.

Her fuckin mouth was slicker than a motha fucka, and if I wasn’t the real ass nigga that I was, I know for a fact that I would have put hands on her years ago.

When I say years, I’m talking about over thirty years ago because that’s just how long the two of us have known each other and been in each other’s lives.

I was 38 years old, and Yaya was 36. We met when I was eight, and she was six.

A lot of shit happened in my childhood, that caused me to be moved around a lot, but at eight years old, that was my final spot, where I was raised by my pop’s best friend, Dutch.

The shit was crazy how I ended up in Dutch’s care.

Before living with him, my life was normal.

Well, from the outside looking in, it appeared to be normal.

I was living in a two-parent household with my mama, and my pops.

I don’t remember much of those years because I only had that family structured lifestyle for the first three years of my life.

My mom was a stay-at-home wife, who’s only job was to take care of me, and be a damn good wife to my pops, Knox.

From stories that were told to me from Dutch, and a lot of the old heads in the streets, I knew that my pops was the nigga to see.

He had the streets on lock. The reason why I’m talking about him in past tense is because my pops was no longer here with us.

He was gunned down by the time that I was three years old.

Nigga died on my 3 rd birthday. Walking in the house, with a birthday cake in one hand, and a gift bag in another hand for me, and some hating ass nigga caught him slipping, emptying the full clip in his ass, having his blood decorate the entire front door, and the pavement.

Even in his death, and the decades that he’s been gone, his name continues to ring bells in Miami.

From the many lessons that I was given on my pops, I knew that it wasn’t just weight that he was out here moving.

Nigga brought culture to Miami, motha fuckas feared him, and he even brought loyalty to the game.

With all of that, you know it came with jealousy, and envy.

If it didn’t, niggas wouldn’t have killed him.

My pops was the blueprint when it came to this drug shit.

He ran his organization like it was a fuckin army.

There was a job for everybody in his camp, and he put niggas in positions where they didn’t have to be hungry.

Loyalty is what he lived by. From the things that were shared to me over the years about him, I knew that I was everything like him, and that I had his blood running through my veins because when they spoke on him, and his personality traits, I felt like they were talking about me.

I just didn’t sell dope. That wasn’t the route that I wanted to go in.

Instead, I wanted to be the nigga in the courtroom with the brains, that were defending all the drug dealers, killers, and scammers.

That was just a hood way of letting ya’ll know that I was a lawyer.

A criminal defense attorney, and Trent that I had sitting next to me, he was one of my lawyers at my firm, that I was using to represent me, and waste my fuckin time, and my wife’s by having us finalize a divorce that her extra ass was asking for.

I’ll get to that later though. In the meantime, I’ll finish telling a little bit about my childhood.

After my pops died, my mom took that shit hard.

She grieved his death differently. I mean, literally lost her fuckin mind behind that shit.

I remember little shit that she would do around the time that I turned 4 years old, but at the time, I was a kid, so I didn’t know that the shit that she was out here doing was basically her way of proving that she’d lost her mind.

At night, her ass would go out looking for my pops, and she would bring me along with her.

I vaguely remember one time, this lady had us walking under a bridge in Miami, looking for him and she had me come out of the house without any shoes on, so my foot was cut with glass.

She had to take me to the hospital behind that shit.

I remember my grandma, which was my mom’s mom coming to the hospital as well.

They were going at it, and that was the first time that I heard my grandma threaten my mom with taking me away from her.

After that incident, shit only got worse, but it was one of those situations where you wouldn’t know the extent of it unless you lived in the house with us.

No one knew that my mom had convinced herself that my pops was still alive.

Hell, she had even convinced me of that shit.

Had me thinking that this nigga was at the dining room table with us, having dinner, and that I just couldn’t see him.

I was the spitting image of my pops, so it had gotten to the point where she had stopped calling me Sevyn, and she would call me Knox, which was my pops name.

I just remember her placing kisses on my forehead, and always telling me, “You came back for me”.

Even with me being a little boy, I knew the shit she was doing wasn’t right, but I didn’t want to tell my grandma on her because I remember my grandma threatening to take me away from her, so I would keep quiet about the shit.

For my age, I’ve always been ahead of my time, and smart as hell.

The last straw for me is when my mama started making comments, saying shit like “I’m going to send you back to Knox”.

Basically, that was her way of telling me that she was going to kill my ass and have me go wherever the fuck my daddy was at.

Man, I remember that shit like it was yesterday.

I was in the bathroom, taking a bath, and her ass came in there, and tried to fuckin drown me.

I fought to get out of that tub, and once I was out, I ran out of the house, naked, going to my neighbor’s house, telling them what happened, and she had been arrested.

By this time, I was six, and I’d moved into my grandma’s care.

My grandma truly believed that my mom had mental issues that she was dealing with from the killing of my father, so instead of having her go to prison, my grandma fought for her, and my mom was placed in a long-term psychiatric facility.

She’s been in there since I was six, and here I am, thirty- eight years old, and it pained me to know that she was going to die in that bitch.

She didn’t want help. Long gone was the person that she was before my pops was killed.

When he died, she died right along with him, and even though that was the one thing to bring me to tears, knowing that she had to live her life like that, I just knew that that was where she had to be, so that she wouldn’t be harmful to herself, or anyone else around her.

I only lived with my grandma for two years.

Till this day, I never really had the right answers as to what really caused her death.

I was always told that it was an overdose, but to me, it just didn’t make sense.

I knew that my grandma was hurting behind what was going on with her only daughter, and how she’d basically lost her mind, and had to be placed in a psych ward, but I didn’t think that she would overdose on pills because of it.

I do remember a lot of times it would be hard for her to fall asleep.

I would wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and I would find her either siting up in the living room, watching TV, or she would be in her room, laying down, reading her bible.

Because of her lack of sleep, I knew that she began taking sleeping pills.

When the autopsy was done on her to find out the cause of death, they found pills in her system that was laced.

Till this day, I never found out where the fuck she’d gotten them pills from.

I had so many questions that needed to be answered.

Did someone intentionally give that shit to her?

Was it just a bad batch of pills that she’d gotten?

It’s like I would never know the answer to that.

Because of all of these deaths from my loved ones, this was the shit that I was talking about when I said that as a child, I was moved around a lot.

Each time someone would die, I would have to be passed along to the next person.