An unprecedented confession: My brother's killer is already my friend (Photo)

There are three women in the room when Taylor arrives. Jim Taylor's in the opposite corner of the three. His adult daughter, Denise, follows him. Both groups look at each other in an unpleasant way. This is the room you wait for before you attend a parole hearing, where they decide whether a prisoner should be released.

They don't talk, but they listen. After a few minutes, they realize that they are all victims of a crime and that they are attending different hearing sessions. One of the women returns to Jim, a look at the relief on her face. “You are not the enemy”, she says. “BBC” Transmission Periscope.

Women watch each other. They weren't expecting it. In their world, defendants are always the enemy and victims participate in hearings for a reason to ensure that the enemy is not released.

Jim keeps talking. One day, he says, he hopes to visit the defendant outside the prison. Jim looks at his daughter, Denise, addressing her that “The situation is now different”.

She's the reason they're there, Denise and her brother, Bo. But Bo is dead. Ronnie Fields, the man who killed her brother, but she's there to support his release.

He doesn't see them. He's wearing what looks like blue clothes at the hospital. He has a black beard and glasses: Ronald Fields, prisoner D00742. Taylors call him Ronnie.

Just after 8:30 a.m. on December 6, 2016, when Commissioner Jack Garner begins his presentations. He warns the Taylor family that the document to be read can be difficult for them. They know. They've heard the story before. It begins on a September afternoon in 1984 with Bo and a friend trying to buy marijuana in Compton, a city in Los Angeles that is synonymous with the violence caused by numerous gangs. It ends with Bo's murder.

There are more details in the court documents: the location of the liquor store where Bo and his friend drank together, different places where they had bought drugs, the kind of cars driving and the name of the street Bo was killed.

The only detail that matters is that after he decided to take Bo's money without giving up drugs, Fields took a gun home from his car.

Bo, confused, asked: “What?”

There was one shot. He hit Bona in the heart. Fields was sentenced to a minimum prison of 27 years.

Thirty-two years later Bo's father makes his way to one of the many microphones in the room. He is here to express his support for the release of Fields, only about 1% of the victims' families do so, says Commissioner Garner.

Now he's 78, with white hair. He has a tendency to dance. He mentions Fields' father and then how many Fields has changed over the years.

And Denise is 54 years old and has lived for most of her life without her brother Bo.

Her father takes off his glasses and wipes his eyes. Denise stops for a minute, unable to continue. Then it begins again:

If I go back to these hearings year after year this family just adds to the pain of”

I understand the Fields crime is considered against the state, but we are the ones who live the daily reality of losing our brother and son Bo. And the constant imprisonment of the man responsible for his death is unacceptable to us”, she added.

Denise thought about trying to make friends with his brother's killer.

As a child, Denise and Bo did not have very good reports. Denise was a good “child”. She had good results at school, stayed out of trouble, and listened to her parents.

Bo's side was pure chaos. He always found ways out of class, facing problems. He was even before their parents divorced, but Denise feels that divorce has made things worse. That was when she was about 13 years old and separated the brothers and sisters, Bo went with their father, and Denise went with their mother. Denise felt lucky. She remembers her father as a nervous person.

Although he has softened over the years and has dismissed some of his earliest hardline views, Jim continues to ridicule Denise for being too liberal. He asks if Bo would have changed if Bo had used the potential he believes he has lost:

I always wondered what Bo would be. He was a troubled child. But I have seen others turn their lives into something positive”, said Jim the father of Denise and Bo.

The Time of Murder

Bo had been on the beach that day. Two African-American girls were with his friend on a trip home. So Bo, a white boy from a peripheral enclave in the middle class, ended up in Compton in the 1980s, a time when the murder epidemic was destroying inner cities. Bo wasn't from that world, but the one with the influence of society started looking for two young African-American men who could buy drugs.

He had left the girls and was parked outside a liquor store in a neighborhood where he did not live. Initially, Fields thought Bo and his friend were cops. Then, after realizing that they were only invisible children, he decided to rip them apart, taking their money without handing them over to drugs.

Denise was training soccer that day. It was a Saturday, and her team had a game the next day. She was at her mother's house when one of Bo's friends came by announcing to them that he was shot.

The moment of friendship between Denise and her brother's killers

Hi, I'm Denise”, she says, extending his hand to him.

His roll is strong but not overwhelming. I'm Ronnie”

They sit down. He's the first one to speak:

May I tell you what happened on that horrible day? ”

He was 24 when he killed Bo. He came from a good family, but he followed his older brothers into a gang. He had gang tattoos, but was never convicted of a gang-related crime.

He dropped out of college in the 11th grade when his girlfriend got pregnant. He worked in a car wash, a used car store.

He describes shooting on Bosa as Taylor had heard many times before.

I'm sorry I caused you this pain, he tells Denise.

Fields, tell her about his family: his dead parents, his two brothers behind bars.

She's his first visitor in a decade.

After two hours, Taylor thanks her for her visit and gives him a short hug. He doesn't resist. He takes her to the gate. She tells him she's coming back. And she does. The next time she visits she brings her father.

When she told her parents about her first visit with Fields, her mother was all right with her, but didn't express the desire to meet her. Her father was another story.

He also felt homesick about what he had lost. Now that he knew Fields, he was convinced that Fields was not meant to kill his son. It was just a terrible tragedy.

A prison van falls at the Salinas train station. It is April 16, 2017, and it is out of prison in 32 years, six months and 11 days.

I'm free, I'm finally free to sleep somewhere tonight, instead of being in a <x1) prison, it's the words of Fields who already lives as a free man.

He smiles. It's something he couldn't do in jail. Inside he had always kept his cold “”. He smiles again thinking about the first meal he wants to eat: an early double cheese, or vanilla from the fast food chain, Carlés Jr.

He was 24 when he went to prison. Now he takes medication for high blood pressure. All he has in this world is a debit card with $978.33 and a plastic bag filled with personal items. The money has been coming for three decades, making furniture in prison for 30 and later 80 cents per hour./Periscopi/