New Haven Independent

Booker, who’s 32, has been out of jail a year. He leaves home before 5 each morning and returns around 2:30 from his paid job painting buildings. Then he goes to work at his unpaid job — rounding up at-risk neighborhood teens to do yard clean-ups, go fishing or camping, or rap about the dead ends that await those lured to the street life.

Tuesday afternoon he was hanging with one of those kids, Chawn Battle. Chawn talked about how his father has been in jail since Chawn was 5. How his family gets up at 3 a.m. every Saturday to drive to rural New Jersey to visit his dad in prison.

When he listens to Edward Booker talk about staying out of trouble, about how jail’s not a joke, Chawn (pictured) said, he feels as though he’s listening to his dad. That’s what his dad says, too, on those weekly visits.

And when Edward Booker listens to Chawn, he thinks back to when he was 14 and running the streets by the old Elm Haven public-housing low-rises, smoking illy, breaking into cars, selling drugs, ditching school. Booker, too, grew up without a father in the house.

“I see me when I was young,” Booker reflected. “If I was their age now, I would want somebody looking after me, telling me the dos and don’ts.”

Booker has signed on to one critical wing of New Haven’s multi-pronged campaign to engage at-risk teens this summer, and beyond. Since leaving jail he has hooked up with city cop Shafiq Abdussabur and volunteered his time with Abdussabur’s “CTribat” program for young teens either involved in violence or living on the edge of it.

Booker has proved right for the role. So Abdussabur tapped Booker this week to open a Fair Haven outpost of Dixwell-based CTribat. Several afternoons a week and on some weekends Booker will work in a more formal way with teenaged boys he has been mentoring in Fair Haven.

City officials on the front line of the effort to stem youth violence consider men with “street cred” like Booker crucial to reaching kids in trouble. The city has hired some of those men full-time for a new street outreach worker program. Volunteers like Booker, who’s working hard at developing a career in the painting trade, and other adults Abdussabur can recruit to serve as informal “influencers” in gang territory have an equally important part to play in the campaign.

The kids living the life Booker once led won’t respond as well to men in police uniforms, Booker argued. “This is my uniform,” he said, pointing to his jeans shorts, white sleeveless tank top, and Crocs. (The footwear earned him some ribbing from Abdussabur. “Twenty-five dollars at Bob’s!” Booker responded.)

Booker and Abdussabur have accepted 10 kids for the Fair Haven program; others are on a waiting list. “I’m one man. I’m not Superman,” Booker said in explaining the enrollment cap. “Out of 10 kids, they always say if you can save one… If I can save ten — shit! I’ll be badder than Michael Jackson!”

The Fair Haven program gets going this week. Booker dubbed the program “SHARK.” As an acronym, it stands for Safe Haven for At-Risk Kids. As the tattoo on Booker’s left forearm, it represents the nickname he has had since his young teenage years living the gang life in Dixwell.

Man Bites Dog

Booker remembers the exact date he last smoked illy, the combustible combo of marijuana and formaldehyde that swept New Haven’s projects in the early 1990s and made users crazed.

The date was Feb. 22, 1994. Booker remembers the date because it marked the arrest that sent him on his first of two extetnded jail sentences.

He’d been in plenty of scrapes with the law before, being sent to juvenile boarding schools as a result, ever since he was 12. He stole cars, shot guns, and sold dope along with his buddies from informal gangs that went by the names Young and Restless and Foote Street Posse, or “FSP.”

That Feb. 22, he claims, he actually wasn’t committing a crime. His buddies were. He was with them, and was chased by the cops. High on illy, he says, “I crashed 12 cop cars and bit a police dog.”

Bit a police dog?

“It was either me or him.”

He served five years on a variety of charges. He returned to jail in 2004 on violation of probation charges.

Then came a second day he remembers clearly — the day he decided to stop getting arrested and going to jail. Two of his daughters, Sharnasia and Arkaysee, came to visit him at the Cheshire Correctional Institution.

“I was behind the glass,” he recalls. “I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t hug them.”

“I’m getting too old for this,” he remembers telling himself. He vowed to finish his term, then “be my kids’ father. No need to run the streets no more. I had my fun.”

Paint Job

He left jail in 2006. Soon afterwards he ran into Officer Abdussabur at Cody’s Diner on Water Street. He told Abdussabur he was trying to go straight this time. Abdussabur invited Booker to come the next day to the CTribat youth program he was starting in Dixwell to talk to the kids about the realities of gang and prison life.

Booker agreed. He enjoyed talking to the kids, found a rapport. Abdussabur gave him more volunteer work to do with the CTribat kids; Booker dived into what was clearly one aid in turning his own life around.

The other aid came through a construction-trades training program run by the city’s Commission on Equal Opportunities. Booker, plagued by his record, had trouble finding a job. But he did well in the CEO’s program. After his graduation in February, he became part of the local painters’ union. By the end of May he had a job lined up.

Meanwhile, Booker was getting to know the teens in the stretch of Fair Haven around Chambers Street, where he was now living with his mom and sister. (He has rights to be with his own kids on weekends.) He noticed the kids riding on bikes, sometimes causing trouble, obviously having nothing constructive to do.

He started hanging out with them — cutting their hair, occasionally lending them a dollar or two, or just sitting and rapping.

One day he saw some of the kids knock over trash cans by one house in the neighborhood. He took the kids back to the house and led them in cleaning up the whole yard as well as the sidewalk. He and the kids performed more clean-ups in the neighborhood.

In May they organized a block party. One night Booker went to Cardinal’s Club and Cafe to hand out flyers. He saw a fight break out. He got in the middle to break it up — and received a bullet in the stomach.

Within a week, he was out of the hospital. Within another week, he started work on his first job as an apprentice with Fine Painting and Construction. He has remained on the job since then, painting buildings in Bridgeport and Shelton and Norwalk, racking up overtime.

Bob Glass, the Painters and Allied Trades union official who placed Booker in his job, said he hears nothing but “high praise” for his continued performance. “When you called me last night I was in a meeting with his field supervisor. He was saying he is a good worker. He’s happy to have him on board; he works well with other people.”

Chawn Battle and one of his buddies were talking with Booker when he got out of the hospital in May. You’re going to get the guy who shot you, they said. Right?

Wrong, Booker replied.

“It’s not always about getting revenge, about pride,” Booker said. “That’s not my job. I’m here [out of jail]. I’m living. I’m happy to be here.”

Quarterbacking Dreams

He, Abdussabur, Battle, and Battle’s friend Quinton Turner reprised that conversation as they said outside the Chambers Street house Tuesday afternoon.

Booker showed obvious pride in the kids, as if they were his own. He boasted of how Chawn had approached some of his pals who were selling drugs and told them to stop. “That’s the next mayor, right there!” Booker said.

Chawn talked about his upcoming 8th grade year at Martinez School, then his hopes of going to Hyde Leadership for high school. He dreams of playing on the football team there.

“I want a football scholarship” one day, he said.

“We’ll get you there,” Abdussabur interjected.

“You will?” Chawn said.

“If you get the grades.”

Donations to CTRibat/ SHARK can be sent to P.O. Box 9392, New Haven CT 06533.

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