When Nelson Hopkins lost his son to a killer’s bullet, Kansas City found a furious new activist
It wasn’t his idea to knock over the QuikTrip. Nelson Hopkins and a buddy had been drinking, and now that friend was driving Hopkins’ car. He pulled into the parking lot of the Shawnee convenience store and explained the plan to Hopkins. He was going to buy a soda and give the cashier a dollar. When she opened the register, he’d hit her in the head with the bottle and grab the cash drawer.
Hopkins wasn’t feeling nostalgic for the pair’s prior days of purse snatching and petty theft. He was 20 years old that July of 1990, and he had just returned home from training with a special unit of the Marines. He had enlisted in the reserves and was counting on a military career to pay for college.
He reminded his friend of all this as they got out of the car and went inside. Hopkins thought he’d talked him out of it. Then he heard the cashier shriek and looked up to see his friend sprawled over the counter, pulling bills out of the register.
“If you gonna do it, do it right!” Hopkins yelled. Hopkins pulled the drawer free, and the pair ran out of the store as police arrived.
Police cruisers chased Hopkins’ car north along Interstate 35. His friend believed that they could escape if they reached the West Side. Hopkins cracked his door and prepared to bail out. As his friend steered sharply around the off-ramp, Hopkins fell out of the car. His friend got away. Hopkins got arrested.
Hopkins’ son, Nelson Jr., was 11 days old.
Growing up near 37th Street and Highland, Hopkins was one of the reckless young men eroding the inner city. In the 20 years since that night, he has been a soldier, a prison inmate, a teacher, an ex-con, a businessman, and a father to his namesake. That last role, he says, has been the most rewarding — and the most painful.
In December, 17-year-old Nelson Jr. was shot dead as he was walking home from a bus stop with his college application in his pocket. Nelson Jr.’s 21-year-old cousin, Randy Wilson, was shot and killed less than a month later as he left a convenience store. Police have made no arrests in either case.
Now, Hopkins finds himself back on the streets with a new purpose, armed with wisdom gleaned from his tumultuous life.
Is this city big enough for another anti-violence activist?
The existing efforts aren’t working. This much was obvious to Hopkins from the moment that word of his son’s death hit the media. Representatives from two anti-crime organizations called him to ask which prayer vigil he would attend. “I said, ‘My son is dead. Do you think I care where it’s gonna be at? What y’all want is the press. What I want to do is grieve my son.'”
Since then, Hopkins has been brainstorming ways to shake up a population that’s numbed by violent death after violent death. His solution is called Operation Promise Land.
Its debut isn’t perfect, but it’s a start.
On a bleak February afternoon, a crowd gathers along the edge of Oak Park at 44th Street and Agnes. The Kansas City Star has dubbed this area the Murder Factory because of its body count and the many former residents who are incarcerated. Camera crews from at least five news outlets set up their tripods. A couple of reporters admit that they’re not sure what they’re here to cover.
One of Hopkins’ biggest advocates, Bill Kostar, arrives early. The former mayor of Westwood met with Hopkins after seeing him on the news and began introducing him to political contacts. One is Sly James, a lawyer running for Kansas City, Missouri, mayor next year. James arrives at the park with a broad smile and exits an SUV with his young campaign manager. Janay Reliford, of the AdHoc Group Against Crime, and activist Ron McMillan are here. So are Deputy Chief Kevin Masters and Maj. Randall Hundley of the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department.
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Mayor Mark Funkhouser and the City Council were invited, but City Hall is a no-show.
Hundley greets Hopkins, then ambles back to his shiny squad car. He turns on the Ford’s lights and siren, startling the assembly of people. They cluster around Hopkins, who begins to speak.
“That’s our official call to signal a state of emergency,” Hopkins says. Today he is declaring war against what he calls “criminal terrorists running amok.” He will go from door to door to tell law-abiding citizens that they needn’t be afraid in their own neighborhood anymore. As for the criminals, he says, now is the time to get out while they can.
Military metaphors pepper his speech, as do references to Sun Tzu and Genghis Khan. He draws parallels between the U.S. “war on terror” and his war against crime in Kansas City. About Operation Promise Land, he says, “You’re either with us or against us.”
In Hopkins’ view, spotlight-hoarding activists are terrorists. Grandstanding, do-nothing politicians are terrorists. Employers who refuse to hire ex-felons are terrorists. Landlords who rent homes to drug dealers are terrorists. And people who won’t stand up against criminals in their communities are terrorists.
After taking questions from a few reporters, Hopkins jogs up steep front steps to knock on the door of a house with faded siding. Three cameramen chase him. The rest of the crowd isn’t sure what to do.
McMillan hangs back, surveying the scene with a veteran activist’s eye.
“He should have had a press release printed up to pass out, with all his information on it,” McMillan says quietly. “But that’s all right. He’s just getting started. He’ll learn. And we gotta support him.”
Hopkins is new to this fight, but he’s not new to fighting.
The day after the QuikTrip robbery, Kansas police released Hopkins. But they arrested him that October, when Johnson County prosecutor Robin Lewis charged Hopkins in the crime. His gunnery sergeant visited him in jail. The Persian Gulf War was just beginning, and Hopkins’ unit of “tank hunters” was to be among the first on the ground. Hopkins says his sergeant told him, “We need to get you out of here because we need you in Kuwait.”
With his sergeant’s help, and over Lewis’ protests, Hopkins bonded out of jail and left for training in North Carolina in October of 1990. The unit shipped out to the Persian Gulf that December. He was in Kuwait when his January court date came and went. A judge issued a bench warrant for his arrest.
His fellow Marines at first regarded Hopkins as a criminal and a disgrace to their unit. In combat, though, Hopkins earned the trust of the other lance corporals in what he dubbed the Lance Coolie Club. They served in Kuwait for six months. Hopkins flushed Iraqi fighters from their bunkers, capturing them as prisoners of war. He volunteered to help free an American military vehicle that was stuck in a sand dune, dodging both friendly and enemy fire.
A group of soldiers went out to the bars on the first night of their return to Camp Lejeune in North Carolina in May 1991. After a fight over a woman, two of the Marines jumped in their vehicles and chased each other through Jacksonville’s streets. Hopkins and another soldier were in the bed of one Marine’s truck when the driver lost control going around a sharp curve.
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“I looked down and seen trees,” Hopkins says. “I knew I was getting ready to die.” The truck landed hard near a creek bed and cracked in half. The bed bounced twice, slamming Hopkins’ face against the truck and shattering bones in his face and nose. The other Marine in the back hit his head on the rear window and was knocked out; two others in the cab were unhurt.
Hopkins was in the hospital while the rest of his unit was debriefed — a process that can help reduce symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder for soldiers fresh off the battlefield. He joined the rest of the Marines for the flight back to Kansas City a week later.
Looking out the windows, the Marines saw police cars on the runway as their plane touched down. “Everybody’s like, ‘They comin’ for you, Hop,'” he says.
According to Hopkins, the Marines told him, “We’re not going to let ’em take you.” If they could get him past the police and take him to his mother’s house, he promised that he’d turn himself in a week later. They managed to sneak him into one Marine’s car, throwing a sleeping bag over him as he lay across the backseat. He spent a week with his family, then went to the police.
Hopkins served two years in prison for robbery in Kansas. He suspects that he was still suffering from PTSD when he got out. He had violent nightmares. His wife divorced him in 1994.
He was still on parole so couldn’t return to active duty with the Marines. “I got real mad,” Hopkins says. “I’m thinking, They threw away my career. Actually, I’m the one who did it, but I was thinking crazy back then.”
Because he remembers the way he was thinking then, he has the key to reach those who need to hear his message now.
It took another prison sentence to make Hopkins’ transformation complete.
After serving two years for the QuikTrip robbery, he took several menial jobs. He worked security at the Kansas City Livestock Exchange Building near Kemper Arena but walked off the job when his boss yelled at him.
“Nobody’s yelled at me worse than my senior drill instructor,” Hopkins says. “If you can’t do what he did, you probably ain’t gonna rattle me.”
Hopkins made the choice that he’d seen a lot of his peers make when minimum wage became too humbling. “I got me a pistol and I hooked up with some guys that I didn’t know, and I hate that I did that,” he says.
In October 1994, Hopkins and three other men robbed a Burger King. Police chased them along U.S. Highway 71 until their car stalled. The men jumped out, tossing their guns and about $12,000 in cash. Hopkins was out of breath and covered in burrs from weeds on the highway’s embankment when a police car pulled up to question him. He was arrested, as were his three accomplices.
Jackson County prosecutors hoped to link Hopkins to as many as 30 area restaurant holdups. He was charged for the Burger King robbery plus three others, though he had been in prison in Kansas when two of the robberies occurred. He was found guilty and sentenced to 15 years in prison.
“I wasn’t nice, let’s put it like that,” Hopkins says of his time as an inmate at the Moberly Correctional Center. “I’d been shot at with bombs, I was angry at the world, and I was taking it out on people. I was an educated, intellectual, ticking time bomb.”
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A fight with prison guards landed Hopkins in solitary confinement. He was moved to the maximum-security penitentiary at Crossroads Correctional Center in Cameron, Missouri. Twice a week, guards led him out of “the hole” to pace a 10-foot cage that resembled a dog kennel.
The library cart rolled by the hole once a month with its mildewed cowboys-and-Indians fiction. Hopkins stuck with the Bible. He was drawn in first by military narratives — battles like Jericho in ancient Israel — but he later found himself gripped by something deeper. He prayed for God’s help to change him, and he says he emerged from the hole a servant of Christ. “I still about went crazy,” he says. Ten more years of his sentence lay ahead.
He enrolled in a correspondence class to become a paralegal, but he wasn’t interested in filing appeals. He was drawn to something that no one else was doing: preparing inmates for their meetings with the parole board.
Though each prison has an institutional parole officer, it’s not the IPO’s job to help an inmate make sense of the system, Hopkins says. The IPO meets with an inmate once, then writes a report and makes a recommendation to the parole board.
When men returned from meeting with the IPO, Hopkins would grill them about the experience, paying attention to commonalities in the process.
Crafting a parole plan was only half the battle, Hopkins says. “I found out that they were looking for body language, voice tone. That’s psychology. I’d check a psychology book out of the library to try to find out why they wanted to look at those things.” Hopkins says he learned to tell the difference between an inmate who was merely sorry and one who was truly remorseful. He figured the parole board could, too.
“Let’s say you killed someone,” Hopkins says. “A person’s dead. Did you ever offer to help pay for that funeral? Did you ever try to set up a scholarship fund for the children who were left behind? Have you ever thought about doing more than the required 50 hours of community service in the area where the crime happened? What have you thought about doing to impact the community? Not something they told you to do, but something you offered to do on your own accord? Those are acts of sincere remorse.”
Hopkins coached his inmate clients to tell the truth, warts and all. If he busted one of them lying to him, he told him to come back when he was ready. More often than not, the men who stuck with him got paroled. After the first five or six success stories, word of Hopkins’ program spread.
“I would walk out of the housing unit, and there’d be a crowd of people on the yard, waiting for me to come out,” he says with a gentle laugh. “They’d follow me all around like I was Jesus or something.” When he was transferred to another prison (as inmates routinely are), his reputation preceded him.
“I wasn’t the best paralegal in the system,” Hopkins says. “I knew better than that. I just had a niche that none of the other ones had.” He estimates that he helped more than 100 inmates win parole.
When his own turn came to meet the parole board, Hopkins says, he didn’t hold out much hope for release. He had been jailed twice for the same crime.
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“As soon as I walked through the door, one parole-board member jumped out of her seat, came around the table and said, ‘Mr. Hopkins, it’s so good to meet you.’ It was just on and on with these accolades.”
Hopkins was released on July 30, 2007, after serving 12 and a half years. Later that year, he started Pardon & Parole Negotiation Services LLC to continue preparing prison inmates in Kansas and Missouri for parole hearings. He charges from $100 to $3,500 for consultation services. The business is growing steadily. He says it made $8,000 in 2007; $18,000 in 2008; and $32,000 in 2009. His small staff includes his second wife, Ella; two sisters and a cousin,;plus some temporary employees from the Full Employment Council.
Clients still think that Hopkins knows how to game the system. “‘How do you trick ’em?’ I get that question every day,” he says. “There is no trick. If you tryin’ to trick ’em, you gonna stay. All you gotta do is tell the truth.”
Nelson Jr. was 15 when his father came back from prison the second time. Life on the outside had gone on without Hopkins. But he was prepared.
“I didn’t come in crackin’ no whip,” Hopkins says. “I just lived my life. After a year, they [younger family members] started coming to me for advice. They started pulling their britches up. They stopped smoking blunts. They started looking for jobs, started getting jobs. That right there takes time.”
Hopkins knew his son had sometimes cursed his absence. Nelson Jr. had written his father a letter when he was 8 years old, telling him how a man broke into his grandmother’s house and demanded money while holding a gun to Nelson Jr.’s head. Hopkins cried all night in his cell after he read that letter.
Nelson Jr. acted tough, but Hopkins knew better. “Once I got to talking to him, I was like, ‘Man, you just fakin’. You need to be you.’ I said, ‘I been right where you at when I was 15, 16. I really wasn’t the person I portrayed. I was a good person, I was smart. Don’t waste your time. Take the lead and be a trendsetter, not a trend getter.’ Every time I see his pants sagging, I’d say, ‘You a ‘getter.’ He like, ‘I ain’t no ‘getter!’ When I started teasing him like that, his britches came up, and he never let ’em fall again.”
Nelson Jr. taught his dad things, too, often about music. Their last debate, Hopkins remembers, was over a Tech N9ne song in which the rapper questions the existence of God. That time, they ended up talking until 1 a.m.
Two weeks later, Nelson Jr. was dead.
Faced with the thought of working for a client who may have taken someone else’s son, Hopkins nearly shuttered his business.
“I can’t explain how hard it is to fight back tears right now,” Hopkins says. “My soul is just destroyed. It’s going to take the strength of God to keep this business going, but something is telling me I have to.”
Fueled by grief, Hopkins is searching for allies to help him with Operation Promise Land. So far, he has met with police, neighborhood associations, politicians, inner city ministers, and 2011 mayoral hopefuls. (A connected friend slipped Hopkins the card of one such candidate, Mike Burke, with the caveat that “he doesn’t want you to think he’s taking advantage of your tragedy.”)
Hopkins isn’t glad-handing. He wants to know who’s with him in this fight. “When I say ‘criminal terrorists,’ people think I’m automatically talking about gangbangers and ‘slangers. No, I’m talking about anybody. I don’t care if they have a suit and tie on and they in City Hall, or they got their pants around their ankles and they on a city block. If you are not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.”
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Not everybody is pleased to see him coming. Hopkins doesn’t care.
“We’re gonna keep it moving,” Hopkins says. “At the beginning, I’m going to have some enemies, but I know I’m also going to have some friends. So say what you want, but this is going to happen.”
