BALTIMORE – Antoin Quarles stood at the podium erect and proud. He was dressed in his burgundy cap and gown, adorned like his 68 fellow graduates gathered in a room at the University of Baltimore for their special day.
Quarles had been asked to speak audience because of his previous life and how he had come through it was exemplary of so many of the former students.
“I grew up in a neighborhood where all I seen was hustlers, stick-up boys, shooters,” Quarles, 43, would say later. “I didn’t have a father to guide me. I was outside. The streets became the vision that I was into. Going inside prison was always about image, identity and having my nickname connected to my hood.”
He took deep a breath and began. He told them how he had been in and out of prison for selling drugs for 20 years, almost all of his adult life. He was homeless at times, roaming the streets armed with guns and knives and looking for a crime to commit, and then he was back behind bars.
Consequently, he struggled to maintain a relationship with his daughter and the rest of his family.
Those days are over, he said.
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Briahnna M. Brown 