Born in Nashville, Tennessee – because his hometown hospital did not accept Black patients – Ronnie Waters was a fun-loving child. The youngest of four, Ronnie has always held deep respect for his mother’s drive to care and provide for him and his siblings despite her limited education and, therefore, earning power.
“Hard working woman, Christian woman, who was devoted to her kids,” Ronnie recalls. “She always found a way to support us.”
Following his parents’ divorce, Ronnie’s mother moved him and his siblings to Pontiac, Michigan where they lived with his grandfather. After years of struggling working low wage jobs in Pontiac, Ronnie’s mother was hired at General Motors. This significant wage increase afforded her the opportunity to move the family into a house of their own in an allegedly better neighborhood. The move did not help Ronnie’s confidence. Describing himself as an insecure kid, and lacking the structure, attention, and close monitoring he knew he needed, Ronnie felt deeply the pressure to prove himself to his trouble-seeking peers.
“It was a lot of peer pressure to prove your worth…and we thought it was manhood if you accepted those challenges.” He remembers being “scared to death” but accepting the challenges his peer group put forth anyway.
Having participated in relatively minor juvenile delinquency since his move, Ronnie thought the night of May 3, 1980 would be no different.
“This is the first time I ever carried a gun, ever in life carried a pistol,” recalls Ronnie.
Remembering his friends shooting this same .22 caliber gun at abandoned cars and the bullet not penetrating the windshield, Ronnie mistakenly believed his shot fired at the passenger side window of a car while at a drive-in movie theater would be no different. The bullet penetrated the passenger window, killing the woman inside.
Ronnie was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole at age 17.
“I’ve only been on this earth for 17 years; so, life to me was 17 years,” he says adding that as a juvenile he was clearly not able to make good decisions or grasp the gravity of the situation. When he realized the pain he had caused, that he “took a life” his mind and body went numb.
In the 40 years that Ronnie spent behind bars, he has developed mentally, emotionally, and spiritually. Never believing that he would die an incarcerated man, he took every opportunity to better himself. He dug into and faced his remorse, took every class and job skills training available to him, earned an associate degree in arts and sciences, and shared the support his family gave him with the less fortunate men he met in prison.
Ronnie was afforded a second chance following the 2012 U.S. Supreme Court case that banned mandatory life without parole for children, Miller v Alabama. Ronnie was resentenced and released in 2020. He has spent every moment since advocating for those he left behind.
“I’m not exceptional,” Ronnie shares emphatically. “I know that it’s so many other people who I left behind that are capable, or more capable than me, of coming out here and doing the same things I’ve done…I use myself as an example of what you should be doing when you receive a second chance and I’m not an exception.”
Ronnie now serves as Community Engagement Specialist with Safe & Just Michigan and lives with his high school sweetheart and wife outside of Detroit.
