you want to kill somebody that took your brother s life? go ahead and do it, just don t kill innocent kids that don t gang bang, that s bad. but it s okay to kill another gang banger? if he killed your brother. if he shot your house. but what does it stop? it doesn t. i guess it keeps going until they kill you or you kill them, you get busted for life for killing that guy or he gets busted for killing you. it doesn t. while awaiting trial, miramontes made a conscious decision to not let jail bring him down. i love it out here. this is paradise. you could picture background noise, water running, my imag e imagination plays it as an ocean. being in here is like i m in hawaii or something. better place than being in jail,
that favor for you. what was easy for you? delivering, here or there. delivering what? meth. they used me to do all the runs. was i getting paid good money, yeah. was it worth it? not really. but that s one thing i thank god for being locked up is because when i was in the street, oh, man, it was bad. i would have been probably dead within a month, a week, a year, the way i was going. i really didn t care what i was doing. hanging out in the streets all day, there was one time i didn t sleep for like four or six days, just running around here and there. using meth a lot. maybe that s why i m so skinny. miramontes has forsaken his
many inmates say coming to jail made them reassess their lives. if not drastically overhaul them. we can never know with certainty how sincere those claims are. but when an inmate repudiates his gang as daniel did it lends credence to their story. i ran the streets, grew up in the streets, life in the streets. what you see is what the streets created. we met miramontes at the orange county jail. he said before coming here he was a member of a los angeles street gang and meth addict. seems out of sorts with a young man who enjoyed reading novels and writing poetry. i like nicholas sparks, note
book. romantics. i m a sucker. do you cry when you read the sad part? most guys don t want to admit that because hey, we re in jail, i don t care. but miramontes was facing the possibility of a lifetime in prison. been down almost two years, my charges are special circumstance murder, big case. miramontes entered a not guilty plea, still awaiting trial when we met him. the night of the murder, he says he was visiting friends in an orange county gang and they were all drinking and high on drugs. while driving around their neighborhood, his friends stopped to confront a 19-year-old man, who allegedly flashed a rival gang sign. what ended up happening was the orange county home boys exited the vehicle, a fight ensued which turnd in a stabbing which turned in a slashing, and
the victim s neck was cut, and he bled to death at the scene. miramontes admits to being in the car but never participated in the murder. i m from l.a., i m not from orange county, why bother getting in the mix? so i just decided to stay in the car. one of the situations you re in a bad place at the wrong time, you know? i was there, so i m here now. facing a long time. miramontes says even though he wasn t involved in the murder he s paying a price beyond just being in jail. nightmares, sweat, toss and turning, hearing the kid scream, falling. just plays in my head sometimes. later on we find out the little kid wasn t even a gang banger, i