By Rickey Hampton
The Flint Journal
FLINT, Mich. — The last time many of you saw Corey Ramone Frazier, he was just a boy, really. Unfortunately, he was a boy who, at 18, had just been convicted of a horrible act.
“Mama, I didn’t know,” Frazier blurted as he was physically carried out of a Flint courtroom in January 1996 after hearing he had been sentenced to life in prison for the murders of Aaron McColgan and James Goff in a Grand Blanc Township home.
The image was captured on television and likely burned into your memory bank.
For most of us, that was the end.
For Frazier, it was just the beginning.
“I actually had a chance to see the tape not too long ago,” said Frazier, speaking by phone from the Genesee County Jail, where he has spent the past four years awaiting a new trial.
His new trial, ordered because of his lack of legal counsel during a police interrogation, begins late next month.
“What I saw on that tape was a child. Now, it’s like I am a totally different person. It’s like it is not even me on that tape.”
A few months after his conviction, I interviewed Frazier at the state prison in Ionia. I wondered then how this small figure (5-foot-5 and 125 pounds at most) with a face that looked like that of a 12-or 13-year-old was going to survive.
Now, at 30, he is a man.
“It’s been tough, very tough,” he said. “There are days when I don’t think I can go anymore, that I want to just shut down. It happens even now.
“But, there is a lot of power in prayer. I figured out that you only have two options in this place. Grow up, or not. I just couldn’t stay in the place I was mentally. I decided to live my life to where my mom would be proud of me, even though I am incarcerated.”
Of course, it’s important to remember that Frazier is in jail for his role in a terrible crime that took two lives. The victims, and their families, should never be forgotten.
Frazier and Idell D. Cleveland III were convicted of the slayings and sentenced to mandatory life in prison. Both victims died from gunshot wounds to the head in June 1995. Testimony indicated the killings stemmed from a drug-related robbery.
The courts will now decide whether Frazier was rightly or wrongly convicted.
I’m certainly not trying to glorify him, either, but Frazier’s story — from the street life to prison, from boyhood to manhood - is intriguing and instructive.
Frazier has immersed himself in books, from self-help to mystery thrillers.
“I just finished the ‘Da Vinci Code,’” he said.
He earned his GED several years ago and is currently taking a correspondence class as a paralegal.
I asked him how much reading he did before entering prison.
“Honestly, the only thing I can ever remember reading was the Source (a hip-hop magazine).”
The education Frazier was getting in those days came primarily from the streets.
“I was two people at that time,” he said. “I was G-Fraz, which put me in a street mode, hanging with the wrong people. And when my mom called me ‘Corey,’ I was like, ‘Yes, Mama.’”
He fooled everyone, including his mother, Beverly. She worked long hours at General Motors. When she was home, Corey was the model kid. When she left for work, he went into G-Fraz mode.
“People would tell me Corey was cutting up in the streets, and I would tell them no way,” his mother said. “But they were right. Later on after he went to prison, he told me about some of the things he did. It meant a lot to me that he would be truthful with me.
“He is so smart. I tell him, ‘See, Corey, it was in you all the time. Look at the person you are now.’”
And that breaks Beverly’s heart. She saw the potential in her child and can’t help but take responsibility that he didn’t fulfill it.
“I think sometimes if I was here he wouldn’t have gotten into trouble,” she said. “But I was a single mom trying to raise my family. I had to go to work to take care of my family.”
To know his mother feels this is somehow her fault pains Frazier.
“I tell her all the time that she did a great job of raising me,” he said. “I always knew right from wrong. Any mistakes I made were because of decisions I made.”
When he can, Frazier speaks to youth groups and classes from local schools who tour the jail. Sometimes the groups see the footage of Frazier being carried out of court, before the tour begins, not knowing they will meet him later.
“Sometimes, there will be a kid who laughs at that scene,” Frazier said. “When we meet, I ask him how would he feel if someone laughed at him or a family member in that situation? I let him know that one bad decision can put him in here like it did me.”
Copyright 2007 Flint Journal