The birth of hope: How 2 Fort Worth officers changed the lives of fatherless boys
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Life and death in Fort Worth’s 76104
People in Fort Worth’s 76104 ZIP code on average won’t see their 67th birthday. What is causing the lowest life expectancy rate in Texas? What can be done to help? Read the Star-Telegram’s investigation:
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No doctors, no grocers, no help. Death comes early in these Fort Worth neighborhoods.
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The birth of hope: How 2 Fort Worth officers changed the lives of fatherless boys
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It’s likely Jerome Norwood wouldn’t have spent 20 years in prison for murder if his only role models growing up weren’t involved with drugs and gangs.
When he was 15, he and a girl broke into a crack house on East Rosedale. When the teens only found $20, Norwood fatally shot a 35-year-old man.
“Kenneth Jenkins lost his life but so did I,” Norwood, now 39, told the Star-Telegram. “I tell people all the time, me going to prison was one of the best things that could have happened to me at the time. I needed to go to prison.”
His fate, he says, had largely been determined by where he lived — the Hillside neighborhood in Fort Worth’s 76104 ZIP code.
Norwood lived in an area that has the lowest life expectancy in Texas at 66.7 years, according to a study released last year by UT Southwestern that looked at death data from 2004 to 2015. During that time, Norwood’s mother, Carletta Norwood, died of heart disease — his neighborhood’s No. 1 killer, according to deaths that were investigated by the Tarrant County medical examiner. Norwood believes the underlying cause was her drug use.
Norwood’s life in the neighborhood preceded the study — and crime has improved significantly since the mid-1990s — but his experiences reflect the area’s challenges related to poverty, drugs and crime. The top three causes of death in the 76104 ZIP code among deaths investigated by the Tarrant County medical examiner during the time frame of the study were natural (247), accidental (79) and homicide (38). Of the accidental deaths, at least 29 were drug overdoses.
Although the neighborhood’s crime rate is lower than at least four other Fort Worth neighborhoods, residents there are twice as likely to be victims of a violent crime than those in the rest of Fort Worth, according to police statistics.
Chris Munday is a former police officer who began working in the 76104 neighborhoods in 2005. He retired in 2019. He said he wasn’t surprised by the UT Southwestern study’s findings about low life expectancy in the 76104 ZIP code.
“It’s taken us a while to get the community the way it is now,” Munday said. “A lot of the families there, they’re in a system where a lot of kids grew up seeing the drug dealing and fast money. They see that cash, and when there’s a lot of cash in pockets, there’s a lot of danger. That’s when you see a lot of shootings and drug overdoses.”
Two years after Norwood was sent to prison, two former law enforcement officers opened Hope Farm, an after-school getaway for kids like Norwood. Hope Farm’s goal is to break the cycles of poverty and crime in the Historic Southside, Hillside and Morningside neighborhoods, which are in the 76104 ZIP code.
The program wasn’t in place in time to save Norwood, but it has helped hundreds of young boys and their mothers since its inception in 1997. Its founders believe the program has been a factor in the decline of crime in the area over the last two decades.
“One thing I’ve discovered is there were not a lot of opportunities for kids like me,” Norwood said. “You become what you’re exposed to, and if I had been exposed to something better, my life might have turned out differently.”
‘I just couldn’t have my son hanging out on a corner’
Cherrina Clark, 48, grew up in Morningside. She walked a couple of blocks to school in the 1980s and saw a lot of gang fights on that short route.
“It was rough, it was really rough,” she said.
By the time she had her son, Charles Jackson, she knew the area had gotten safer. When the opportunity to live in a Habitat for Humanity home in Historic Southside came, Clark couldn’t turn it down.
At the same time, she wanted to make sure her son stayed out of trouble and that he was exposed to positive role models.
She learned about Hope Farm from a friend when Charles was about 5. She already noticed he had a short temper and would sometimes lose control, so she thought the men at Hope Farm could show Charles, now 15, how to control his anger and release it in healthy ways.
She was right. Clark said it helped Charles to have Black Christian men steer him in the right direction.
“Hope Farm has done therapy for him and all the other boys,” she said. “I got a call from Charles’ school that he was cutting up, and I couldn’t take off from my job. So I called Hope Farm and asked, ‘Can anyone go up there and find out what’s going on?’ and they did and told me about everything later. After that, we honestly had no more problems.”
Seeing someone who looks like him succeed gave Charles an opportunity to see that he, too, can live out his dreams, his mom said.
Kids like Charles are mostly chosen to join the program through referrals from their schools or other mothers whose children have gone through or are in the program. For their sons to join, the mothers have to participate.
Charles plans to major in engineering when he graduates from the Young Men’s Leadership Academy. He hopes to attend college in Florida and open his own business one day — maybe in Fort Worth.
For now, Charles said he likes to mentor the younger boys at Hope Farm.
“It feels like I’m supposed to be here helping,” he said.
Charles’ confidence makes him a natural leader. He easily makes friends and doesn’t exclude any of the other teens at Hope Farm.
On a Tuesday afternoon after school in February, Charles took those leadership skills to the basketball court. Jamaal Johnson, a mentor for the children who oversees Hope Farm’s engagement with the community, made the game a life lesson for the 10 kids who played.
“The goal is to deal with conflict with no negativity,” he told the group before breaking them into two teams.
Charles took over the first team and took the first shot, but when he missed, he ran down the court ready to play defense.
“Let’s go, block him,” he shouted to a teammate.
Anytime his teammates scored, he fist bumped them. He took possession of the ball in his right hand, holding his glasses in his left the entire game.
“This is what I call an easy day when I can just play basketball,” he said.
Seven minutes into the game, Johnson told them to stop.
“We went seven minutes with no negativity,” he said. “Our attitude affects everyone around us. It’s hard to have fun when people have negative attitudes.”
Clark doesn’t like to think about what might have happened to Charles without Hope Farm. His anger turned into confidence and positivity, and, instead of looking at mechanical engineering schools, his life could have taken a different path.
The differences between Charles and his friends who aren’t involved in Hope Farm are stark, Clark said.
“Some of them are his age and already hanging out on corners, and I just couldn’t have my son hanging out on a corner,” she said.
The birth of hope
Noble Crawford was an investigator with the Texas Department of Public Safety in the early 1990s when he realized something needed to be done about violent crime in Fort Worth.
“I saw a lot of young people locked up in holding cells, mostly boys but girls as well,” he said. “It was a burden on my heart to do something about it ... I was aware of the scared straight strategies and boot camps, but none of that really appealed to me.”
In time, Crawford met Gary Randle, a former officer with the Fort Worth Police Department. Together, they began to devise a plan for Hope Farm and, in 1997, they opened the program in an old crack house. Since then, more than 300 kids have participated.
Crawford said Hope Farm isn’t a quick fix to reduce crime, but he believes it has reduced crime in Historic Southside, Hillside and Morningside because of the success of their participants. One former Hope Farm participant is obtaining a master’s degree in Florida, another recently bought a house, and some stayed in Fort Worth to work at Hope Farm.
Because they start working with boys when they’re as young as 5, Crawford said, they might not see a difference in them for 10 to 15 years.
“The kids have to grow up,” he said. “But the thing is, we are teaching them to be leaders, and, in doing so, by default they’re going to influence their peers. Our hope is that their positive influence would inhibit their peers from doing something that’s criminal.”
Charles hopes he’s a positive influence on his friends.
“That’s just how I am on the regular,” he said. “If anyone needs help and they just ask for it, I’m here. Being a leader is something I like to do.”
Hope Farm also works with the boys to make sure they are at their reading level, their homework is complete and they’re eating healthy meals while there. They also study the Bible and play basketball in the Hope Farm gym.
It has helped Charles focus on what he’s good at — math and engineering.
“I’m taking an engineering course at my school, and my mom’s already getting phone calls and stuff saying how great I’m doing in class,” he said in November.
His mom, Cherrina Clark, is getting help from Hope Farm through the group’s Parent University, which teaches professional development, gives mothers free internet access and sets them up with parenting skills classes. Each mother is required to attend the university.
“It’s like a sisterhood,” Clark said. “We meet once a month and we talk about what we can do better for our boys. How can we be better parents? They put us through all kinds of parenting classes and coaching classes on how to deal with upset and hurt boys. It’s good to talk with parents who might be in the same situation as us.”
The sisterhood goes beyond the once a month meeting. The mothers call each other for advice or help if a son needs to be picked up for school or watched as they work late at night.
Crawford said there’s room for expanding Hope Farm, but the question is funding. The annual budget for the two Fort Worth locations and one in Dallas near Fair Park is $1.8 million, all of which comes from private donations. There is no cost for participants. The budget also pays for 31 employees and five interns.
“You’ve got to have the staff, the facility,” Crawford said. “You have to have all of the things that make for a successful operation. The east side of Fort Worth could use a facility, the north side, and then of course now the west side because of the Las Vegas Trail area.”
Sacher Dawson, Hope Farm’s executive director, said expansion would mean having 60 to 70 students at each location and opening more Hope Farms in areas of need. No mother who wants to enroll her child has ever been turned away, Crawford said.
For Clark, her son is already a success story. He has goals, keeps his grades up, has memorized Bible verses and controls his anger.
“We owe a lot to Hope Farm,” she said.
‘Not going back to Fort Worth is the best thing that happened’
Now married, Jerome Norwood says he had to escape Fort Worth and Hillside, though he comes back to visit. He said leaving the city is “the best thing that happened.”
He’s up at 4:30 each morning for work and spends his evenings at home with his wife.
“Home and work, home and work, that’s all I do,” he said. “That’s all I want to do.”
Norwood learned about healthier ways to survive while he was in prison. He took college courses and participated in every program offered to him. He frequently read and was involved in Toastmasters.
Looking back on his upbringing in Fort Worth, he said his mom did her best.
“She had six kids and had her own struggles, and now that I’m older, I understand it a little more,” he said. “Everybody has something they did, their own story. She was a good person.”
Norwood was 28 and still locked up when his mom died. He didn’t expect to grieve a parent from behind bars, but he believes at some point, Carletta Norwood knew she was going to die young.
“She fought with drugs for most of her adult life,” he said. “I think that a lot of what had to do with her heart came with her abusing drugs. And I think that a lot of times, you’ve really got to want it for yourself. No one else can help you. She knew she was just going to abuse drugs, and that’s how she was going to live.”
Norwood’s dad was diagnosed with liver cancer in November. He died in December.
“At the end of the day, my life turned out pretty good,” he said. “Here I am out of prison three years, and I bought a house, got married with no kids. Everybody is not as blessed to be in that type of situation.”
This story was originally published September 22, 2020 at 5:50 AM.
