The Great Escape

Butler decided that he'd never be in that position again. He read Bible verses his grandmother, Margaret Butler, had sent him. Butler said he was drawn mostly to 1 Corinthians 13:11, which reads, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things."

One small window, sandwiched between steel bars, lit his room. Butler could peer out and see a basketball court.

"God puts stuff in front of you for a reason," he said. "That was my ticket out."

On the day he was released from Ethan Allen in August 1996, Butler, then 16, promised his mother that he'd never do anything to hurt her again. He also sought out his daughter, Camary, born less than a month after he was incarcerated. For Butler, who barely knows his father, it was another way to make amends.

"One of the main things I wanted to do was be the best father I could be because I didn't have a father," he said. "I know that void hurt me."

Butler's mother moved the family away from trouble, to a new home in midtown on Bluff Avenue. Eight days after Butler arrived there, he was getting a haircut on his porch when Andre King visited and asked him if he wanted to hang out at Hamilton Park. Butler, shackled by an ankle-monitoring device assigned to him after his release, told King that he couldn't leave the porch. Two hours later, Butler said, King was shot and killed.

"If I wasn't on the bracelet, I would've been right there with him," Butler said. "That stuff, it takes a fire out of you, makes you say, 'This is not for me no more.' " Less than two years later, James Barker Jr. also was murdered at Hamilton Park, shot twice in the chest. Butler remembers rushing from his home to find a bloodied Barker removing his jewelry and handing it to his weeping sister before being moved to an ambulance.

A job at Burger King was one of Butler's first steps toward a different life. His friends routinely heckled him for mopping floors and removing french fries from the piping hot grease. "They'd see me with heat bumps, laughing at me," said Butler, who now owns several Burger King franchises. "I said, 'I ain't got to watch my back out here.' I set the example."

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A Critical Decision

Richard Geller, 47, has been a member of the Racine Police Department for 24 years and last year he was honored with the department's award of excellence. The son of a Marine, Geller has spent practically all of his life in Racine. He considered attending law school at Western State University in California but instead chose a career in local law enforcement so that he "could give back to my community." Geller worked in the department's drug investigations unit during the mid-1990s, the most dangerous era in Racine's history, when it often had the highest per capita homicide rate in the state. "It was a time in the city's history that we're not sad to see in our rearview mirror," Racine deputy chief of police Art Howell said.

About 5 feet 10, slightly built, balding and with a salt-and-pepper mustache, Geller is far from a physically imposing man. But on that afternoon in January 1998, he had the power to play God with Butler's life.

Geller, by then the head of the department's investigations unit, had received a tip that there was drug activity in the garage of the home Butler shared with his mother and younger brother, Melvin Claybrook. He secured the search warrant and organized the raid. "To be honest, I had no idea who we'd find in the house," Geller said recently.