A son's crime becomes his mother's punishment
.jpg "Jeri Rowe")
GREENSBORO — Monica Purvis thinks about her oldest son every day.
Stop by her small apartment at Smith Homes, and she’ll pull a heavy box from her closet and read the stacks of letters she has written her firstborn, encouraging him to stay strong and keep his head up. She calls him “Pa Pa,’’ a nickname he’s had since birth.
In the margins, in big letters, are words Deandre can’t miss: “Watch the Lord move for you,’’ “A son for life’’ and “Pa Pa coming home.’’
“People think I’m crazy,’’ she says. “But God tells me he is coming home, and that’s what I have to rely on.’’
Deandre Purvis will be in jail for a long time.
He got caught in the vicious cycle we all hear about.
No father. A single mother. An impressionable teenager drawn to the glamorous life of a gangster. He committed a string of armed robberies, got popped by the cops and had his mug shot flashed on the 6 o’clock news.
He got locked up, carted away from his hometown and erased from our collective memory.
But not from his mother’s memory.
She wants to start a support group to help mothers like her cope. She wants to get his sentence reduced. But mostly, she wants to give her son some kind of hope.
So, she writes him. Almost every day.
“That is my child,’’ she says.
* * *
Some would call Deandre Purvis a punk. He was hardened by the streets, lured by an easy buck — no matter the consequences.
Around Thanksgiving 2004, he and a seven-member crew went on a crime spree and toted handguns wherever they went. Deandre, cops say, was the ringleader. Monica refutes that.
They stole a Saturn and robbed three restaurants and four convenience stores. In one case, according to court records, Deandre shot a clerk in the neck. In another, the crew kicked restaurant employees and beat them with brass knuckles, pistols and their fists.
All for $400.
When he was arrested, Deandre had his nickname written on one side of his tennis shoes. On the other side were two words that cops say underscore everything about Deandre’s motivation for breaking bad: GET MONEY.
At the time, Deandre had just turned 17 and had a 10th-grade education. He pleaded guilty to multiple felony counts of armed robbery, kidnapping and assault, and he’ll be in jail until he’s at least 64.
During his plea hearing in June 2005, Monica apologized for her son. Meanwhile, Deandre has apologized for his actions — and to his mother.
“I aprriate how u raised me and all the extra love that u gave me,’’ he wrote in an undated letter. “I wish I can take the pain away. … I said I’m sorry mama. I never ment to hurt you. I never meant to make you cry.’’
Monica keeps that letter in her box, along with the other letters she has written — so many that her son can’t keep them all in prison.
Deandre never knew his dad. Monica Purvis was a single mother with a checkered past who raised three children and worked as a certified nursing assistant.
She often wonders if Deandre’s life would have been different if he had been raised with a father, a strong male role model. She wishes someone had come to her about Deandre’s crimes so she could yank him hard and say, “It’s not OK to do this ungodly stuff!’’
She didn’t know until he was arrested two days before Christmas 2004. Two hours before daybreak, she was awakened by a phone call from her son.
“Pa Pa, where are you? You need to come home.’’
“Mom, I’m in jail, and they’re trying to pin all these robberies on me.’’
“Huh? How much is your bond?’’
“Mom, it’s $1 million. I’m never coming home.’’
* * *
Monica had Deandre when she was young. She was 20, unmarried, just a few years out of prison herself. A high school dropout raised by her mother and grandmother — Monica didn’t know her father, either — she had served time for stealing.
But once she got pregnant, she felt she had to get right.
She had two more children. The fathers were never involved in their lives. As her kids grew older, she held down a job and kept telling herself, “Monica, you don’t want your kids to go down that same path you did.”
Ask her about it, and she’ll retrieve a folder full of certificates from Deandre’s days at Jones Elementary and Jackson Middle in Greensboro. There, Deandre was an honor-roll student who earned certificates for good attendance and physical fitness.
He played baseball. He fished. He protected his younger siblings, Ashley and Nathan, even telling his sister, “Don’t be getting into no trouble, and don’t be talking to no boys.’’
And he minded his mom. Until age 15.
He started cutting school, hung close to a drug-dealing crowd and got caught driving 100 mph without a license, trying to outrun a state trooper. He ended up in training school for nearly 10 months.
When he came back home in the summer of 2004, he was out the door constantly, drawn to the street, hanging with his old crew. Monica told him to stay away from that crowd. Deandre didn’t listen.
“Pa Pa, please don’t get into trouble,’’ she once pleaded. “I went through all this, and you’re doing the same thing I did.’’
“Mama, you don’t know what you’re talking about,’’ he said.
“Oh, yes I do, honey,’’ Monica told her son. “Your past will haunt you.’’
“Well, Mama, I can get the hell out of this house,’’ he yelled.
“Well, Pa Pa, you know more than me, you go on ahead,’’ Monica yelled back. “Seems I can’t talk any sense into you.’’
Deandre left for two months. He lived in a hotel room with his friends, and during that time, they went on a monthlong crime spree that landed them prison time and prime time on the 6 o’clock news.
“I wished I would’ve beaten the hell out of him,’’ Monica says now. “But I was focusing on my job. I loved working with elderly people, and he wasn’t listening to me.
“But, Lord, sometimes I think it was my fault him getting locked up,’’ she says. “I carry that burden, and I think if he could’ve stayed with me and not stayed with his friends....But that was his other family.
“That stays in the back of my mind,’’ she says. “When he’s doing time, we mothers are doing time.’’
On this particular morning, Monica has a visitor: Carolyn Stover. Stover’s son, Larry Allred, one of Monica’s best friends, is doing time for armed robbery.
Allred calls, gives Monica advice and writes letters to Deandre. Stover simply visits, sits on her couch and says often, “Monica, don’t give up. Prayer changes things.”
A few months after her son’s arrest, Monica lost her low-income apartment on Swann Street because she didn’t pay her light bill. She says she was too preoccupied with going back and forth to court for her son’s case.
She bounced from family to friend and even to Pathways, Greensboro’s shelter for homeless families, before she got an apartment two years ago at Smith Homes, a low-income housing community on the city’s south side.
She says she can’t hold down a job because of her emotional state. She’s going through counseling, and she’s taking pills every day to help her sleep, fight depression and keep an ulcer in check.
Meanwhile, she has had two operations on each foot, paid for by Medicaid. And she lives on $326 a month in food stamps and $61 a week from Ashley’s child support.
Ashley, her 18-year-old daughter, a senior at Smith High, gave birth three weeks ago to Monica’s first grandchild, a girl named Amieria Pierson.
Ashley isn’t married. She plans to graduate from Smith in June and go to GTCC to study nursing. Her 19-year-old brother, Nathan, is expected to graduate from Smith next year.
So at 41, Monica Faye Purvis is a grandmother.
* * *
Generation after generation.
Monica grew up around crime, got involved in crime and later tried to keep her kids away from crime. She couldn’t save her oldest son.
Now, she depends on government handouts, can’t hold down a job, sees her only daughter getting pregnant and is helping raise her granddaughter in a community that knows crime and violence and prison firsthand.
Monica can’t escape — maybe she refuses to escape — the life around her.
She says she wants to get a job after she finishes counseling. She says she wants to stop getting government assistance. She says she wants to buy a house and live in a safe community.
But she wonders if she ever can. Life has been a constant struggle for her and her children.
“I raised my kids by myself, taught them right from wrong, and I have been a good mother,’’ she says. “But you have to realize when they reach a certain age, it’s up to them to listen and make choices of their own.
“I’ve stuck with my kids through good and hard times, and I’m still sticking with them. But it’s hard. It’s really, really hard.’’
Around Smith Homes, she’s known as “Mama Faye.’’ She spends her days watching her nieces, nephews and now her granddaughter when Ashley goes to school.
And when she does, she’s surrounded by pictures, certificates and dreams of her oldest son.
She sees him on the table in her den, wearing a vest, dress slacks and black shoes for an Easter service. Deandre was no more than 7.
She sees him on a shelf near the TV, wearing his blue graduation gown, taken at Foothills Correctional Institute south of Morganton, after he earned his high school diploma.
And she sees him in her dream, knocking on her front door, walking in and telling her, “I’m here. I’m home.’’
All that helps, especially when she thinks that Deandre may never come home. At least not in her lifetime.
When that hits her, she thinks about the next time she can get to Morganton to see him. Or she simply goes into her bedroom, turns on the local AM gospel station and begins writing another letter to her son.
Contact Jeri Rowe at 373-7374 or jeri.rowe@news-record.com
Accompanying Photos
Photo Caption: Monica Purvis at home with her daughter Ashley.
Help for parents
Life without: A letter from prison
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