I Never Gave Up

By Chris A. Kirven

This is a true story of a man who has spent most of his life in prison due to an unjust system and the struggles and hardships he has faced as a result. Our system is broken, and his story shows you how life changes. He wrote the story to motivate, inspire, and encourage people to stay strong and to not let the people in life or the system break them. Go for what you believe in. It is better to attempt and fail than not attempt at all. Change is possible. People are so used to being told what they can't do, and they begin believing it and don't attempt to do. People need motivation, inspiration, and encouragement. Who better to give this to them than someone who has walked a mile in their shoes.

This is what my story is for.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Release date: Apr 26, 2023
• ISBN: 9798887931265

Book preview

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I Never Gave Up

Chris A. Kirven Jr.

Copyright © 2023 Chris A. Kirven Jr.

All rights reserved

First Edition

PAGE PUBLISHING

Conneaut Lake, PA

First originally published by Page Publishing 2023

ISBN 979-8-88793-120-3 (pbk)

ISBN 979-8-88793-126-5 (digital)

Printed in the United States of America

Table of Contents

Chapter 1

So What, I’m a Fuckup

Dedicated to my beautiful daughter Hazel who is the apple of my eye, my wife Loretta, my grandmother Gladis (Lord rest her soul), everyone who had a hand in the success of my life story and gave me feedback: Renee Kirven, Louis Chapman, Dennis Johnson, Rodrigo Gutierrez, Weenie, my stepmom Louis, Carolyn Carol, and just to the people in the world who lived a hard life and had been through a lot of hard times. Please take motivation and inspiration from my story and know that it’s never too late to change. Change is possible, never give up hope, and always put God or whoever you believe in foremost. The higher power has a plan for you.

Life’s Changes

A true story based on real life events. Names of Individuals and locations have been modified to protect the identity and interests of the characters.

Written by: Chris A. Kirven, Jr.

Credits

Loretta Lynn Kirven, First Editor

Rodrigo Gutierrez Lara, Critique

Dennis Johnson, Critique

Matthew Hardney, Critique

Renee Kirven, Publishing Assistant/Critique/Advisor

Soundtrack:

Pleasure P., Rock Bottom

Tank, I Deserve

Drake, Fake Friends

Game ft. Drake, 100

Plies, 100 Years

Plies, Kept It Too Real

50 Cent, Somebody Gotta Die

Ron Isley ft. Shaniece, Busted

Mary J. Blidge, Give Me You

Jamie Foxx, My Wedding Song

Jahiem, Never

Black lives do matter! As a matter of fact, all lives matter!

I am a part of the less fortunate society. In the criminal injustice system, I am a nobody! In this world besides a select few loved ones, I am a nobody because I don’t have money, power, or fame. In that same note, I shout to the world that I am somebody! I am Chris A. Kirven, Jr.

I am more than just a Man of Color. I am a living, breathing human being. And my life matters too! If anybody out there hear my shout, this is my autobiography, my story to tell.

Due to the injustice, I have been served in the criminal injustice system. I am currently incarcerated, fighting to overturn my wrongful conviction in the appeals court. I’m a man that’s been found guilty until proven innocent. With that being said, is there a hero out there for me? Is there anybody willing to help me share my story?

I would like to turn my autobiography into a motivational and inspirational movie. Will someone, who is someone, help me?

Thanks,

Chris A. Kirven, Jr.

Contact information

Email address:

Phone number:

Phone number:

Please always leave a message. If there is no answer, I will return all calls and emails ASAP.

Okay, so as far back as I can remember, I was born in Littlefield, Texas, to Doris Freeman and Chris Kirven, Sr. At the time, I had three little brothers. (From oldest to youngest) Shaw, Justin, and Zebode Freeman. And a older sister. Her name is Deon. I’m the oldest boy. We all lived in a small town west of Lubbock named Sudan, Texas. I was raised there to about the age of eight or nine. The town is so small. When passing through it, if you blink, you would miss it. The population couldn’t have been more than a few hundred.

I went from prekindergarten to the first grade while living in Sudan. The school mascot is a black and gold hornet. I also got held back in the first grade for three reasons. One, the teacher claimed that I was looking under little girls’ skirts during a school yearbook photo shoot (I really wasn’t. I was looking for a penny I had dropped while trying to pull it out of my pocket, so I could give it to this cute girl that was sitting next to me). Also, because I used to draw a lot instead of doing my classwork. So a lot of the time, when my mother or cousin would come pick me up after school, I would get in trouble because my teacher would tell on me. She gave them my drawings, letting them know that drawing is what I would be doing, instead of paying attention doing my assigned classwork. They would chastise me but, at the same time, still liked my drawings. The straw that broke the camel’s back, which was the main reason that got me held back in the first grade, was the fire I set in the bushes when me and my class was at recess. (Sudan is so small that shit was definitely in the newspaper.) I wasn’t trying to set a big fire. (I used to just hang in the bushes at recess sometimes because there were two Mexican kids and a little White girl that was bigger than me that used to bully me a lot.) I had some matches. What I was doing was I picked up a few long dry pieces of grass (there were plenty of it up and down the fence line), set it on fire, and let the fire get close to my fingers before I dropped it and put it out. Well, one time, I let it get too close to my fingers, and it burned me. I dropped that shit. Before I could step on it and put it out, it had caught dry grass on the other side of the chain-link fence on fire.

I’m like, Oh, fuck.

So now I’m jumping back and forth across the fence (it wasn’t that high), trying to put the fire out that was starting to spread down the fence line. I knew that there was no way in hell I was going to be able to put this fire out. It was on both sides of the fence, spreading. Right across the road, there were like three or four big kids who came running out of this big brown house (they had to have been high schoolers) to put the fire out. It was crazy after that. The teachers were running from the school and all.

When the fire was out, one of the teachers grabbed me and was like, What happened?

The big kids were like, We were across the street, seen the fire, and the little boy jumping back and forth across the fence. So we ran over and put the fire out.

They asked me what I was doing by the fire.

I was looking at them with big eyes and was like, Shit, I was trying to put the fire out.

They ended up knowing it was me because they found the matches. They called my mama to come get me. They told her I couldn’t come back to school for the rest of the year. I knew I was fixing to get my ass beat.

At about the age nine, my parents packed me, my brothers, and older sister up, and we moved to Temple, Texas, for the first time. We only stayed a few months before moving to Belton, Texas, to the Bella Oaks apartments. Me and my brother, Shawn, attended Miller Heights Elementary School, which is right across the street from the apartments. My sister Deon attended Belton Intermediate, and my two younger brothers were in day care.

Well, living in Belton was also where I began to start getting into trouble. I skipped elementary school for the first time when my brother Shawn had gotten written up and suspended from school one day. My parents didn’t know about the disciplinary action because I was the one they would send most times to check the mailbox. So when I saw his disciplinary papers, I threw them away. He didn’t want to be alone, so he asked me to skip school and be with him. I did. It just so happened the same day would be my first run-in with the police. Me and my brother were going around the apartment complex, tearing the screens off different apartment windows. Maintenance had to have seen us and called the police. We were really trippin’. We were just doing some shit to pass time until our parents went to work, so we could then go back to the apartment and chill. On our way back to our apartment to see if our parents were gone, the police tried to stop us. We both took off running toward the shallow trees that were right next to our school. The one police (I didn’t see the second one yet) had tried to catch my brother, but he had jumped the gate to the school. I lied down in the shallow trees commando style, hoping that he wouldn’t see me. He didn’t, but the second police that joined him did. So I jumped up and took off running through the open field on the other side of the trees. I wasn’t going anywhere because there was another officer coming toward me from across the field.

He yelled, Stop and don’t move!

I stopped.

He walked me back toward the first policeman who was still trying to make my brother come back across the fence. My brother wasn’t trying to hear it though, so the police officer looked at me and told me to tell him to come back across the fence. I was looking at my brother, and he was looking at me. We were both are scared (we ain’t ever had no dealing with the police before).

I sighed then finally told him to come on. He came. Once they had both of us, they asked us where we stayed. We told them. They took us to our apartment to our parents. Lucky for us, my mom and dad were getting ready to take us on a road trip to Waco to see our aunt and uncle, so they were in a good mood. If it was any other time, me and my brother would have gotten our assess torn up for the shit we pulled.

Then my baby sister, Nicole, was born. Now there was six of us all together—four boys and two girls. With so many kids in our family now, I honestly started feeling like my mom and dad didn’t love me anymore. Why did I feel like this? I felt like this because not only did they hardly pay me any attention, they were quick to whoop my ass behind my little brothers for small things. Till this very day, I absolutely love kids and myself being a child once upon a time. Know that a child knows when she/he is loved. So surely, I started rebelling and looking for love in other mother and father figures. Neither my mom nor dad knew that I felt this way about them. Not that I believe they would have cared then or now.

It was a good thing, though, that almost every school that I went to, there was at least one woman teacher who fell in love with me and would treat me as if I was her own son. In first grade (in Sudan), it was Mrs. Read. She would take me home with her after school and let me play around on her trampoline. I was in love with her grown twin daughters. She introduced me to country music (George Straight). She also loved black and white cows. My second and first grade teacher (in Belton) was Mrs. Shirley Wilson. She would take me on the weekend to clean trash up on the side of the country roads where she stayed and point out different flowers by name. Afterward we would always go to McDonald’s, and she would buy me whatever kind of ice cream I wanted. There were a couple more. All of these wonder women was where I really received so much motherly love from.

Although I loved all my teachers that fell in love with me, there is one that I will remember the most. My fifth grade science teacher, Mrs. Carolyn Carol. She taught me at Belton Intermediate. Although she was my science teacher, she would always call and ask my mom for permission to keep me after school, so she could help me get better with my math, so I would pass in math. Math has always been my hardest subject in school. Always afterward, she would reward me by playing table games with me (our favorite game was Jingo). She gave me motherly attention, even though she had an older daughter. Right before she would take me home, she always took me to get ice cream. I adored and loved this woman so much. She took me to the mall and bought me shoes (she pissed me off because she wouldn’t buy me the kind I wanted. She just calmly explained to me why she wasn’t grabbed and hugged me and asked me not to be mad. I instantly stopped being mad because of the hug, and I loved this woman). She even took me to one of our school football games.

My mom never did anything special with me. One night, our apartment in Bella Oaks caught on fire because my mom and dad had come home drunk and were making something to eat. They both fell asleep. So cooking grease in the kitchen got to popping going everywhere. (I know this is how it happened because this is how they said it happened later). That’s how the fire started. I remember waking up to my mother’s voice screaming my name. Smoke was everywhere. I didn’t know what the hell to do. I was scared to death. (At this time, I’m about twelve.) My mom yelled for me to run outside. I did. My mom, dad, baby brother, baby sister, and big sister were already out there. (My mom was in her nightgown. My pops was in his underwear. And me, my brother, and sisters were in pajamas.) My mom was still yelling to my dad, telling him that my younger brothers, Shawn and Jay (Justin), were still inside of the apartment, in my oldest sister’s room.

So my dad looked at me and said, Boy, go get your brothers and don’t come back without them.

I was scared shitless. I did not want to go back into that burning apartment. My dad saw how scared I was. He didn’t care. So I saw I had no choice. For some reason, I was more scared of my dad than the burning apartment, and something inside me told me just to go (it was probably God telling me that I was going to be okay). So I ran over to the burning apartment (we lived upstairs) and had the Hispanic man that was standing there lift me up to the rafter beams that were right up under the bedroom windows. With the help of the Hispanic man, I was able to easily climb up on the rafter beams (I was used to climbing up and down on them anyway because me and my brother Shawn used to sneak in an out of our bedroom window that way). As I got to the window, it seemed as if I could actually hear my little heart trying to beat out of my chest. The room was so thick with smoke that I could not see shit, and the smoke was burning my eyes. So I had to close my eyes when I climbed up into the window and just go by sound and memory from the way I knew the room was set up (think about how a blind man feels. I experienced it inside a burning-ass apartment). I had to hold my breath at the same time. Even though I was only twelve years old, I was skinny and long limbed (I was going to be tall when I grew up). So this was how I decided that I would search the room. I would spread my arms wide open, searching in front and around me. While at the same time, stretching one of my long skinny legs to search the floor (that way, I wouldn’t miss one of my brothers if they were passed out).

I called my brothers’ names and heard one of them answer from the bed. I rushed to the bed and grabbed my brother. It was Shawn. I pulled him off the bed and rushed him over to the open window (I was running out of breath). I almost pushed him through the window, trying