Tag Archives: Richard Gatica

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Wanna burrito? a prison tale

Tell Your True Tale

A new story is up on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.

Richard Gatica, serving three life prison terms, writes of the day he offered to make a burrito for a friend on a tier above him, and how he got it up there.Richard Gatica

Check out Wanna Burrito? a prison tale up now.

It’s an amazing story, of the kind I love to post on the site. Small, poignant moment. Great stuff!

If you have a story that you think might work, let me know. Write it and send it in. I don’t pay but I do edit.

Sam

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Filed under Prison, Storytelling, Tell Your True Tale

TELL YOUR TRUE TALE: Huffington Post again

The Huffington Post crime page has posted another story that first appeared on my storytelling website, Tell Your True Tale.

The story is by Richard Gatica, a longtime Mexican Mafia tax collector, and drug runner inside various prisons.

Now 43 and a prison-gang dropout, he is writing his memoirs, and was just convicted of strangling his cellmate to death. His memoirs make for powerful reading as he’s a great storyteller.

Richard sent me the story of how he killed his crack dealer, included in those memoirs, more than a year ago. It was posted on TYTT last year.

Anyway, read “Killing Donald Evans” on the Huffington Post. 

Please “like” it, share it on FB, tweet about it, and tell your friends.

Earlier this month, HP also posted a story by federal prison inmate Jeffrey Scott Hunter: My First Bank Robbery.

Also I hope you’ll all consider submitting your own stories to Tell Your True Tale. We’ve got about 40 or so up so far.

If you haven’t looked into TYTT, or it’s been a while, feel free to check it out. The stories are great (and deal with all kinds of topics; only a few are about crime). Don’t pay, but I do edit.

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Filed under Culture, Gangs, Los Angeles, Prison, Tell Your True Tale

CALIFORNIA: Toothbrushes and solitary confinement

The other day, on my way out of town on vacation, I stopped by a San Bernardino County Courthouse to hear a bit of the trial of Richard Gatica.

Richard Gatica is accused of strangling his cellmate at West Valley Detention Center in Rancho Cucamonga in 2006. He then propped up the cellmate for more than a day, pretending to talk and play chess with the cellmate, and moving the corpse occasionally, so that jailers wouldn’t realize what had happened.

Gatica, who grew up in Rosemead, was already doing two life terms in prison when this happened. So prosecutors are asking for the death penalty.

I happened to catch the testimony of the psychiatrist, employed by the prison system, who examined Gatica for several hours and reviewed thousands of pages of documents about him, and concluded Gatica suffered from several kinds of mental illness.

The doctor described a childhood of apparently nonstop abuse by a sadistic mother who “was severely mentally ill, both because of addictions and because of an innate mental disease which appears to be major depression. … Mr. Gatica was, along with his younger brother, the focus of his mother’s illness and anger in that Mr. Gatica was physically and emotionally abused through much of his childhood.”

Among the mental illnesses Gatica developed was post-traumatic stress disorder.

The doctor went on to say that later, in the prison system, Gatica was incarcerated in a special housing unit, SHU, which amounts to solitary confinement, where inmates are denied human contact, often sunlight and are let out of a cell an hour a day. The SHU is reserved usually for inmates who’ve committed some crime in prison, or been part of a prison gang. Gatica lived in a SHU for a dozen years, the doctor said.

“He grew up without a father in the home and with a crazy abusive mother who was also a drug addict. There wasn’t much opportunity for Mr Gatica to learn coping skills, how to be a loving, caring person. What he learned was how to be a drug addict and a criminal. Being in the segregated housing unit only reinforced Mr Gatica’s dwelling in his internal world of disassociation and very pathological defense mechanisms.”

One of which, the doctor said, was to develop an extreme phobia to germs to the point where he would scrub his cell with a toothbrush “20 to 30 times a day or [wash] his hands 20 to 30 times a day.”

Gatica sat in his seat, dressed in a lavender shirt, a tie, black slacks, glasses, short, gelled hair — looking like a business executive and watching the very middle-class jury absorb all this.

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Filed under California, Gangs, Prison