Milton Sellers is using his past as a warning to help young people in Southeast Texas avoid the choices that landed him in prison for nearly a quarter century.<\/p>\n
Sellers, a mentor with IEA in Beaumont, said many young people do not fully understand the consequences that can follow crime. He said he stole his first car when he was 9 years old, and what began as thrill-seeking on Beaumont streets escalated into violence, drugs and 24 years behind bars.<\/p>\n
\u201cStealing cars to breaking homes, packing pistols, pulling them out on people. I ended up stabbing my teacher at Vincent Middle School. And eventually I ended up going to prison. And I stayed there for 24 years,\u201d Sellers said.<\/p>\n
Now back home in Beaumont, Sellers said he sees himself in many of the young people making headlines today. He said some may claim they do not care about the risks, but that changes once they are incarcerated.. \u201cYou can say that you don’t care. But I can guarantee that once you get locked up, you’ll be writing letters to the parole board with tears in your eyes begging them to let you come home,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Sellers said many kids are growing up learning survival, not consequences, and he pointed to a culture where guns can be seen as symbols of status and respect. He warned that pulling a trigger carries irreversible consequences. \u201cThey are not really really realizing that once you pull that trigger and somebody’s dead now you can’t undo it. It’s not PlayStation. They’re dead,\u201d Sellers said.<\/p>\n
He said too many teenagers carry weapons without understanding how one impulsive decision can affect the rest of their lives. Sellers said he remembers seeing an 18-year-old on death row who did not pull the trigger, but still faced the consequences. \u201cI’ll never forget seeing an 18 year old boy on death row. He didn’t pull the trigger. He didn’t directly kill anybody, but just because he was there,\u201d Sellers said.<\/p>\n
Sellers, 56, said no young person is too far gone to change direction, but that the decision must come from within. \u201cNo matter what it is that you’re exposing yourself to in the streets, you can get out of the streets, there’s no such thing as you can’t get out of the streets,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019m a firm believer in that because I live that life. And when I wanted to change, it happened on the inside. And that’s what I try to get across to anybody that I talk to,\u201d Sellers said.<\/p>\n
Sellers said the biggest challenge is reaching young people before another shooting, another arrest or another funeral. He said the deeper issue of gun violence often starts long before the courtroom and can begin inside the home, and he believes accountability has to start before violence becomes normalized.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Milton Sellers is using his past as a warning to help young people in Southeast Texas avoid the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":305255,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[27,29,28],"class_list":["post-305254","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-texas","tag-texas","tag-texas-headlines","tag-texas-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305254","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=305254"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/305254\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/305255"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=305254"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=305254"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-tx\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=305254"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}