After nearly a half-century behind bars, Ronnie Carrasquillo is learning how to shop for clothes, use a smartphone, and adjust to his freedom after a split-second decision in his distant past cost a police officer his life.
“You can’t give back what I did. It’s not fixable,” said Carrasquillo, now 65, in a recent interview from the home of a family member. “I am guilty of firing a weapon, and that weapon was deemed to have killed Officer Loftus. That’s the truth you can’t get away from.”
In an exclusive 90-minute conversation with Injustice Watch, Carrasquillo reflected on his remorse, his long fight for freedom with the help of family members and lawyers, and the culture shock of emerging from nearly 47 years of incarceration into a world completely transformed from the one where he grew up so many decades ago.
“Being around family, the younger children especially — you wouldn’t say to them you’ve been a prisoner, all that,” he said. “But they can sense it and see it, that something’s different because you don’t know how to use a phone. You don’t know how to scan items at the store. You don’t have a credit card.”
His priorities now include relearning how to socialize with his family members; wearing clothes that aren’t gray or brown; and acclimating to new chores, such as mowing the grass.
“I haven’t even used the word ‘garage’ in 47 years.”
On Oct. 18, Carrasquillo was resentenced to time served for the 1976 shooting death of Terrence Loftus, an off-duty plainclothes Chicago police officer who was trying to break up what was reported to be a gang-related fight. Carrasquillo has maintained from the beginning he intended to shoot over the crowd to stop the fight, but a bullet errantly struck Loftus. Carrasquillo’s case has since become a focal point for questions surrounding mass incarceration, the meaning of rehabilitation, and what some say are the shortcomings of a parole system too heavily geared toward retribution.
Carrasquillo’s young age when he was given an indeterminate sentence of 200 to 600 years, his dozens of denied parole applications, and his decades of work in prison programs were featured in Injustice Watch’s 2017 series, “The Long Wait.” The series examined the cases of 122 aging men and women locked up for decades in state prisons who, despite being eligible for parole, were consistently denied it. The series exposed inconsistencies, arbitrary decisions, and the influence of politics and outside interests at the 15-member Illinois Prisoner Review Board.
His release at the end of October came after a three-judge panel of the Illinois Appellate Court ruled his sentence was “excessive” in a 27-page opinion.
“Mr. Carrasquillo’s excessive sentence threatens to defeat the effectiveness of the parole system by keeping him incarcerated long after he has been effectively rehabilitated,” wrote Justice Freddrenna M. Lyle in the majority opinion issued Aug. 18. “Although Mr. Carrasquillo has had the apparent opportunity for release, because of his sentence and the offense for which he was convicted, such opportunity will never be ‘meaningful,’ despite his demonstrated maturity and rehabilitation.”
The panel continued, saying Carrasquillo should be resentenced based on changing legal precedents regarding how youthful offenders are treated and how mitigating factors, such as prison rehabilitation, are considered in sentencing. He turned 18 just five months before the shooting, but the legal precedents have applied in other cases in which 18-year-old defendants have established their emotional development was equivalent to a 17-year-old at the time of the offense, according to the ruling. At a 2019 evidentiary hearing, a forensic psychologist testified Carrasquillo fit that definition — a finding that was not contested by attorneys representing the government.
Denied parole again and again
Carrasquillo first sought parole in 1984 and went before the board over 30 times in the decades since.
He officially renounced his gang membership in 1993, and 20 years later, in 2013, he submitted an affidavit to then-Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan reaffirming the renunciation. While inside prison, he earned a bachelor’s degree in theology, helped steer younger prisoners to a better path away from violence, and kept an almost-spotless disciplinary record. Some members of the parole board suggested he’d been fully rehabilitated.
Still, he’d be denied parole. The vast majority of law enforcement — including Chicago police officers who at times came by the busload to parole hearings on Carrasquillo’s case — have worked to prevent his release, “despite the fact that the board recognized his extensive rehabilitative record.” Most recently, he was denied parole in an 8-1 vote in May.
“They made me stay as an 18-year-old,” he said of the parole board’s consistent denials. “My whole incarceration was trying to hold me in place. … My liberty didn’t come from there.
“It would tear my family apart to go through that again and again,” he said. “‘They’re gonna grant parole, you’re walking such a good life,’” he remembered his family members saying each time he had a new hearing. “And then be denied. It would destroy them.”
While some board members commented on his rehabilitation and the mentorship he provided to other prisoners, some also suggested he wasn’t remorseful and was being revered in prison because his crime was against a law enforcement officer.
“Another statement the board used to make for many years — that I had it made because, in the prison system, you glorify shooting a police officer,” he recalled.
“You don’t get no kudos for killing a policeman. That’s all fantasy. … It’s a lie,” he said.
He said his resentencing hearing in October before Cook County Associate Judge Alfredo Maldonado was the first time he felt someone of authority finally acknowledged his growth in prison. Carrasquillo said it felt gratifying when the judge acknowledged his accolades and accreditations and said he believed Carrasquillo had transformed his life.
“Somebody finally acknowledged it,” he said. “Finally, I wasn’t 18 anymore.”
A mentor to others in prison
Life inside prison was cutthroat and violent, Carrasquillo said. He said the atmosphere was always tense — hundreds of men crammed into tiny cells, sharing four showers, two phones, and minimal resources. Guards found entertainment by forcing men to fight each other, creating makeshift boxing gloves with Ace bandage wraps. There were standoffs between prisoners every day, with men just waiting to unleash their misdirected anger at a fellow prisoner.
“When I went to jail, it was like going from here to Germany. You’re a kid coming into the prison system,” he said. “My mindset is to stay alive. It was just a constant, constant survival.”
One night while watching PBS’s “Common Ground,” Carrasquillo saw a friend on the program speaking about the impact of violence and street gangs on his neighborhood. He immediately thought back to the prosecutors going “on and on” about his ignorance during closing arguments at his 1976 trial.
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“He said, ‘We were fighting to the death about a corner. It was a sad thing that I was fighting in the shallow end of a swimming pool and never made it to the deep end.”’ Hearing his friend’s metaphor of drowning in 3 feet of water after his first “breaking point” — the state’s attorney casting him away as an ignorant degenerate — struck Carrasquillo hard.
“We have to stop claiming this toughness. We have to educate ourselves,” Carrasquillo recalled telling other men in prison. In 1978, he earned his GED. In 1982, he and a few others started the Hispanic Culture Exchange Committee inside Stateville Correctional Center. The group hosted baseball and basketball games where people could win prizes. The administration let them make Hispanic meals on special occasions. These were just a few outlets Carrasquillo said he could think of to “keep the peace” and boost morale.
After the appellate court ordered his resentencing, Carrasquillo’s friends asked him to sum his feelings up in one word. Carrasquillo told his friends he felt “empty.” He’d spent nearly 30 years investing in and serving other people, and now suddenly, it was about to end.
“So many people are traumatized in one way or another — alcoholism, divorce, illiteracy, poverty,” he said. “And they can’t see a way out of it. I’m going to work on getting into them places and continue to uplift and minister to people. Same thing to the church, same thing to my family.”
Carrasquillo is involved in the Credible Messengers Mentorship Program and said he plans to return to Department of Corrections facilities to continue mentoring younger prisoners. He’s been in the same spot many of these younger men are just starting out in.
“When you first come in, you don’t see no hope. Things are being done to you. You get so aggravated, you get blinded,” he said.
He said his goal is to remind them they’re more than the result of their crimes.
Carrasquillo said his faith was a roadmap to how he was “supposed to live as a human being.”
“I can only walk that walk and not let anybody disturb that walk. That walk says to love God and love your neighbor as yourself. There was a time in my life when I didn’t love my neighbor as myself.”
Reconnecting with family and loved ones
Carrasquillo grew up with his mom, three brothers, and sister in a bungalow-style home in Humboldt Park. He described his childhood as unstable and his neighborhood as “gang-infested.”
To escape, he said, he spent most of his hours on a nearby basketball court or working out at his school’s gym. A young Carrasquillo would go to the playground near his home with other kids, not knowing the playground was marked gang territory.
“When people would come attack, I wouldn’t run because I wasn’t part of a gang,” Carrasquillo said. “I’d get assaulted for being there. But I lived across the street. I’m 100 yards across the street. I would get assaulted just for being there.”
He and the other kids played cautiously, he said, staying alert of their surroundings, so if “somebody was coming, we had the chance to run.” Faced with the reality of survival, he said, learning became less and less important, and he slowly stopped paying attention in school.
“I was excused a lot from the classroom,” Carrasquillo said. “Basically, I was illiterate — ignorant to the book knowledge because I was passed just for sports.”
After his mother suddenly died when he was 15, Carrasquillo and his brother went to live with their father and stepmother. By then, “our heart was given away already,” he said.
“At that age, you’re not wise enough to know everyone’s not your friend — you think everybody’s your friend. So you fall in love with your — what they call ‘homies’ now in the neighborhood. [The guys] who plays baseball with you. That’s how I got lured to the streets.”
In the weeks since his release, he has been spending time reconnecting with his loved ones. He recently went clothes shopping with his niece, who implored him to get a shirt that wasn’t solid blue or brown.
She told him, “You gotta get a Cubs shirt,” suggesting things with patterns, decals, and designs.
“I was from the streets,” he said. “We used to walk down the street and see somebody with a tag — they don’t know what’s coming. I don’t need any of that.”
Returning to life outside prison walls, when that’s all he’s known for nearly 50 years, is like flipping a switch, Carrasquillo said. He feels strongly about protecting himself and his family from the ghosts of his past returning to haunt them. So he wears bland, inconspicuous clothing. He said the best he could do was polka dots.
“Somebody might just look — ‘Oh, he’s a nerd?’” he joked. “Yes, I am. Thank you very much.”
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