Getty M.

“Talking about my son’s experience is like picking at a sore. It’s still hard, it’s still very hard,” Getty says. She has not forgotten the traumatic experience of coming home to a house in turmoil after her son Steven had been arrested for murder. He was convicted and sentenced to life without the possibility of parole even though he did not participate in the crime. After 25 years in prison, he was released thanks to the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Miller v. Alabama. In this 2012 landmark decision, the Court held that mandatory life without parole sentences for people, who were under 18 at the time of the offense, were unconstitutional. Since her son’s return, Getty has enjoyed special moments while assisting him in his fight for an actual innocence certificate.

A Broken “Birthday” Boy

Getty had always aspired to have a peaceful family life, a goal she felt she had achieved after getting married and having three kids. She and her husband worked tirelessly to raise their children on the South Side of Chicago, instilling important values, including honesty, integrity, and respect. “Growing up, my family didn’t have much, so I wanted better for my kids. I didn’t want them to have a hard life,” Getty says. “I used to get up at four in the morning to fix a full breakfast for them before school. All my husband and I wanted was for our kids to be successful. So, we worked hard to put a roof over their heads and food on the table,” she recalls. 

Getty and her husband also tried to shield their children from gangs, drugs, and violence. “I rearranged my schedule to be able to take my children to school and pick them up,” she shares. “We had rules for them. They couldn’t just get up and walk out of the house. They had chores; they had different things to do to occupy their time. At some point, I thought I was too strict, but we only wanted to keep them away from outside as much as possible.” She continues, “Of course, they could go outside, but they had to tell us where they wanted to go. We would tell them not to go to certain areas and to stay away from certain people. They had to be in the house at a certain time; they never spent the night outside.” 

This peaceful family life was shattered when Steven and his siblings were arrested in their parents’ absence. “I didn’t want to leave my teenagers at home alone. It was two days before Steven’s eighteenth birthday, and I really didn’t want to leave, but I had no choice because of a family emergency,” Getty explains. A few days later, “I got a call that my children had all been taken out of the house. I was in shock. I couldn’t scream, I couldn’t cry, I couldn’t do anything because I was far away taking care of a relative,” she recollects.

Upon her return, Getty found their home had been ransacked and robbed. “When I got home, everything was gone. Closets had been stripped clean; the TV was missing …” she trails off. “So I went to a friend’s house to stay while trying to get everything organized. I had to sleep on someone else’s couch. It was a nightmare, a total nightmare,” she remembers. 

Eventually, Steven’s sister was released, while he remained in custody with his brother. Approximately two weeks after the arrest, Getty was able to see her sons separately. She recalls how painful these visits were, and how miserable her boys looked. “I couldn’t touch them. I couldn’t do anything but talk to them through the glass,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do. I just sat there. I didn’t want to cry, I didn’t want to let them know I was in pain. They were already broken on that side, and I didn’t want them to see me broken on the other side,” she adds. Both of them were trying to process and make sense of the situation. “I couldn’t say, ‘what happened?’. I couldn’t demand answers because they looked so destroyed. They were also trying to understand what happened.”

“A Constant Battle”

Steven and his brother’s prolonged custody severely affected the family. “We were thinking about our sons, how they were doing, if they were eating … They worried about us; we worried about them,” Getty says. She recalls how “it was a constant battle to get normalcy back” into the household. “My husband couldn’t function. He couldn’t get it together because his boys were gone. He had breakdowns. His heart was broken.” She continues, “My daughter was also affected. I had to try to keep it together for everyone.” 

Beneath her attempts to keep it together for her family, Getty was lost. She couldn’t help but feel guilty and hopeless. “For me, that was the end. I couldn’t see myself. I couldn’t see my family, I couldn’t see us anymore. I asked myself, ‘What’s the use of being a mom when you don’t have your kids? What door did I leave open? What did I not do? What did I not say? Why did this happen?’” She continues, “I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t fathom it. I couldn’t get to the point of why this happened to my family. I was working like a dog every day. I was trying to keep my children safe, and this kid came out of the blue and said they did a crime. And just because of that, they were arrested. Why?” Getty began “to question my value as a parent, as a mom, because I was supposed to be their protector.” 

The financial burden of supporting two incarcerated sons was overwhelming. Getty had to get a second job just to be able to assist her children. “Each of them needed to go to commissary, which is the prison store; each of them needed clothes, a TV, a radio. All of this fell on my shoulders because our relatives had disappeared.”

Getty’s boys were tried separately. “It was my first time dealing with the police and setting foot in a courtroom. I didn’t know what to expect,” she explains. Her first son’s trial lasted just a few days, and he was acquitted. Steven’s trial, on the other hand, lasted several years and was a prolonged traumatic experience. 

The courtroom “became another battle” for Getty and her family. Getty was particularly devastated by the way she and her husband were mistreated and humiliated by the prosecutor and some of the victims’ family members, as if they had done something wrong. “I still feel angry about the way we were treated. The prosecutor hated us. They described us as people who were so superficial. They described me as a woman who only wanted to dress and look nice, who didn’t worry about her kids, and who didn’t have feelings for the victims’ families. They spoke about our kids as if they were just running loose. They painted a picture that was so far from the truth,” she laments. “We were called names by people who didn’t even know us. Not once did anyone talk to us or ask questions about who we were or how we felt,” she adds. Despite the pain, “We didn’t miss anything. We were there every day to support our son.”

As a mother, Getty was not oblivious to the pain the victim’s mother was going through. “I would have loved to meet the mom. I would have loved to say, ‘I’m sorry’ even though I didn’t know what I was sorry for. My son had done nothing, but I was ready to say sorry … I was just there trying to understand, trying to get through it all.” In retrospect, Getty thinks families can rise above tragedy and heal if they support each other. “We are just on different sides of the fence. Families can heal if prosecutors and attorneys stop pitting them against each other.”

“Broken to the Bones” 

Unfortunately, the family’s nightmare did not end, but instead took another ugly turn as Steven was convicted of double homicide under the theory of accountability and received two life sentences. “When my son was given two natural life sentences, I thought that was the end. I didn’t want to hear anything else. I was broken to the bones, and I stayed that way for a long time. I lost so much weight. I went down to a size four, and everybody thought I was sick. But I just couldn’t eat because all I could think about was my son locked away in a cage,” Getty shares. 

Steven started serving his post-conviction sentence at the now-closed Joliet Correctional Center, in a reception center where incarcerated people entering the Illinois Department of Corrections were held temporarily. After two weeks, he was transferred to Stateville Correctional Center. 

The first time Getty visited her son in Stateville, she could finally touch him — their first physical contact since Steven was arrested almost three years earlier. The image of her distraught child remains imprinted in her mind. “When I saw him, I thought, ‘This is not my son.’ He was just broken. He couldn’t talk; he couldn’t say anything. All he could do was hold his head down and cry,” she recounts. “The whole visit, he couldn’t look up. So, I could tell he had been going through something traumatic. I knew something had happened to him, like being beat up or something, because he didn’t even want to look me in my face. He just kept his head down and cried.”

Getty continued visiting her son for years, making sure he had the financial, emotional, and legal support he needed to cope inside prison. However, as a mom, she couldn’t help but feel the pain of his absence at home. “It’s like having a two-year-old. You have him in your eyesight right there. You can see him play and be happy. But then you turn away, and all of a sudden, he is gone,” she reflects. “How do you react? You are terrified; you panic. You are sick … not physically, but you are sick. Your whole inside is destroyed because you don’t know what’s happening to your baby. You don’t know where he is. You don’t know if somebody is mistreating him. You might go to sleep, but you wake up to the same reality.” She concludes, “This is the feeling you continue to live with. It doesn’t go away.”

“Coming Out of the Dark”

As Getty was struggling with the trauma of Steven’s wrongful conviction, her son’s cellmate asked his mother to get in touch with her. Eventually, Getty was introduced to Communities and Relatives of Illinois Incarcerated Citizens (CRIIC), a group established in 2007 to help people with incarcerated loved ones. Getty still remembers the first time she went to a meeting. “I went with my head down because I was angry, ashamed, hurt, and confused. I was going through all these feelings because I thought I was the only person this was happening to.” 

When she met Julie Anderson, who has been managing CRIIC since its creation, she thought Julie was “a director or something of the sort, helping us.” But when Julie revealed that her son was also serving a life sentence, Getty’s mindset changed. “It made me realize something … I told myself, ‘Stop pouting because here is someone who is hurting just like you but who is willing to help you. You are crying, beating yourself up, and thinking you are alone, but you are not.’” 

This decisive encounter ignited Getty’s desire to get involved and to become an advocate. “It brought me to a new level,” she says. This desire grew as Getty met other parents, especially women, whose children were also serving long sentences. Being able to share her son’s experience and learn about other children was helpful. “It gave me a sense of being able to fight another day. It gave my daughter, husband, and me a new meaning.” Getty emphasizes that with CRIIC, “we could see ourselves coming out of that darkness.” 

CRIIC also enabled Getty and her family to visit Steven in Menard Correctional Center, where he was housed after ten years at Stateville Correctional Center. The trip to Menard —a six-hour drive each way from Chicago — was more costly than going to Stateville, which was less than two hours away from Getty’s home. Traveling to Menard to visit loved ones was similarly inaccessible for many CRIIC members and others in Chicago, so the group organized free trips. For Getty and her family, these free visits were a relief in the midst of financial struggles.

“See My Son Again”

By the time Getty heard about Miller v. Alabama, Steven had already spent over a decade in prison. Getty reveals that she was shocked to realize that the Appellate Court would reconsider her son’s case after all these years, although “we were a little confused by the fact that they were getting ready to do a retrial.” She thought her son would and should have been released right away. “I was trying to understand what was going on. I thought, ‘Why was he getting a retrial?’ We already knew that Steven was innocent, and we thought, at some point, they would be able to figure that out. But after serving all that time, they still hadn’t figured it out.” Notwithstanding her concerns, Getty was hopeful this would be the end of her son’s ordeal. It was not. 

Steven was resentenced to 50 years at 50 percent, meaning he had to serve a minimum of 25 years in prison. “After all this, he still had a cloud over his head; he still had to carry this burden,” Getty says. “They did not clear his name. They put him in a position where he had to spend more time in jail. I didn’t expect that from the judicial system.” 

The family continued to fight and wait, and after two and a half decades behind prison walls, Steven was released. When she first saw him, Getty couldn’t believe he had regained his freedom. “I never thought I would be alive to see my son free again. I didn’t think I would get to touch him, hug him,” she says. “I’m happy that he’s out because I get to touch him, to talk to him, to rub his face when he is happy, to hold him if he is sick.”

“My Son is Still Locked Up”

Beyond her excitement, Getty is aware of how her son has been impacted by his lengthy incarceration. According to her, he is “stuck in time” to a certain extent. “A lot of damage was done. He missed milestones. He missed girlfriends, teenage friends. He was incarcerated as a boy, and he didn’t get to experience certain things. It’s hard to grow from a boy to a man.” So Getty and the family are still trying to help him advance 30 years. Getty sees a “lot of residue from incarceration. My son is still scared to step outside. He is scared to talk to certain people. He is just a shell.” 

This is the heartbreaking reality facing people whose loved ones come home after decades in prison. Getty can only remain hopeful that time will heal the wounds. “I want my son back, not fearful, not leery, not nervous, not struggling to speak as he tries to narrate what happened when he was in prison.” 

As she reflects on the tragedy that almost destroyed her family, Getty says, “It was a shameful and stressful situation that I don’t wish on anyone.” She doesn’t want another mom to experience the pain she went through. 

Her advice to parents is to remain vigilant, even though one cannot predict the future. “We cannot say what our kids will get into. We cannot say, ‘That will never happen to my child’ because we don’t know what might happen. It might happen in any roundabout way. It might happen in a way that we never even saw coming,” she warns. “We have to be on guard as parents. And still, we’re not prepared. We’re not prepared for tomorrow. We’re prepared for today because we’re dealing with today. But tomorrow is a whole different story. We don’t know what’s going to come.” 

Getty may not know what the future holds, but she is determined to assist her son until his name is cleared and he receives an exoneration certificate. “My son is still locked up. With the stigma of murder conviction attached to his name, he is free, but he’s not free,” she says. 

In addition, Getty also continues to help Steven figure himself out after such a long time behind bars. “I tell him, ‘We’ve made it this far, let’s keep going.’” She encourages him to build new memories and strives for happiness in spite of the circumstances. She explains, “I want people to see the better part of my son, not what the system labeled him as.”