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"Right there in the white," said Connie. She pointed at Cousin. Her hand was shaking. "May God forgive you," she said, "because I never will."
FROM FATHER TO SON
"My family knew very little of my real life. In effect, I lived two lives, the one with my mama...and the thing on the street." --George Jackson, Soledad Brother, 1970
For a long time Shareef Cousin thought he knew who his father was. Shareef was the seventh of eight children born to Beverly Cousin in the downtown 9th Ward area of New Orleans. The first five kids came from Beverly Cousin's first marriage. After that relationship ended, she became involved with Robert Epps, a special-education teacher at Nicholls High School, and she had two more kids, including Shareef. He was an intelligent child. The family was poor, but he seemed like he was headed places. He won his school's Martin Luther King award for an essay on "How Technology Has Progressed." "He was a positive role model here," says Shareef's half-brother Ellis Cropper, with whom he lived for a time. "He got A's and B's, played varsity football and served as an usher in church...He wanted to be an accountant so he could manage the money he was going to make as an athlete."
One day Shareef, a few friends in tow, went over to Nicholls High in New Orleans to see his father. Epps had broken up with Shareef's mother years before; so Shareef had no relationship with him and wanted to change that. He went to the front office, asked what room Mr. Epps was in and went to talk to him.
"Do you know me?" Shareef asked.
Epps said that he did.
"You're my father, right?" Shareef asked.
"No, I'm not," Epps replied. "I don't know why your momma would tell you that."
Shareef was crushed. And in front of his friends. "I started crying," Cousin told TIME in a prison interview. "That was like him telling me, 'I'm sorry I made you.' Like I wasn't worth anything."
Family members say that day was the start of Cousin's descent. His grades fell. He developed a bad attitude. His mother began to suspect he was using drugs. A local substance-abuse treatment center, Eastlake clinic, agreed to admit him. There he met James Rowell, a teen who was in Eastlake for depression. After Cousin left Eastlake, he began to run with Rowell, accompanying him on robberies. (Cousin claims he always stayed in the car during Rowell's stickups.) Family members say Cousin was looking for a father figure and settled for a bad influence. "James was on drugs too," believes Cousin. "He'd come around and bring them." Later, Rowell, after being arrested on robbery charges, would turn on his buddy and finger him for the murder of Gerardi. "The system failed [Shareef]," says Beverly Cousin. "We sent a child in to get help, and he met James Rowell instead."
THE DEFENSE
On Friday, Jan 25, 1996, at 11 p.m., Clive Stafford-Smith, a British-born defense attorney living in New Orleans, was awakened by a phone call. It was a lawyer named Willard Hill, whose teenage client, Shareef Cousin, had just been convicted of murder by a jury. Hill, a local defense lawyer, hadn't expected to lose, and now he needed help to keep Cousin off death row. Could Stafford-Smith help him organize an "emergency" case for the penalty hearing? Stafford-Smith yawned and signed on.