Ol’Otis
The Picasso of the Ghetto
well they told a half truth
the original story
https://www.si.com
Complex did a cover story in 2015
Your Sneakers or Your Life: 25 Years Later, Has Sneaker Crime Changed?
The cover is a polemic, an image that shocks and starts. The account inside is more harrowing still. In May of 1989, 17-year-old James David Martin led 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas into the woods, strangled him to death, and took his two-week-old pair of Air Jordans. In Sports Illustrated’s iconic account, Michael Jordan himself is sitting at his locker when he is told the story. He becomes solemn and grieved. “I can’t believe it,” he says, on the verge of tears. The nation has become a warzone, the story seems to say, fueled by desperation and decadence alike: a place where a red and white bundle of leather and polyurethane warrants murder.
Except, that’s not the full story. Not nearly. Because James David Martin ceased to be a normal kid when he was six years old, when his mother beat his sister to death. It was later revealed that Martin not only strangled Thomas in the woods that day, he sodomized him as well. After serving seven years in jail, Martin soon went back in, this time for strangling a relative and stabbing him in the neck. Three months after being released in 2005, Martin murdered his girlfriend, Cicela Santiago, and left her body in a parking lot trash bin. Most recently, in 2012, he pled guilty to the 1998 rape and murder of Marleny Cruz, after new DNA evidence connected him with the crime. When asked if there were other victims, Detective Malcolm Reiman told the New York Times, “I would say it’s a very strong possibility.”
the original story
https://www.si.com
Complex did a cover story in 2015
Your Sneakers or Your Life: 25 Years Later, Has Sneaker Crime Changed?
The cover is a polemic, an image that shocks and starts. The account inside is more harrowing still. In May of 1989, 17-year-old James David Martin led 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas into the woods, strangled him to death, and took his two-week-old pair of Air Jordans. In Sports Illustrated’s iconic account, Michael Jordan himself is sitting at his locker when he is told the story. He becomes solemn and grieved. “I can’t believe it,” he says, on the verge of tears. The nation has become a warzone, the story seems to say, fueled by desperation and decadence alike: a place where a red and white bundle of leather and polyurethane warrants murder.
Except, that’s not the full story. Not nearly. Because James David Martin ceased to be a normal kid when he was six years old, when his mother beat his sister to death. It was later revealed that Martin not only strangled Thomas in the woods that day, he sodomized him as well. After serving seven years in jail, Martin soon went back in, this time for strangling a relative and stabbing him in the neck. Three months after being released in 2005, Martin murdered his girlfriend, Cicela Santiago, and left her body in a parking lot trash bin. Most recently, in 2012, he pled guilty to the 1998 rape and murder of Marleny Cruz, after new DNA evidence connected him with the crime. When asked if there were other victims, Detective Malcolm Reiman told the New York Times, “I would say it’s a very strong possibility.”
