Criminal - Bloodlines

Episode Date: June 5, 2015

Julius Robinson had killed for revenge before, and so when his sister was brutally murdered in her sleep last year, he says he planned to "get" the killer. He felt like his family expected him to get revenge, because that's what he'd always done, both in and out of prison. But when he learned that the killer was actually his 17-year-old nephew, he struggled against his family's expectations and his own. Music by Elephant Micah. Say hello on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. Sign up for our occasional newsletter, The Accomplice. Follow the show and review us on Apple Podcasts: iTunes.com/CriminalShow. We also make This is Love and Phoebe Reads a Mystery. Artwork by Julienne Alexander. Check out our online shop.  Episode transcripts are posted on our website. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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And before we start, the episode you're about to hear contains descriptions of violence, so please use discretion. They used to call her Bonnie and Clydede because she would love to hang with me. For what reason, I don't know, because of the public. Every time we went to a liquor house, liquor house, you know, you had a jujones and stuff like that. We would go there where I would take pisses with me and she would want to take one too. And she would take it and we'd get drunk together. And we was real tight. Julius Robinson is describing his sister, Carolyn Hemingway.

They grew up very close in age and were always getting into trouble. Now in their 60s, Carolyn was raising several of her grandchildren in an apartment complex in Durham, North Carolina. And Trayvon, her grandson, he lived with her. She raised him from a little bit of a little baby. And he'd come over here. He'd talk to him. Every time he'd do something bad, she would call me,

and I would call him over here and take him in the back room and put him around the round table and talk to him about what's the right thing to do. 17-year-old Trayvon Evans had dropped out of school and was constantly in trouble with the law. He fought with his grandmother all the time, and it was just getting to be more than she could handle, especially since she was also caring for Trayvon's 4-year-old brother and baby sister. Eventually, things in the house got so bad

that Carolyn told her grandson to pack his things and move out of her apartment. Thanks for joining us. We are following a developing story out of Durham. A woman is dead, her four-year-old grandson recovering after a stabbing. Police say it all started with an argument. 17-year-old Trayvon Evans has been taken to jail, photographed and booked. He is accused of violent acts against his family and a 911 call reveals that he may have tried to cover up what police say he did. The autopsy found 26 stab wounds on Carolyn Hemingway's body, on her neck, chest, and abdomen.

There appeared to be defensive wounds on her arms. She was declared dead at the scene. Trayvon's four-year-old brother had also been stabbed and was rushed to the hospital. He survived. The baby was in the apartment. She was unharmed. Trayvon Evans was charged with murdering his grandmother and the attempted murder of his little brother. He's currently awaiting trial in jail with no bond.

Julius remembers the day he found out his sister had been killed. He was home when Trayvon's stepfather came over with the news. And he knelt down right there and put his head on the end of the chair and started crying. And I looked at my niece and I said, what in the world going on? And he looked back up and he said, she's dead, Punky. I said, dead? I said, you mean my sister Carolyn? He said, yeah, man, she dead.

I said, come on, man, stop lying. I said, I'm going to be talking about that. And immediate right then, I said, wow, who did it? Because I'm going to get whoever did that. I'm going to get them. This wasn't just his grief talking. Julius was serious. He'd hurt people before. He says that in his family, he was the guy you called when you needed something fixed. One way he put it was that he tried to stick up for the underdog.

And that, not surprisingly, had gotten him in a lot of trouble with the law. He'd gotten comfortable using violence to get revenge a long time ago, back when he was a teenager, back when he was the exact same age as his nephew Trayvon, 17. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. In 1970, Julius Robinson was engaged. His fiancée was six months pregnant with their son, and he was working in the OR at Duke University Hospital. And I did that for two years, and I loved it.

And we went to a party one night, a dance party that the community was giving, and the senior citizen gave that dance. And I went there, and I let some friends of mine in that worked at Duke Hospital, five guys. They brought in brown badge, which was alcohol, and they got kind of like intoxicated, and I drunk some of theirs too and they got kind of like too excited and got rather balling into the dance and the senior citizen asked me to ask them out that they couldn't be that no more because they were serving the peace and I asked them out and they got mad with me and my fiance and they jumped on me and her

and she was six months pregnant. His fiancee was rushed to the hospital and Julius went home. He says he didn't know how beaten up he actually was until he got home and looked at himself in the mirror. He called the hospital to check on his fiancee. She was fine. The baby had died.

He packed two rifles, a.22 and a.30-30 Winchester, and walked back to the senior center. So when I seen them down there, I took my rifle down there with me and the.30-30 Winchester, and I shot one guy six times, and he died. And I shot the other guy one time in the neck and shot, well, I actually shot all five of them, but one of them died. Did you know walking back down there was the thought, I don't care what happens to me, I'm going to kill him? When I went there, I said, well, Lord, I don't know what's going to happen,

but I'm going to do what they did to her and my son and me and my intention was not to kill anybody but my intention was to hurt them as well as they had hurt I guess for me for someone who hasn't shot a gun before shooting the man who died six times, was it something like you took that first shot and you just couldn't stop? Yes, when I shot the first shot, it felt like I could not stop because I kept shooting until the bullets ran out of that gun. And then I went to the telegram post and got the other gun

and ran the other four guys down and shot them as well. And I didn't run out of bullets on the second gun and my brother came up to me and grabbed me and my nickname is Punkin' and he said, Punkin', Punkin', you can kill one guy and it's enough. So I remember taking the gun, hitting him in the chin with it, and he fall down on the ground, and I pointed at my brother and said, this is a war, and said, if you don't get out of the way at a time like this, I kill you too. Then all of a sudden I took the gun from pointing at him

and shot the rest of the bullets up in the air. Then I got both guns and went back home, and my friends destroyed both of the guns. Were you scared that they would come and get you ever? I wouldn't say I was scared, but I felt that they would try to hurt me when they see me. And you understood why. Yeah, I understood why, And I always would say, well, they get me before I get them. Then that's the way it is.

The man he killed was named Rabbit Stroud. Julius managed to escape not only the scene of the crime, but the entire state of North Carolina. He fled five hours north to Baltimore to hide out at his brother's house. So when you get to your brother's house, is the idea that you're going to hide out, that you're going to go on the run? Yeah, the idea was that, no, I don't want to go to prison. And my brother, he said, well, as long as you're a brother of mine, I'll hide you out as long as you want.

He said, but the police are going to be looking for you for the rest of your life. He said, but stay here a while and think about it. And I stayed up in the alley for like two weeks. Were you really just up there in that attic hiding? Yes. Yes, and his four daughters, which they were some most beautiful kids that I ever had a chance to really talk to and get to know my four nieces. And they would bring the food upstairs. It would never come down. They had a bathroom up there as well. At the end of two weeks, Julius gave up and turned himself in. He knew that eventually he'd be caught, either by the police

or by friends of the man he'd killed, Rabbit Stroud. He was found guilty and sentenced to 30 years in prison. And did you experience any violence in prison? I mean, when you were young, when you got in, you had people I could assume knew that you were in there for killing a man. Did you have to get strong or be tough to protect yourself? I really did. I learned more violence and more crime in prison than I did outside. Scoops Wednesday. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We talked with Julius at the kitchen table in his apartment, which he shares with a black and white pit bull named Shalom, who let us know she didn't like being left out of the conversation. But I did meet a lot of homosexuals that would work for me and stuff like that because they wanted protection and stuff like that. That would work for you? You would be running them? Yeah, I would run them. I would tell them to do certain things, and I would make sure they didn't get jumped on or didn't get

beaten and didn't get taken advantage of. So you learned the system? I definitely did. I learned the system so well, I ended up catching two more years in prison. As the years passed, his family came to visit less and less and stopped sending money. Why did they stop coming to visit you? I guess it got old, and I think they guess that, well, we just don't want to, well, I felt that they didn't want to deal with me anymore and that they didn't love me anymore because that was exactly what it felt like like and the people inside the prison became my family. When he was released from prison in the early 90s, Julius was more violent than ever.

He was mean. I have to say he was mean. This how I can, nobody, he was what you would have called the black sheep in the family, if you've ever heard that term. Yes. That's how everybody regarded him. Nobody trusted him with anything. Julius admits he wasn't in good shape. He had a bunch of DWIs and was arrested for assault. He was a guy you called if you needed someone beat up. But he thinks some of what he did, while maybe violent, was for good reason. My sister was married, you know, there's five of them and all five of them had got married and they were, husbands was abused to them. And every time they would beat them, I would go beat them

and then let my sister beat them back if they wanted to, and they would do it, and I always did that, and they always called me for that reason every time something like that would happen, and they would call me, even my brothers as well. They would call me about their wives going out with another guy, and they wanted me to go take care of their wives' boyfriend and stuff like that. One night in 2011, Julius bought a bottle of Johnny Walker Red,

drank the whole thing, and tried to end his life by walking into traffic. He was arrested and eventually sent to a halfway house, and now he's living independently. He quit drinking, and he's very religious now. But as he said earlier, when he learned that someone had brutally murdered his sister and stabbed a four-year-old, he felt stirrings of his old self again. If she's got to die like that, by being murdered, in her sleep, well then that person need to be got somehow. Not necessarily killed, but got a lesson. So when he heard it

was Trayvon who had been arrested and charged with this crime, he didn't know what to do. It made absolutely no sense. You know, he wasn't the one I was going to go try to kill, which was my nephew. It had to be somebody else because I knew him. He listened to me like you and I are talking now. He listened to me before he listened to any of my brothers or his mom. So this is out of my mind that he did it.

So I'm looking for other solutions. So I want to know I go out there where she got killed, murdered, and talk to all the public out there to find out who really did it, and it led right back to him. Not only did Julius feel like he should, as he says, go get the killer, but he also felt like members of his family expected him to do something to get revenge, even though Trayvon was locked up in jail, because that's what Julius had always done.

How would you even do that? I mean, do you know how you would do that? If you were a different person, do you even know how you would do that? If I was a different person, most definitely I would. You would know how to do that? Because I wouldn't know how to do that. But you would know. But I would, yeah.

Yeah, I most definitely would know how to do that. So the rest of your family thinks that you have the capability to kill Ian. Yes, indeed. They really do. And they don't believe that I have really turned a new leaf or a new 360 degrees around no they don't believe that 100% at all because I tell you why they don't believe because on through the years I would try to get right

and and straighten my life up and bam soon, soon as something happened, I'm back there. And it happened so many times where they said, well, no, he's going to come. We're going to give him. Y'all get so long. But now I think this is a turning point for them that they know that I'm real, because now I guess picked up my four-year sobriety chip

like two months ago, and they had never seen me stay straight and sober and focusing on persevering, doing the right thing for the right reason in their life. It's only been like six months or two, nine months. For the first time in his life, Julius didn't go for revenge. In fact, he did the opposite. He went and visited and talked with Trayvon. He goes all the time.

He knows what it's like to be locked up at 17. He doesn't want Trayvon to feel abandoned like he did. How can you even look at him? Wow, man, that was hurting. Wow. When I first went there, I really had to pray. I really had to pray before I even went there. And then even when I went there, I wanted to jump through the glass.

I really did. I wanted to jump through the glass because the first thing I saw was a smile. He never said, Punkin and I'm so sorry. I miss my mommy. I missed her. I wish I'd never done this. Can you forgive me? Can anybody forgive me?

It's always game play. Man, I need some money, man. I'm doing this, man. I guess the game ignorant talk where young guys do that like he haven't done nothing in the world. Because he goes to see Trayvon in jail and brings him money, Julius has offended some members of his family. Some aren't speaking to him. Because he's sober now and goes to church, others make fun of him.

They say, well, mom, man, wow, you must be gay. As you turn, I mean,, man, wow, you must be gay. I mean, dad, you're sugar, you're sweet. And that does hurt me when they say that, because that kind of life that I was living, that kind of life that I was in, it is one of the most cruel, ugliest, most difficult way to live that anybody can live. One person who stood by him is his sister Doris, who says that their relationship is now stronger than ever. But Julius Robinson is in this kind of impossible spot.

He talked to us about it so much. One might think that cleaning up your act would solve most of your problems. That's why people do it. So it's a strange thing if you change your life and not everyone likes the new you. Will you go see Trayvon again soon? Might if I get to see him on Friday. You are seeing him or you just saw him? I just saw him this past Friday and took him some money, took him $30.

The 12th was his birthday. How has he changed at all in prison? I was upset again. It seemed like every time I go get him, my spirit falls, but it don't go away. My spirit just falls down. And it shakes my head every time I go see him. But the invention, I know for a fact that it's going to come a time in his life,

if he don't get killed, that he's going to be sorry. Trayvon Evans' trial date hasn't been scheduled yet. Julius says he'll be there. He plans to testify as a character witness on his nephew's behalf. Criminal is produced by Lauren Sporer and me, Eric Menel, helped with sound. Julianne Alexander does our episode art. Special thanks to Carol Jackson. Some of the music in this episode is by Elephant Micah,

and we're excited to announce that they'll be joining us in Brooklyn for our live show on July 15th. Learn more at thisiscriminal.com. If you're interested in supporting us and other shows like ours, email sponsor at prx.org. Check out all the other Radiotopia shows at radiotopia.fm. Great shows like Radio Diaries. In their latest episode, they gave tape recorders to a juvenile court judge and to a 16-year-old repeat offender to get the

same story from two different sides of the bench. You understand, I'll make a promise to you right now that if you come back before me and you're adjudicated on any offense, you'll spend 18 months. I'm going to give you one chance in life, you understand? This is your last chance. Any questions? Release, take the handcuffs off him. That's Radio Diaries. Go listen.

Radiotopia from PRX is made possible with support from the Knight Foundation and MailChimp, celebrating creativity, chaos, and teamwork. I'm Phoebe Judge. This is Criminal. Radiotopia. From PRX. Headlines look better in adults. Effects of Botox cosmetic may spread hours to weeks after injection causing serious symptoms. Alert your doctor right away as difficulty swallowing, speaking, breathing, eye problems, or muscle weakness may be a sign of a life-threatening condition. Patients with these conditions before injection are at highest risk. Don't receive Botox cosmetic if you have a skin infection.

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