Casey was eight years old when he decided to kill his father using a portable gas heater. His father was a violent, abusive alcoholic who would beat his mother right in front of him. Casey recalls seeing his mother covered in her own blood in the closet.
His father told him not to call him “dad.” Casey started to feel a sense of emptiness and worthlessness, which led him to question the purpose of being here. He became very angry.
Casey found purpose in a South Central LA gang. He easily became violent, stabbing his first victim at just eleven years old. More victims would follow, as well as a lengthy rap sheet.
He rose up in the gang world, feared and hunted by rival gangs.
At sixteen, he was sentenced to twelve years in a juvenile correctional facility for second-degree murder and 52 counts of armed robbery. He ruled the gang-infested prison until he attacked another inmate, which led him to solitary confinement.
One day, a Christian woman named Francis invited him to monthly Bible study. Every month for a year, she came by and Casey declined, but each time her response was the same: “I am praying for you, and Jesus is going to use you.”
In his second year of solitary confinement, he was awake and saw what looked like a movie reel. He saw footage that only he knew, with the bad things he had done in his childhood. Then he saw another scene of a man carrying a cross with nails in his hands. The man called him by his birth name and told him he did it for him. He audibly heard his breath leave.
Casey went to the floor and began weeping and repenting for all the wrong things he had done. He felt free afterward.
He said Jesus told him to talk to the prison chaplain. He prayed with the chaplain and accepted Christ.
Now his faith would be tested. Now eighteen, he would be released from solitary, and a hit was placed on his head for becoming a Christian and leaving the gang.
One day, an inmate came to his cell with a knife and said, “I can’t do this to you.” That inmate was the first person that Casey led to the Lord. The hit was removed, and over the next five years, Casey would lead 200 inmates to Christ.
At age twenty-five, he was released, and in time he forgave his dad, who eventually gave his life to Christ as well.
Today he owns a successful side business and lives in LA with his family.
View the full testimony here:
