MY FIRST KNOWN KILL

🔵 By David Breaux. Photo by lauragrafie.

My name is David Breaux, I’m 66 years old now, serving a life sentence for 1^st Degree Murder, in the Illinois Department of Corrections at the Hill Correctional Center. I was born and raised on the South side of Chicago in Illinois.

1969! During that summer, the gang wars were in full swing all over the entire city. You couldn’t leave your own block and go anywhere where you didn’t encounter some asshole confronting and asking: “What you be about?” or “Who you ride with?” So your own stomping grounds were limited to your own immediate surroundings. By 1969 and 1970 I was full of anger, and the growing rage inside me at the madness that had been set upon me I was now determined and resolved to survive. So my calling card became “Fuck the world and anyone in it who was not kin or friend! Everyone else is and was fair game!”

Due to changing child labor laws during this time and being a high-school drop out, “The Game” and the streets were the only option left to me, so I started robbing people, stealing cars and selling the parts and since I hadn’t yet learned to drive I did a lot of damage. During one attempted armed robbery, I experienced and learned the hard way what a “hair trigger” was. I had a growing reputation as a killer that I was unaware of at the time. But the night the following happened I was oblivious to that.

I’d shoot and had shot a lot of people but didn’t know for certain if any of them had died at this point, and didn’t care one way or the other. “You get what your hand calls for.” in the streets.

This summer night there were two other people with me when I stopped the guy I was intending to rob. When I stopped him I told him to put his hands up and when he didn’t do what I told him immediately, I shook my gun hand at him and warned him again but my finger touched the trigger, the gun went off. The guy dropped to the ground but before I could search him and take his shit the 3^rd guy with me panicked and we ran instead of getting the loot.

The shooting was mentioned in the paper! My father, whose habit was to read the daily paper, I suspected got wind of my involvement because that third individual had been running his mouth and my father wasn’t the first person to ask me if I had heard about it. My father sent me to New Orleans shortly thereafter. I came back on New Year’s Eve 1970 after a serious falling out with my lying, cheating, thieving, cocaine touting, phony-ass Jehovah Witness uncle Henry (my mother’s sisters Alberta’s husband).

A real piece of shit.

Three months and several more bodies later in the spring of 1970, April 15^th, I shot and killed Ricardo “Rico” Mixon in self defense. My brothers and friends made peace with King David (the real David Barkdole) Chief of The Black Disciples, a peace that could not be reached unless I agreed to it.

So a special meeting was arranged and held in the visiting cage on a non-visiting day so me, my brothers and members/friends could talk and discuss it. We were called “Imperial Pipers” by then. I agreed to the peace. My older brothers Lewey and Krendell were there and Lewey told me Kind David had given his word and had accepted it that his “folks” wouldn’t bother me in the jail. King David’s word was his bond like my own, and amongst his folks his word was low, and so the peace was made and our war with the Black Disciples ended. When some of the Black Disciples’ younger brothers that called themselves “The Gonzatoes” wound up in the Cook County Jail on the same tier as me, word was quickly spread that night that I was “A killer on the street!”

That is when I first became aware of my growing reputation. It only got worse and larger after I got released.

Wherever I went on either side of the city, if someone confronted or stopped me with that: “What you be about…?” or “Who you ride with?” bullshit I’d pull my pistols and start shooting. Fuck their madness!

What I learned and told my two dogs and best friends named Warrior and Cossack was: “The only way to survive other people’s madness is to be crazier and madder than them!” That is exactly what I did. Fueled by rage, booze, and one drug or another I stayed cranked up and crazier than them! By then people knew, realized and were told by others that I was the last person they wanted to fuck with. I survived their madness, a lot of them didn’t.

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