Page 1 of This is Law

Chapter One

SEVYN ‘LAW’ CRAWFORD

“Will there be any final remarks before I proceed?” Judge Bowden asked, as he sat behind the elevated bench, in front of the courtroom. His tone was dry, as if there were a million other things that he would rather be doing right now, outside of giving the final verdict towards me, and what was getting ready to be my ex-wife in the next few moments.

When Judge Bowden asked that I knew that myself, nor my lawyer Trent, had any final remarks, so I glanced over at my wife, and her lawyer, that she was using to represent her. The look that I was shooting across the courtroom at my wife was a cold one, and I was damn near antagonizing the fuck out of her, waiting for her to look my way, but she wouldn’t. Her ass had been doing her best to avoid me for the last hour that we’ve been in court.

My wife’s name was Soraya. Everybody called her Yaya though. I call her Boobie. Well, I used to call her Boobie, but the way me, and her been beefing these days, I really couldn’t tell you the last time that I’d called her Boobie. Shit, fuckin around with me, I get around her and do my very best to call her anything outside of a child of God. Yaya knew how to take me there. Her mouth. Her fuckin mouth was slicker than a mothafucka, and if I wasn’t the real ass nigga that I was, I know for a fact that I would have put hands on her years ago. When I say years, I’m talking about over thirty years ago because that’s just how long the two of us have known each other and been in each other’s lives.

I was 38 years old, and Yaya was 36. We met when I was eight, and she was six. A lot of shit happened in my childhood, that caused me to be moved around a lot, but at eight years old, that was my final spot, where I was raised by my pop’s best friend, Dutch. The shit was crazy how I ended up in Dutch’s care. Before living with him, my life was normal. Well, from the outside looking in, it appeared to be normal. I was living in a two-parent household with my mama, and my pops. I don’t remember much of those years because I only had that family structured lifestyle for the first three years of my life. My mom was a stay-at-home wife, who’s only job was to take care of me, and be a damn good wife to my pops, Knox. From stories that were told to me from Dutch, and a lot of the old heads in the streets, I knew that my pops was the nigga to see. He had the streets on lock. The reason why I’m talking about him in past tense is because my pops was no longer here with us. He was gunned down by the time that I was three years old. Nigga died on my 3rdbirthday. Walking in the house, with a birthday cake in one hand, and a gift bag in another hand for me, and some hating ass nigga caught him slipping, emptying the full clip in his ass, having his blood decorate the entire front door, and the pavement.

Even in his death, and the decades that he’s been gone, his name continues to ring bells in Miami. From the many lessons that I was given on my pops, I knew that it wasn’t just weight that he was out here moving. Nigga brought culture to Miami, motha fuckas feared him, and he even brought loyalty to the game. With all of that, you know it came with jealousy, and envy.If it didn’t, niggas wouldn’t have killed him. My pops was the blueprint when it came to this drug shit. He ran his organization like it was a fuckin army. There was a job for everybody in his camp, and he put niggas in positions where they didn’t have to be hungry. Loyalty is what he lived by. From the things that were shared to me over the years about him, I knew that I was everything like him, and that I had his blood running through my veins because when they spoke on him, and his personality traits, I felt like they were talking about me. I just didn’t sell dope. That wasn’t the route that I wanted to go in. Instead, I wanted to be the nigga in the courtroom with the brains, that were defending all the drug dealers, killers, and scammers. That was just a hood way of letting ya’ll know that I was a lawyer. A criminal defense attorney, and Trent that I had sitting next to me, he was one of my lawyers at my firm, that I was using to represent me, and waste my fuckin time, and my wife’s by having us finalize a divorce that her extra ass was asking for. I’ll get to that later though. In the meantime, I’ll finish telling a little bit about my childhood.

After my pops died, my mom took that shit hard. She grieved his death differently. I mean, literally lost her fuckin mind behind that shit. I remember little shit that she would do around the time that I turned 4 years old, but at the time, I was a kid, so I didn’t know that the shit that she was out here doing was basically her way of proving that she’d lost her mind. At night, her ass would go out looking for my pops, and she would bring me along with her. I vaguely remember one time, this lady had us walking under a bridge in Miami, looking for him and she had me come out of the house without any shoes on, so my foot was cut with glass. She had to take me to the hospital behind that shit. I remember my grandma, which was my mom’s mom coming to the hospital as well. They were going at it, and that was the first time that I heard my grandma threaten my momwith taking me away from her. After that incident, shit only got worse, but it was one of those situations where you wouldn’t know the extent of it unless you lived in the house with us. No one knew that my mom had convinced herself that my pops was still alive. Hell, she had even convinced me of that shit. Had me thinking that this nigga was at the dining room table with us, having dinner, and that I just couldn’t see him. I was the spitting image of my pops, so it had gotten to the point where she had stopped calling me Sevyn, and she would call me Knox, which was my pops name. I just remember her placing kisses on my forehead, and always telling me, “You came back for me”. Even with me being a little boy, I knew the shit she was doing wasn’t right, but I didn’t want to tell my grandma on her because I remember my grandma threatening to take me away from her, so I would keep quiet about the shit. For my age, I’ve always been ahead of my time, and smart as hell.

The last straw for me is when my mama started making comments, saying shit like “I’m going to send you back to Knox”. Basically, that was her way of telling me that she was going to kill my ass and have me go wherever the fuck my daddy was at. Man, I remember that shit like it was yesterday. I was in the bathroom, taking a bath, and her ass came in there, and tried to fuckin drown me. I fought to get out of that tub, and once I was out, I ran out of the house, naked, going to my neighbor’s house, telling them what happened, and she had been arrested.

By this time, I was six, and I’d moved into my grandma’s care. My grandma truly believed that my mom had mental issues that she was dealing with from the killing of my father, so instead of having her go to prison, my grandma fought for her, and my mom was placed in a long-term psychiatric facility. She’s been in there since I was six, and here I am, thirty- eight years old, and it pained me to know that she was going to die in that bitch. She didn’t want help. Long gone was the person that shewas before my pops was killed. When he died, she died right along with him, and even though that was the one thing to bring me to tears, knowing that she had to live her life like that, I just knew that that was where she had to be, so that she wouldn’t be harmful to herself, or anyone else around her.

I only lived with my grandma for two years. Till this day, I never really had the right answers as to what really caused her death. I was always told that it was an overdose, but to me, it just didn’t make sense. I knew that my grandma was hurting behind what was going on with her only daughter, and how she’d basically lost her mind, and had to be placed in a psych ward, but I didn’t think that she would overdose on pills because of it. I do remember a lot of times it would be hard for her to fall asleep. I would wake up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, and I would find her either siting up in the living room, watching TV, or she would be in her room, laying down, reading her bible. Because of her lack of sleep, I knew that she began taking sleeping pills. When the autopsy was done on her to find out the cause of death, they found pills in her system that was laced. Till this day, I never found out where the fuck she’d gotten them pills from. I had so many questions that needed to be answered. Did someone intentionally give that shit to her? Was it just a bad batch of pills that she’d gotten? It’s like I would never know the answer to that. Because of all of these deaths from my loved ones, this was the shit that I was talking about when I said that as a child, I was moved around a lot. Each time someone would die, I would have to be passed along to the next person.

After my grandma suddenly passed away, that was really the only family that I had left. If it wasn’t for my pops best friend, Dutch stepping up, I know for a fact that I would have been thrown into the system, being raised in foster care, and group homes. Dutch took me in, and that man loved me as if I came from him.

Growing up, you couldn’t tell me that Dutch wasn’t my pops, and you couldn’t tell that nigga that I wasn’t his son. He was the one that had given me the nickname ‘Law’ when I was just eight years old. I was given that nickname because I was always the kind of kid to want to know ‘why’. I was an inquisitive ass lil nigga. All that shit that happened with my pops, my mom, and my grandma, you couldn’t just tell me the short version of the story. I wanted all the details. I didn’t want my mind to have any room to wonder. Dutch will tell me till this day that when I moved in with him at just eight years old, he would often feel as if he was in the presence of a grown man whenever he was around me because that’s just how wise I was. On top of that, I had a vocabulary of someone that was at least twice my age. Law is what stuck, and that’s what people have been calling me for years.

Dutch was in the same career field that my pops was in. In fact, Dutch was my pops right hand man, so once he was killed, Dutch took over, and he ran the business. Dutch had money out the ass, so growing up, I was living ghetto fabulous. I didn’t want for shit. I used to have all the flyest gear, I had a mean shoe collection, and at just eight years old, my jewelry collection was better than a grown ass man. When it came to education, Dutch made sure to keep me in private school, with a tuition that wasn’t even the average person’s salary. Shit, by the time I was nine, I knew what it was that Dutch was out here doing, so from that tender age, I knew that I wanted to be lawyer, just in case Dutch, or the niggas that he ran with ever got caught up, I wanted to be the one to save them. That was my mindset at nine years old.

Eight years old was the age I was when Yaya moved next door. At the time, it was just her, her mother, and her twin sister, Shai. Everybody will tell you that I fell in love with Yaya when I saw her for the first time. Mind you, I was eight. I didn’t haveany hair on my chest, I didn’t know what the fuck love was, but I knew that I wanted Yaya. For my age, I was grown because I used to hang around grown niggas all the time, and I would pick up on their lingo, and I would see the way they were with women, and I thought that I could be a sponge, and go back, and do, and say all the things to Yaya that I would see Dutch, and those niggas do to other women. Yaya wasn’t having that shit though. At six years old, she hated me. She was in that phase where she thought all boys were dirty, and had the ‘cooties’, so she wasn’t trying to fuck with me. She didn’t find her common sense until the time she was about twelve. That’s been my lil shit since she was twelve, and I was fourteen. Just about everything that we could have gone through together, we’ve gone through it, which is why I didn’t believe that right now, we were on opposite sides of the courtroom, and her ass had really gone through with this bullshit ass divorce. My wife was the kind of person that just likes to do shit, mainly to get a reaction out of me, and I swear to God this was the highest length that she’s gone to piss me off, and to get a reaction out of me, but here we were.

“We don’t have any closing remarks your honor,” Trent responded to the judge, once I looked at him, and basically told him with my eyes that I was fine with everything that we’d shared in court, and I didn’t feel the need to prolong this shit.

Yaya, and I had twin boys. Our boys were fifteen years old, and their names were Legend, and Creed. She knew not to try any funny shit with me, by asking for full custody of those boys because it would have taken everyone in this courtroom to get me off her ass. She knew what my sons meant to me, so even with her doing this petty ass shit by having us come to court, she knew that I drew the line on her coming for my kids. In return, I knew not to do that shit to her as well. Our boys meant the world to Yaya. She would put hands and feet on me if I tried to takethem for full custody, so I didn’t go that route, either. We both just wanted 50/50 custody.

Our divorce has been an ongoing process for almost a year because there were so many steps that had led to this moment. For the longest, I wasn’t taking her ass serious when she brought the divorce up. This was the same woman that would still have my semen dripping down her thighs, then would get in her feelings, hollering about a divorce. At the time, I felt like Yaya didn’t know what the fuck she wanted, so I wasn’t entertaining her shit. I didn’t start thinking that this shit was serious until she moved out of the house. Well, in her case, she packed up some of her shit, and she went to her mama’s house.

Weeks later, that’s when paperwork came in the mail, where her goofy ass had me served with divorce papers. That’s when I knew she was serious. By that time in our marriage, I had a mindset of,it is what it is, and if that’s what she wanted, I was willing to give it to her. We were in a bad place in our marriage for the last two years of it, really. We took a loss that was hard for either one of us to shake back from. We lost our daughter. Our beautiful baby girl, Sarai, was robbed of life, only getting four months here on earth.

A death that was so sudden, and unexpected. A nighttime routine, just like any other night, where she was bathed, fed, and placed in her basinet that was on the side of our bed. Just like our boys, Sarai had her own bedroom, but we hadn’t had a newborn baby to love on at that time in over ten years, so instead of having Sarai sleep in her nursey most nights, where her crib was, Soraya and I would often let her sleep in our room, where her bassinet was.

By this point, I knew that Sarai would wake up like clockwork around two in the morning, wanting to be fed. Knowing that that was something that she would do, I would naturally wake up at that time, so that night, when I woke up at two in the morning, Iwas shocked to see that my daughter didn’t wake up. At the same time, I had to piss, so I remember walking to the bathroom, handling my business, and I came back in the bedroom. Sarai still hadn’t woken up for her feeding, which was weird to me.

That’s when I looked down into that basinet after making it back in the room, and I saw what was left of my daughter in there. It had been enough to bring a grown man to tears. I just remember letting out a scream that I had never let out before in my life, and that scream caused my wife to quickly wake up, and our boys to rush in the room to see what was going on. I’ll never forget that night. I’ll never forget the way my wife crashed out. To know my wife, is to know that she was the crash out queen, and she would take it from 0 to 100 in a few seconds, but even with all the times that I’ve witnessed her over the years getting outside her body, and crash out, I’d never seen her so irate before.

Yaya was a damn good mother. Whether we were together or not, I’ll give credit where credit was due and always give her the flowers that she’d rightfully deserved, and say that if I died, and came back in another lifetime, I would choose her again to be the mother of my children. She was loving towards them, soft, very attentive, and she showed up. She played all roles, whether that be a teacher, doctor, therapist, whatever hat that she needed to wear, she would do that. In the short four months that we had Sarai, the bond that the two of them shared was beautiful. Yaya used to get matching outfits for the two of them, and that shit would be adorable as fuck when Yaya would give Sarai little spa dates at the house, where she would just lay her down on the bed, giving her little massages. To have that little girl removed from our life so quickly, it shook our marriage. Yaya didn’t lose her mind in the sense that my mom had when my father was killed, but she grieved by pushing a nigga away. In the beginning, she was open, and she let me be there for her, butas time went on, I felt like she started treating me like it was my fault that Sarai was no longer here, when nobody was to blame for it. Our daughter passed away from SIDS. It was no villain in that shit. The only villain was a bunch of pain, heartbreak, and silence that took place between us.

Months had gone by, and Yaya stopped sleeping in the same bedroom as me. She would sleep downstairs, and I would sleep in our bedroom. No kind of spark was taking place in our marriage, but I was very much still attracted to my wife. Yaya was one of one. Her face card needed to be studied, and it would go down in history as one of the most beautiful women to grace this earth. I wanted my wife still. I used to try to hug up on her, kiss on her, romance her, get her out the house to take her out on dates, but she didn’t want that shit. We went from fuckin every day to no kind of romance. I brought that shit up to her probably four months after Sarai passed, and I remember her looking me in my eyes, telling me, “You better find another bitch to fuck because it’s a shortage of pussy around here”. I wasn’t the kind of nigga to tell that shit to. If you tell me some shit like that, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, so yes, I went on a field day, fuckin hoes, and I knew that a big part of me only did it because of the low spot that I was in. I knew I was losing my marriage, I had lost my daughter, so fuckin random bitches, and trying to run from the past is how I was coping.

“Yes, your honor. We have one final remark before we close,” Soraya’s attorney, Taryn voiced. I sucked my teeth because I just knew that neither one of us would have any closing remarks, and here they go again, dragging this shit out.

I cut my eyes over again at Yaya, and just like she’s been doing, she wouldn’t look over at me. The judge let Taryn know that she could go ahead with her closing remarks, and she stood, so that she could relay them.

“I would like to request that if Mr. Crawford has any intimate videos or recordings of my client and him engaging in any kind of sexual acts, that they be deleted permanently from his phone, or any other devices that he has. For the record, we don’t think that Mr. Crawford would ever put that kind of footage out there to use it as revenge porn, but for the sake of the marriage coming to an end, there’s no need for him to still be in possession of them,” Taryn shared, and when she said that, I looked over at Trent, and he smirked, and all I could do was shake my head. This is what I meant when I said that my wife just goes around doing shit. She knew fuckin well that I would never leak our sex tapes. I had shit in my phone between us from over ten years ago, and I have way too much respect for her to ever do some vile shit like that.

Trent looked at me, and I put my finger up, basically telling him that I had it. I stood up, cocky as fuck, just like I always am, fixed my tie, and I glanced up at the judge.

“Your honor, with all due respect, I deleted those pictures, and videos out of my phone months ago. I rather the storage be filled in my phone with beautiful images of our children. If we’re going to request that the footage be removed, can we also request that she has the ones removed that are in her possession as well? I wasn’t the only one that was propping the phone up. That was her favorite part-

Trent tugged on my suit jacket, basically telling me to stop. If this nigga didn’t tug on me the way that he did, I swear I would have kept it going, but I had to remember that this wasn’t that kind of setting. I wasn’t defending a criminal case right now. Everyone knew that when I was in court, defending my client, I would play a dirty game, and use everything in my power to get my client off. I didn’t care what would come out of my mouth, but I had to understand that this case was different, and it didn’t cause for all of that.

---