This interview accompanies the essay “A New World,” written by Tyrone Wyche and published in Richmond magazine’s July issue.
After 28 years in prison, Tyrone Wyche is finding his footing as a new resident of Richmond. (Photo by Tina Eshleman)
Tyrone Wyche had been in prison before. Back in 1976, when he was a young man of 27, he served seven years in the former Virginia State Penitentiary after being convicted in a series of Northern Virginia robberies, he says. In 1990, another string of robberies in Washington, D.C.-area supermarkets landed him behind bars again.
Initially, he thought it would be much like his previous stint: “I’d go in for a few years to clean up my habits.” But this time, Wyche says, “I got hit with a sledgehammer.” Those few years became almost three decades.
Now 68, he still moves with the fluid grace of an athlete, but one carrying the weight of experience. Wyche recalls the events of his life while sitting in a gazebo outside the transitional housing program on Chamberlayne Avenue where he was living after his release on Feb. 13. He’s back in the city of his birth, but it’s not a place he’s ever lived — apart from his time in the State Penitentiary. Richmond is new and strange to him.
Born in the segregated former St. Philip Hospital on the Medical College of Virginia campus, Wyche grew up in Brunswick County, near the Virginia-North Carolina line. The son of a live-in domestic worker and an absent father, he moved between relatives’ homes. Even as a boy, he used to steal things — “That was the knock on me, all through growing up,” he says. In an autobiographical essay, Wyche reflects that, “As a child, not only had I gotten negative stimulation by stealing, I’d found stealing exciting.”
He could be difficult to manage, he acknowledges. Once, when he was about 7 or 8, an exasperated relative pulled out a gun while warning him to control himself. He doesn’t recall what prompted that, exactly, but he developed an intense aversion to firearms.
“Even when I was a child, if I got a toy pistol, I’d break if up and use it for something else,” he says. “I never owned any guns.”
Eventually, Wyche settled with a pair of distant cousins, a couple he fondly calls “my grannies.”
“My grannies gave me a good childhood," he says. "They were empty-nesters. I was in fourth grade when I went to live with them.” There was no telephone, and the couple didn’t read or write, so to keep in contact with relatives in New York, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., young Tyrone would write letters for them.
The writing practice served him well as a student, and later, when he was in prison, gave him a means of expression and introspection — and a way to pass the time. “In a lonely cell, pen and paper were friends with whom to talk,” he writes in another essay.
It’s no surprise that the 6-foot-9 Wyche was pegged as a basketball player. And while he felt pushed into the sport initially, he learned to love it.
“My coaches were good male figures in my life,” he says. Because he lived about 20 miles from his high school, Wyche would stay overnight at his high school coach’s house. “I almost started living with him and his wife and two kids,” he says.
After graduating in 1967, he became the first African-American to win a full, four-year scholarship to East Carolina College (now university) in Greenville, North Carolina. Other colleges also tried to recruit him — among them Villanova, Arizona State and Virginia State University.
Tyrone Wyche as a student-athlete at East Carolina College (now University) (Photo courtesy The Daily Reflector Image Collection, Joyner Library, East Carolina University)
It was a tough adjustment from the all-black James S. Russell Jr. High School to the predominantly white college. Of the approximately 15,200 students, he says, only about 50 were black.
“I wasn’t ready for college,” Wyche says. Also, “I was not the right person to be first. ... I was looking for something to protest. I wanted to change the place rather than get something out of it.”
He stayed at East Carolina for a year, then transferred to the mostly black University of the District of Columbia.
“I thought the problem was the white school,” Wyche says, “but the problem was really me.”
He started using heroin and cocaine, dropped out of school, and was in and out of jail. He robbed stores to get money for drugs.
An Oct. 12, 1990, article in The Washington Post describes the search for a man nicknamed the "stretch bandit" who had eluded arrest for two months while robbing at least 16 supermarkets in Alexandria, Fairfax, Loudoun and Prince William counties in Virginia and Prince George's and Montgomery counties in Maryland. Police had announced a $1,000 reward for Wyche's arrest. The next day, a call to Crime Solvers led police to Wyche, then age 41, at a Days Inn in Mount Vernon, The Post reported.
Though he pretended to have a gun during the robberies, Wyche says he never carried one. Still, he acknowledges there is a gun charge in his record, because a witness testified — at the urging of prosecutors, he says — that she thought she saw him carrying a gun.
“I fought it, but they did not drop it,” he says. “It came back to haunt me. It was a tough-on-crime era, and they exaggerated the charge.”
The sentence he received in 1990 was for over 70 years, he says — 50 years for the new charges plus the remainder of his 27-year sentence from 1976, of which he had served seven years before being released on parole.
Fifteen years ago, Wyche believed he was ready to return to society. With the help of prison programs, self-help books and Alcoholics Anonymous, he had confronted the problems within, and now he felt trapped in the prison system. He appealed for parole, but got turned down year after year.
“It was so depressing,” he says. “You had to spend all your energy not becoming depressed. … You develop a kind of resilience of spirit. You also have support because other guys are going through the same thing.”
He tried to make the most of his time in prison. He worked as a librarian, he tutored writing and literature classes, and he helped put together a literary journal called the Captive Quill, featuring work by inmates.
In 2016, “I really felt like it was going to be my year,” he says. He was then 66 years old and thought that surely the Virginia Parole Board would see it was time to release him. But records show he was denied parole on March 23 of that year. The reason stated was “crimes committed — robbery; robbery; robbery." On Aug. 5, 2016, several weeks before his 67th birthday, the board denied his request for geriatric parole, citing an “extensive criminal record.”
Then, something changed. That November, he says, Gov. Terry McAuliffe visited Deerfield Correctional Center in Southampton County, where Wyche was being held, and spoke to inmates at an annual veterans' banquet. The governor, Wyche says, expressed displeasure that so few inmates were being granted parole. During his address at the banquet, McAuliffe talked about his efforts to restore voting rights to convicted felons and reduce veteran homelessness.
“I am a governor that believes in parole,” he said, according to The Tidewater News. “I am a governor that believes in second chances. People make mistakes.”
In a 2015 commentary piece published in The Washington Post, McAuliffe had written, "One issue we must address is the number of nonviolent offenders occupying prison beds. While we have made progress in reducing this number, the Department of Corrections reports that 9,000 offenders, representing 24 percent of its population, have no violent crimes on their records. At $27,000 per inmate per year, we are spending approximately $243 million annually to house nonviolent offenders."
In 2017, after a shift in the composition of the parole board, members changed the way they were interpreting the state's three-strikes law, which kept inmates such as Wyche, many of them nonviolent, imprisoned longer than the typical sentence for first-degree murder.
On July 6, 2017, Wyche finally received approval for parole. After going through a reentry process, he was released on Feb. 13. Since then, he's been working to rebuild his life. He recently started a job as a driver and merchandiser for the Richmond Metropolitan Habitat for Humanity.
He also plans to keep writing, particularly about the effects of mass incarceration. Using essays he wrote while in prison and after his release, Wyche applied for a Writing for Justice Fellowship through PEN America.
Writing, he says, helped him find his way out of self-made prisons. "Now, I want no celebration of my freedom other than to be able to write more freely."