OUR STORY

CUTS find these young men through the sheriff office (first time offenders). Parents who express trouble with their child. Schools that recommends. CUTS is looking for anger issues, rebellion, low self-esteem, depression, and oppression.

 

CUTS was founded by Ellis Curry who grew up as a trouble teen. – Ellis Curry and a group of friends went to Terry Parker High School on Nov. 4, 1993, to find someone who owed their friend money. That boy wasn't there, so they decided to rob someone instead.

At random, they picked 14-year-old Jeff Mitchell (right), who was waiting with a friend for his father to pick him up after an after-school event.

Jeff's father arrived to find him shot to death.

Curry sat down with Channel 4 anchor Jennifer Waugh in an effort to help parents spot the warning signs he says his own mother missed.
Talking about that night 19 years ago, Curry say: "That was never supposed to happen. We would rob somebody, just take whatever they got and just let them go."

Curry's friend, 19-year-old Omar Jones, is the one who shot Mitchell. Curry and two other teenagers also were charged with murder because they took part in the robbery that led to Mitchell's death. Curry, who was 16 years old at the time, is the only one no longer behind bars. His three friends are currently serving 34 years to life sentences in prison.

Curry says he bought his first gun when he was 12 years old for $25. The older brother of a friend of his bought the gun for him at a pawn shops in Arlington.

Asked why a 12-year-old needed a gun, he said: "At that time I felt like if I have a gun, I have power. I've got a convincer. I can instill more fear with a gun than with my fists."

"Even at the time I had no intentions of shooting somebody. I was just going to pull it out scare a couple of folks and make everyone think I was this really bad guy, I'm really not,' Curry said.

Curry says he grew up wanting to be a thug like in the movies he and his friends would watch, movies like Boys N Hood and Menace II Society.

"At the time we thought that was the image to be," Curry said. "The group didn't say 'I want to graduate and go to college,' although that should have been our mind set. But it wasn't."

It's the first time Waugh says she's heard an ex-offender attribute their criminal behavior to images they had seen on television.

Curry was released from prison in 2005 and works now as a mentor. He says he regrets every day his part in the murder and has become friends with Jeff Mitchell's father, Glen. Together, they work toward a common goal of trying to keep the next generation teenagers from following the wrong path.

"That's the whole reason I'm here today; that's why I do what I do," Curry said. "It's all because Jeff's life, my incarceration and the whole incident is why I try to go out and stop anybody who's on that path.