TIME IS ON THEIR SIDE

The downtown mural Time Saved vs. Time

Served depicts (clockwise from bottom left)
Sheila Donaldson Johnson, DeAnna Hoskins,
Tyra Patterson, Tracy Brumfield, and Belinda
Coulter-Harris. Each has dedicated herself to
helping create second chances for others.

MAKING THE MOST

OF ABY PATRICIA GALLAGHER NEWBERRY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY KRAMER

SECOND
CHANCE
48
T
T HE STORY OF THIS DOWNTOWN MURAL BEGINS WITH TYRA PATTERSON. SHE IS
the glue holding it all together. So let’s start with her.
It’s September 1994, and Patterson is 19. She and a friend leave Patterson’s moth-
er’s apartment in Dayton after midnight in search of the friend’s missing car keys.
On their way back, sometime after 2 a.m., they find themselves in the middle of an
encounter between two carfuls of young people near the apartment. One group is
robbing the other.
Patterson picks up a dropped necklace from the pavement near one of the cars. Once
home, she hears gunshots. She calls 911 to alert police.
Patterson made this mural happen. She
pitched the concept to ArtWorks. She de-
veloped the design. She recruited a muralist
from Philadelphia and an artist friend, then
still incarcerated, to collate photos of the five
subjects into the mural image. She worked
with two teaching artists, who directed eight
youth apprentices to paint Time Saved vs. Time
Served on the side of the Court Street building
last summer.
“People who make mistakes should be hu-
manized,” Patterson will say on dedication day,
pointing out the bold headline at the top of the
mural: We don’t write people off.
“It’s important that we give people second
chances, even third chances,” she’ll say when I
speak with her via Zoom from her Cincinnati
apartment several weeks later.
And the woman who hired her to make
those bold assertions, ArtWorks CEO and
Artistic Director Colleen Houston, will say
that Patterson was the right person with the
Soon, she will learn that 15-year-old Michelle Lai died after being shot in one of right message for 2020, when all seven of its
the cars. Patterson will be grilled by police, who coerce her into falsely confessing that new murals offered a “New Voices” theme.
she took the necklace from the neck of a girl in the car, instead of off the ground. By the “Art,” says Houston, “creates compassion and
end of the following year—on December 28, 1995—she will begin serving a sentence empathy. Art has the power to change hearts
of 43 years to life for aggravated robbery and aggravated murder. and change minds.”
Twenty-two years later, Lai’s sister, Holly, will write to then-Gov. John Kasich to Collectively, the five women featured on
assert Patterson’s innocence and to plead for her release. Twenty-three years after Time Saved vs. Time Served spent 48 years
the crime—on Christmas Day 2017—the state of Ohio will grant Patterson parole. behind bars. Four were convicted for crimes
While in prison, Tyra Patterson learns to read and write and tell her story. She finds related to drug use and own their guilt. Patter-
a lawyer who believes in her. She attracts the support of politicians and celebrities son served the longest, for a crime she did not
with the hashtag #IAmTyraPatterson. She is the subject of national news coverage commit. All have proven themselves worthy
and films. of second chances, and all now work to help
When she’s finally free, she will take a job at the Cincinnati-based Ohio Justice and create second chances for others.
Policy Center. And while walking in city neighborhoods she’ll see murals on buildings
and think that she should create one that tells her story and that of other women who
did time and, once released, began to serve Ohioans seeking justice. BELINDA COULTER-HARRIS’S RECURRING
All of which leads to Patterson, now 46, standing on a downtown sidewalk in Octo- dream began at age 5. She is falling off the top
ber 2020 in front of a three-story image of herself and four fellow “returning citizens” of a building. Before she hits the ground, a nun
painted on the side of 235 W. Court St. Belinda Coulter-Harris, Tracy Brumfield, Sheila catches her. “When I think about it, it says that
Donaldson Johnson, and DeAnna Hoskins join her to dedicate the 200th mural created God has always had me,” she says. “He’s always
by ArtWorks, the 25-year-old nonprofit that employs area teens to make art. caught me. Even when I was a little girl, I was

50
 HER STORY HAS A SEQUEL
TYRA PATTERSON
PHOTOGRAPHED ON
MARCH 17, 2021.

put in situations that no child should ever

be in. I’m still here, for some reason.”
But her path to a brighter future, like
the other women Patterson selected for the
ArtWorks mural, wasn’t straight. Raised in
Cincinnati by a family that struggled with
poverty and drugs, Coulter-Harris grew up
early. “At 5 years old, I was standing on a
chair cooking for me and my little brother,”
she recalls.
By 14, she’d had her first child. By 19, her
second. At age 22, she and a woman named
Elizabeth Green robbed a man across the
street from Coulter-Harris’s apartment.
Green then stabbed the man to death, earn-
ing the death penalty—later commuted to
a life sentence—from the state of Ohio.
For her part in the crime, Coulter-Harris
served 20 years of a 12-to-50-year sentence
on involuntary manslaughter and aggravat-
ed robbery charges.
Released in 2008, she turned up at Cin-

cinnati Works, the nonprofit focused on
lifting “members” out of poverty through
employment. They advised her to return to
school in order to supplement the GED she
earned while incarcerated. In quick order,
she completed an associate degree, then a
bachelor’s, then a master’s.
“ART HAS
because prisons lock down inmates in
those conditions. Another time, a boss had
to gently remind her she didn’t need to ask
THE POWER permission to use the bathroom, another
habit from prison life.
TO CHANGE And like many returning citizens, she’s
felt stained by her past mistakes. Tyra Pat-

HEARTS AND
Four years ago, Cincinnati Works hired
her as an intake coordinator, and she be-
came Miss Belinda—often the first point of
contact for new members seeking employ-
ment. Along the way, Coulter-Harris, now
CHANGE
terson has helped the stain fade.
Patterson arrived at the Ohio Refor-
matory for Women in Marysville when
Coulter-Harris was seven years into her
sentence there. “Me and a lot of other old-

55, rebuilt relationships with her adult chil-
dren and cared for her paraplegic mother,
who passed away five years ago. In 2019, she
married Larry Harris, whom she’d known
for 40 years.
Life after prison hasn’t always been
easy. Early on, she once nearly skipped a
bus ride to work because it was foggy out-
side. She’s spooked by fog, she explains,
MINDS,” SAYS
timers that were in prison were there for
Tyra,” says Coulter-Harris. “She looked up
to me as her ‘auntie’ type of person.”
COLLEEN Sharing her face—and story—for the
ArtWorks mural “feels like we still have
HOUSTON. that ability to be there for other people,”
she says. “Even after we’re no longer in
this world, maybe somebody can go look
at the mural and say, CONTINUED ON PAGE 84

51
MAKING THE MOST OF A SECOND CHANCE
CONTINUED FROM PAGE 51

TIME IS ON THEIR SIDE

The downtown mural Time Saved vs. Time
inspiration—useful to people returning to SHEILA DONALDSON JOHNSON FIRST
Served depicts (clockwise from bottom left)

their communities. met Tyra Patterson via video. The Ohio

Sheila Donaldson Johnson, DeAnna Hoskins,
Tyra Patterson, Tracy Brumfield, and Belinda
Coulter-Harris. Each has dedicated herself to
helping create second chances for others.

Brumfield launched RISE in 2017, after Justice and Policy Center, where Johnson
MAKING THE MOST winning what she calls a “one-in-a-trillion is a senior paralegal, had just taken Patter-
OF A
shot” $100,000 grant as a People’s Liberty son’s case. Johnson’s boss, OJPC Executive
BY PATRICIA GALLAGHER NEWBERRY | PHOTOGRAPHS BY JEREMY KRAMER

SECOND Haile Fellow. She and her team have pro- Director David Singleton, asked Johnson

CHANCE duced 26 editions of the paper, launched

a companion website called RiseUpNews,
48 and added Montgomery County jails to
those in Hamilton County as distribution
You know, this is one of the places that it sites. She’s now exploring expansion into
started. We hope to get rid of this whole other Ohio county jails, prisons, and youth
inclination to sum a person up by one mis- correctional sites as well as, she hopes,
take.” other states.
Brumfield says she could have used
WHEN TRACY BRUMFIELD MET WITH THE something like RISE when she was fresh
teenagers painting Time Saved vs. Time from prison. “I was homeless on the streets
Served last summer, she didn’t like her of Cincinnati and addicted to heroin,” she
face—the one already painted on the says. “I have a bachelor’s degree, and I found
building. She had been photographed for it difficult to navigate our social service
the mural fresh from ovarian cancer treat- system.”
ment, “and, oh my God, I looked horrible,” She hopes being among the faces on the
she says. ArtWorks mural will bring attention to
So she talked to the artist assigned to RISE, the injustice of criminalizing those
“[AFTER PRISON] I WENT BACK TO DOING THE SAME THINGS
BECAUSE OF ALL THE NO ANSWERS: YOU CAN’T LIVE HERE, YOU
to review video of the Dayton Police De-
partment’s questioning of a then-19-year-
old Patterson. “When I saw Tyra, woo, my
heart just went out to her,” Johnson says,
pausing to wave off tears. “She was a child,
uneducated. She didn’t really know what
was going on.”
Over time, with OJPC support, Patter-
son would establish that she was coerced
into implicating herself in that videotaped
interrogation. She would prove, too, that
the jury that convicted her saw only the
portion of video with her false confession,
not the entire 88 minutes. Johnson watched
the full confession. “I had to shut the office
door, and I just cried,” she says.
These days, Johnson considers herself
something of a big sister to Patterson, who
calls Johnson a pioneer among women who
made the most of their second chances.
“You kind of reconstructed and reinvented
yourself on the quiet side,” Patterson told
her when she asked to add her to the mural.
Johnson, 63, says she almost missed

CAN’T DO THIS OR THAT,” SAYS SHEILA DONALDSON JOHNSON. her second chance. Drug trafficking charg-
es landed her in Ohio prisons in 1984–85
and again from 1986 to 1989. She spent
paint her portrait and asked for some re- with addiction, and the overall needs of additional time in jails in Ohio and else-
visions. “He kind of fixed my face, based returning citizens. where.
on how I look now,” she says. “It came out Now sober for six years, Brumfield’s She struggled to get clean until 1993. “I
much better.” addiction began in college with an opiate found myself going back to the same thing
Vanity was not the motivation. At 54— prescription for migraine headaches. She that I once knew because of all the no an-
with cancer, heroin addiction, and prison built a career in magazine publishing until swers I heard: No, you can’t live here, you
time now behind her—Brumfield really a 2012 conviction for drug possession sent can’t do this, you can’t do that. So I almost
wanted to show a more hopeful visage to her to prison for six months. With the help gave in to the system telling me no.”
the world. “That’s not how I wanted to be of the People’s Liberty grant—and her wife By 1993, Johnson says, “something told
remembered, as sick,” she says. Instead, if and their 13-year-old son—she’s been re- me, You’re going to die if you don’t stop.” She
her plans pan out, she’ll be known as the building ever since. got help. She stopped. And she earned a
woman who took a small Cincinnati news- Support is critical to recovery, she bachelor’s degree from the University of
paper to jails and prisons across the coun- notes. She’s certainly needed her own sup- Cincinnati and landed her first paralegal
try. port network through the past year, as she job, before arriving at OJPC 19 years ago.
She’s already four years into RISE (Re- expanded RISE, battled cancer, and endured And now she’s honored to be pictured on
enter Into Society Empowered), a publi- the COVID lockdown and the death of her the side of a building owned by former
cation whose readers are soon-to-be or 86-year-old father. Hamilton County Deputy Sheriff Sean
just-released incarcerated people. Avail- The RISE tagline reads Hope. Help. Hu- Donovan. “Our paths have crossed again,”
able at no cost from jail commissaries, manity. “By putting those things together,” she jokes.
the four-page issues provide information Brumfield says, “we can change humanity When the 16-year-old grand-niece she
about housing, jobs, addiction treatment, and humanity’s view on people who have and husband William “Billy” Johnson are
and other services, along with stories of been incarcerated.” raising saw the finished mural, she told

8 4 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M M AY 2 0 2 1
Johnson, “Aunt Sheila, that’s on point.”
Johnson thinks the artists could have added
a few more of her small freckles.
But despite her “cool as a cucumber”
reputation at OJPC—just one returning
citizen helping other returning citizens—
she can’t help feeling the significance of
being among the five women depicted.
“They usually wait for people to die to put
them on a mural,” says Johnson. “This is
something special.”
DEANNA HOSKINS HAS MOVED EVER
higher in more than 20 years in criminal
justice work. A Cincinnati native, she was
a correctional casework manager in the In-
diana prison system, then came back to run
Hamilton County’s first Office of Reentry.
Later came a stint in Washington, D.C.,
with reentry work for the U.S. Department
of Justice.
Since 2018, Hoskins has led Just Lead-
ership USA, a New York City nonprofit
aiming to cut the nation’s correctional
population in half by 2030. As president
and CEO, she oversees a $1-million-plus
budget, a staff of nearly 20, two boards,
and a funder roster that includes corporate
names like Kellogg, Ford, and Rockefeller.
During her 20s, though, Hoskins was on
the streets of Cincinnati, deep into crack
cocaine. At the dedication of Time Saved
vs. Time Served, she told the crowd that
Court Street plays a starring role in her life
story. “My active addiction happened at the
corner of Court and Linn [streets], at the
bottom,” she said, “and my life transitions
were where Court Street dead-ends into
the county courthouse.”
Her drug use landed her in court, where
a 1990 probation violation yielded a 45-day
stay at the River City Correctional Center.
That exposure to the system—and separa-
tion from her three children—inspired her
path to recovery and her start in criminal
justice work. Then she finished college (and
obtained three degrees), won a pardon for
her earlier crime, and began the work that
lured her to New York.
Along the way, she followed the #IAm-
TyraPatterson story. When they finally
met, they hugged like they were long-lost
friends. “It was almost kindred spirits, be-
cause we could truly connect on the pain
and the trauma.”
Hoskins likes that the mural highlights
women since, she says, “we normally do the
work behind a man who gets the acknowl-
edgement.” She likes that all five are women
who found success after convictions and
what the mural says about Cincinnati.
Hoskins, 52, began running Just Leader-
ship from here last year, with COVID draw-
ing her back to family in this area. After
years in other cities, she thinks “nobody
knows how to tuck the ills of a community
away more than Cincinnati.”
Perhaps ArtWorks’s 200th mural sig-
nals a change. “Conservative Cincinnati
put these faces on the side of a building,”
she says. “To acknowledge this issue, that
is progress.”
TYRA PATTERSON LEFT SCHOOL IN THE
sixth grade. Her family—mom Jeannie and
three brothers—struggled with poverty
and occasional homelessness. Her father,
an alcoholic who abused her mother, died
when she was 13. She had just one job, as
a Wendy’s cashier, before that 1994 night
in a Dayton alley changed her life. She’d
quit because she didn’t know how to make
change.
Out of prison now for four Christmases,
Patterson is an enthusiastic, well-informed
cheerleader for returning citizens. She
writes op-eds and speaks at high schools
and colleges. She’s the Ohio Justice and
Policy Center’s first-ever community out-
reach strategy specialist.
When we talk in December, she hops
on Zoom in a winter white holiday sweater,
hair and make-up done at 10 a.m., with a
curated bookshelf and sleek silver-and-
white props behind her. It’s her closet, she
reveals with a giggle.
Patterson is clearly not who she was at
19, when her false confession, combined
with poor legal representation, led to her
conviction. “I was young, very young. And
not only that, I was ignorant.”
She set out to change that behind bars,
securing her GED, completing paralegal
training, and earning a steam engineer’s
license. And she took up art. “Art was our
way of life,” she says. “It stabilized us. It was
therapeutic for us.”
She also found allies who became critical
to her eventual release. One was Chinonye
Chukwu, a filmmaker best known for the
2019 drama Clemency. Then a professor at
Wright State University in Dayton, she led a
filmmaking project at Dayton Correctional
Institution, with Patterson among her stu-
dents. Patterson says Chukwu deserves
credit for creating #IAmTyraPatterson.
Another key ally was David Singleton.
At the suggestion of an OJPC board mem-
ber, he took a look at Patterson’s case and
signed on to represent her in 2012. It would
be his organization’s first wrongful convic-
tion case.
Pivotal, too, were key players in the
1994 crime. Michelle Lai’s killer said Pat-
terson was innocent. The killer’s boy-
friend said she was innocent. Years later,
Lai’s sister spoke out, too, telling Ohio’s
governor she no longer believed Patter-
son was responsible for her little sister’s
death. “Dear Governor Kasich: I am writ-
ing to ask you to release Tyra and set her
free,” Holly Lai Holbrook said in a April
2016 letter. “I no longer believe that Tyra
participated in the robbery that led to Mi-
chelle’s murder. I believe it is wrong for
Tyra to stay locked up.”
On October 24, 2017, the Ohio Parole
Board voted in favor of parole for Patter-
son. She walked out of prison the following
Christmas Day, kissed the snowy ground,
and joined her family for dinner.
Through and since her ordeal, Patter-
son has told her story multiple times. The
Dayton Daily News covered it closely. The
Guardian featured her case in a three-part
series. A Google search of her name turns
up 600,000 hits. More attention will like-
ly come if Netflix releases a planned film
about her case and if she wins the pardon
and exoneration she’s seeking with help
from the Innocence Project. “I don’t turn
down an interview,” she says now.“I thought
it was very important that people know.”
But Patterson also says she never
wanted to be known just for serving time.
“I didn’t want to be the girl who spent 23
years incarcerated. I wanted to be more than
my story.”
A mural that sits on Court Street, fac-
ing the home of Hamilton County’s justice
system, ensures that. As Patterson says,
“These are actual people who are doing
amazing things that we’ve given a second
chance to.” Their names are Belinda, Tracy,
Sheila, DeAnna, and Tyra.
M AY 2 0 2 1 C I N C I N N AT I M A G A Z I N E . C O M 8 5