Tristen Rouse/CNN

Bear, Delaware — Tina Crawford put the biscuits in the oven, poured the coffee, and proceeded to tell a story that was almost too strange to be true. It had compelled official action from the governor of Delaware. It would soon set a guilty man free. It was unbearably sad, and surprisingly joyful, even though it involved Tina herself contemplating murder.

The story had to be funny, for the sake of accuracy, because Tina’s only child was hilarious. Ira was hilarious in that incorrigible way that boys can be when they know they will always be loved. He was still that way as a man, right up to his 35th birthday, the day he fell victim to a senseless killing, which was also the day he brought home a kitten.

Ira Hopkins lived with his mother and uncle and grandmother in a three-bedroom apartment that already had one cat. Ira had brought that one home too. He proudly announced that her name was Little Girl, and she was to be his grandmother’s emotional support cat. Ira loved to tease his grandmother.

“Grandmom, I’m looking for a woman like you,” he would say.

“As if a woman like me would have you,” she’d reply, always in on the joke.

Now here was this grown man presenting this striped kitten, the apartment’s second cat, an unsolicited gift to others on his own birthday. He had named the kitten Iggy, apparently after the pop star Iggy Azalea. His mother said something like, “So now we’re naming cats after your fantasy girlfriends?”

Ira had a reply for that:

“This is Little Girl’s emotional support cat.”

So that was Ira, the lovable rascal, the brilliant light that suddenly went out. It was getting late on July 1, 2014, and most of Ira’s friends had left the birthday gathering, and he told his mother he was walking his cousins out to the car. Tina was lying awake in bed when she heard the pop-pop of the gunshots. She ran downstairs, found Ira lying on the front steps, put his head in her lap and said, “Mommy’s here.”

Tina was reliving all this after breakfast on a windswept morning in February. She drove from her townhouse to her old apartment complex and then stood near those front steps in the bitter cold. She remembered where her nephews were, where Ira’s blood fell, the worry she’d felt about cleaning it up, and the relief she’d felt when it started raining.

We stood by those steps until the cold was too much. Then we got back in the car so she could show me some of Ira’s favorite places.

Outside D&H Jamaican Cuisine, I asked her to talk with me about anger. She worked up to it gradually, listing the things she missed about Ira.

She would miss his voice, the way he yelled her name when he came in the house, the way his skinny arms felt when he wrapped her in a hug, the way he smelled when he got out of the shower. She would miss their midnight walks in the snow, when all was quiet and neither of them had to say a word.

One night she woke up and thought she heard Ira’s keys jangling. He was born when she was only 18, and he’d been with her for two-thirds of her life. She protected him, and then he protected her. Some boys grew up and left their mothers, but not Ira. Even if he got his own house someday, with his own kids running around, he’d want Tina to be there. He told her, “We will always be together.”

Tina imagined the sound of Ira’s key in the door, and then she realized she would never hear that sound again. It had all been stolen from her. Someone would have to pay the price.

“Whoever killed my son,” she said, “they were gonna get it.”

I asked her what that meant. Getting a gun? Finding the killer? Killing the killer?

“Yes,” she said. “Yes.”

“They need to pay. Whoever did this is — I’m gonna find ‘em. And I want to make them pay. For what they did. By any means necessary.”

The mystery of the disappearing $50

In the days after Ira’s death, there were other things besides retribution to keep Tina busy. The barbecue, for one. She thought a funeral would be too sad. Not really Ira’s style. So she gathered his family and friends and they grilled and drank and played volleyball and listened to music and did the Cha-Cha Slide.

A mystery was solved in those early days, though it was not the mystery of who killed Ira. Tina had wondered for a while about $50 that disappeared from her bank account. She and Ira had access to each other’s bank cards, so she figured Ira had something to do with it, but she didn’t know why. Then a woman approached Tina at a vigil for Ira and told her a story. Her boyfriend had been beating her, and Ira found out, and he gave her $50 for a bus ticket so she could get out of town for a while.

We thought he was out in the streets, Tina’s sister said. Turned out he had his own little ministry.

And Tina continued that ministry: listening to Ira’s friends, having them over for lunch or dinner, occasionally giving someone a place to crash. She thought less and less about revenge. Tina had two nephews who saw what happened that night — one had also been shot, and still had a bullet in his leg — but they didn’t tell her much and she didn’t ask. It was all too painful. No revelation would bring Ira back. When one of Ira’s friends told her he could get some answers, that he had people in the streets looking into it, she told him to stop.

“I didn’t need or want any more violence,” she said.

A year went by, and part of another. Tina gave up on finding a resolution. She’d heard that in Delaware, a lot of killers get away. She told herself that God would take care of it.

And then, one day late in 2015, a police detective showed up. Tina poured him some coffee. He gave her an update on the investigation.

That December, a grand jury indicted two men for the murder of Ira Hopkins.

‘I miss him every day’

On October 27, 2017, following guilty pleas, the first of two defendants appeared in court for his sentencing. His name was Jy’Aire Smith-Pennick. He’d been 18 years old when Ira was killed.

As the hearing began, the court recognized Tina Crawford. Here is some of what she said:

“My son was Ira Hopkins, or should I say is Ira Hopkins, because even though he is not here, he will forever live in our hearts. He was my only child.”

“I never thought the day I gave birth that I would have to be there for his death. But I’m happy that I was, to let him know that he wasn’t alone and that he did not die in vain, and that I will fight for him until my last breath.”

“I have to stay at peace. I have to meditate. I have to keep myself in check at all times, because they took my son. And I refuse to let them have my spirit and soul.”

“I miss him every day. I miss his laughter. I miss him calling me ‘Tina.’ I miss him texting me from the next room asking me, ‘Are you cooking bacon for me this morning?’”

“I have forgiven the people that have done this to our family because my God tells me to. But what they did was wrong, and it was hateful, and it was just full of evilness and they must pay. They must pay with whatever you decide.”

Jy’Aire Smith-Pennick had not pulled the trigger that night. (The shooter would later be sentenced to 30 years in prison — a sentence Tina thought was too light.) But under the law, Jy’Aire was still complicit in the murder because he’d taken part in the robbery that led to it. He was sentenced to 20 years.

“I shouldn’t have robbed them in the first place,” he told the judge that day. “That was wrong. And like I said, I admit to that. I own up to that. But it was never my intention for nobody to lose their life that night. And it’s unfortunate that that happened. So, once again, I apologize to the family. I know they probably don’t like me very much, and I understand that. But I am sorry.”

Tina had felt herself changing these last three years. Softening. No matter how bad a person is, she thought, there’s somebody out there who loves ‘em.

And this was true for Jy’Aire. In the hallway, after the hearing, she noticed a woman named Cheryl Green — a coworker she knew from the hospital where she worked in foodservice. Tina was surprised to learn that Jy’Aire was Cheryl’s nephew.

Wendy Young, another of Jy’Aire’s aunts, was there too. Tina remembers telling both women she was sorry for their loss — that is, their nephew’s departure to prison. The women cried together. They held hands. And there outside the courtroom, they prayed.

Something was happening in Tina’s heart. Something she’d never expected.

Tina stayed in touch with Jy’Aire’s aunts. They talked regularly about Jy’Aire. One day, Tina told them Jy’Aire could write her a letter. And then she said he could give her a call.

Little by little, she learned the story of his life.

A street-hardened youth finds trouble

Jy’Aire was born prematurely to a mother who was already in the hospital for her sickle-cell anemia. They lived with his grandmother until she died, at which point they were evicted, sleeping in the car, no electricity to turn on the nebulizer for Jy’Aire’s asthma, so his mother broke into their former home and they stayed there until the landlord kicked them back out.

He told me about this in a series of phone interviews. The broad outlines of the story were confirmed through legal documents and interviews with relatives.

Jy’Aire’s mother was in and out of the hospital. Sometimes he lived with her; sometimes with other relatives, including Aunt Wendy and Aunt Cheryl. He learned to be self-sufficient: washing dishes, running the vacuum, waking himself up for one of the many schools he briefly attended. His mother got out of the hospital. They went to the grocery store, took items from the shelves, opened them, and ate without paying. His mother went back to the hospital. Now she was fighting for her life.

She had always told him, “If anything ever happens to me, don’t let them pull the plug on me.” He was only 14 when she was taken off life support. From then on, he felt as if he’d let his mother die.

“I just became a different person,” said Jy’Aire, who lived with his father for a time after his mother died. “I just kind of gave up. And I just dove headfirst into the streets.”

Jy’Aire began selling heroin. The money was good. He was arrested, charged, locked up. His father died, and he missed the funeral. Jy’Aire got back out and kept selling heroin. He got a gun. The streets were hardening him. One day a woman drove up to make her purchase. She had two kids in the back of the car. It was raining, and the car windows were down, and the children were getting wet. Jy’Aire told her to roll up the windows. But he still sold her the drugs.

On July 1, 2014, when Jy’Aire was 18 years old, he and two friends were walking through the Village of Windhover apartment complex in Newark, Delaware, about 12 miles southwest of Wilmington. All three men had guns.

When they saw some other men outside on the steps, one of Jy’Aire’s friends had an idea. They would rob the four men on the steps. According to court documents, this friend had already taken part in two other robberies at the same apartment complex.

Jy’Aire told me he didn’t like the idea. He had plenty of money from selling drugs. More than $2,000 in his pocket. And he guessed from a quick glance that these other men were just civilians. They weren’t in the dangerous game that Jy’Aire was playing.

But Jy’Aire’s friend had made up his mind, and he was persuasive. Jy’Aire drew his nickel-plated .32-caliber pistol.

As Tina Crawford lay in bed in the apartment, unaware of what was happening outside, the three robbers advanced on Ira, one of his friends, and two of his cousins. They ordered them to put their hands up and hand over their cash.

It all happened so fast after that. Young men, hearts racing, making it up as they went along. Jy’Aire took someone’s iPhone. His friend got $20 from Ira and wanted more. Ira looked to Jy’Aire, as if appealing to him for help, and said something like,

“Come on, young boy.”

Jy’Aire told Ira to run.

Rebuilding a life

In his regular phone calls with Tina from prison, Jy’Aire found a refuge. A safe space, he called it. He could talk to her about almost anything, tell her things he couldn’t tell other people. His doubts, his relationships, his low self-esteem. But they didn’t talk much about the crime itself. Tina didn’t want to know too many details. One day she told him that he’d taken a piece of her heart, but she wouldn’t hold it against him.

Tina had some motherly instruction for Jy’Aire. She told him he needed to better himself while he was in prison. Get his education. Enroll in every program he could. And after he’d served a few more years, she would do everything in her power to help him get out.

Jy’Aire listened.

One day inside SCI Chester, a medium-security facility outside Philadelphia that housed inmates from both Pennsylvania and Delaware, Clint Miller set up a table. He was proprietor of the CJ Miller Vacuum Center of Harleysville, Pennsylvania, attending a job fair at the prison out of the kindness of his heart.

A young man introduced himself. He was serving a long sentence, so he wouldn’t be needing a job on the outside anytime soon, but he wanted to absorb whatever knowledge he could.

“We had great conversations,” Miller recalled. “And at the end, he said, ‘Would you mind if I wrote you a letter?’”

It turned out Jy’Aire had done the same thing with almost all the guests. Engaged them in conversation, gotten their business cards, asked if he could write to them. Miller was impressed with the penmanship, the storytelling, the potential. He let Jy’Aire start calling him. When he asked why Jy’Aire was in prison, Jy’Aire hesitated. He was afraid Miller would pull away. But Miller believed that everyone needed God’s grace, whether or not they were in prison.

We’re all sinners, he said, and kept taking Jy’Aire’s calls.

A new Jy’Aire was emerging. One who was grateful for every day, determined not to waste his second chance. SCI Chester was a pretty good place for someone like that. You could meet a generous vacuum-cleaner merchant or a sociology professor from an elite liberal-arts college.

Nina Johnson taught a class at SCI Chester that brought inmates into the same room with her regular Swarthmore College undergraduates. Jy’Aire was there, of course, and impressed the professor with his intellect. He looked around the room, heard other inmates chiming in about Plato and African civilizations, and the world felt like a bigger place.

Here are a few of the many ways Jy’Aire enlarged his world inside the prison walls. He took a course in cognitive behavioral therapy. He learned how to be a traffic flagger at road-construction sites. He helped officiate soccer games and unconventional triathlons that involved relay races and weight-room challenges. He finished an eight-week class called the Post-Traumatic Growth Experience. He helped with audiovisual production at a Crime Victims’ Awareness Conference. He became a certified personal trainer. He delivered the most outstanding persuasive speech in a public-speaking class. He got his high school diploma. He finished a 76-hour course that made him a certified peer specialist, which allowed him to be a counselor for inmates in distress, including some he said he had to talk out of suicide.

During this transformation, this death and rebirth, Jy’Aire was getting his own counseling — from the woman whose heart he helped to break.

Her son came to her in a dream

She was drinking her coffee at the kitchen table, a few feet from a sign on the refrigerator that reminded her to choose happiness. Dangling from her left hoop earring was a tiny figurine of a dolphin. Somewhere upstairs was an urn decorated with two dolphins. It contained Ira’s ashes.

“I love dolphins,” Tina said as a tear rolled down her cheek. “Always have.”

Once, at Rehoboth Beach, when Ira was a teenager, Tina saw two dolphins playing in the waves. They made her happy. She had to cherish things like that, because some days she couldn’t get out of bed, and other days she’d be at a traffic light and the grief would wash over her like the Atlantic Ocean. Sometimes a person has to laugh through the tears.

She was laughing, there at the kitchen table, telling me a story about one time she almost died. She’d had a severe allergic reaction that left her unconscious. Ira came to see her in the hospital.

“He was like, ‘Listen,’ he sat down next to me, says, ‘Listen, I’m lettin’ you know this now, Mom. If this ever, ever happens again.’ I was like, ‘I’m gonna try to make sure it doesn’t, Ira.’ He says, ‘But Mom, if it does,’ he says, ‘Look at me.’ He was like, ‘You’re gonna wake up with a missing kidney. Because I’m gonna sell it. On the black market.’”

Now we were both laughing. Her stories about Ira were so good that it almost felt as if he were still there. As if I were getting to know a man who’d been gone for more than a decade. Ira would always be with Tina. Which raised a very big question.

How would Ira feel if he knew his mother was helping one of the men who was charged with his murder?

This question had occurred to Tina, of course. It fell heavily on her conscience. In trying to relieve someone else’s guilt, she had brought guilt upon herself.

One night, Ira came to her in a dream.

Tina, he said.

You’re not betraying me.

It’s okay.

You just keep doing what you’re doing.

A graduation ceremony behind bars

Almost seven years passed from Jy’Aire’s sentencing until the day Tina saw him in person again.

On August 19, 2024, a band played a graduation march inside the prison gymnasium. At SCI Chester, Jy’Aire had taken part in Eastern University’s Prison Education Program. A former high-school dropout was getting his associate’s degree in liberal arts.

Jy’Aire was disappointed at first that day, because it looked as if a work obligation would keep Tina from attending, but she found a way to get there. He looked down the aisle, saw her smiling and crying, and he was struck by the bittersweet strangeness of it all.

“I’m in prison for participating in a murder,” he would later say. “And the mother of this man is here, present, on behalf of me, watching me receive my degree.”

Tina noticed how many of the other graduates thanked Jy’Aire for helping them along the way. Some of them thanked her, too.

“They said, ‘So you’re Miss Tina. I’m so glad to meet you.’ And I’m sitting up there going, ‘Well, how do you know about me?’ And he said, ‘Jy’aire told me, been tellin’ us all about you. We all need a Miss Tina in our life.’”

Jy’Aire wanted to greet her, but other people kept coming up to him, which was nice, and he didn’t want to be rude. Eventually he waded through the crowd and found her, and they hugged for the first time. The hug felt familiar, because Jy’Aire already knew her so well.

She remembers asking him, “Baby, you okay?”

And him telling her, “I’m okay, Mom.”

He says she told him,

“I got you. I got you.”

And this:

“We’ve got work to do.”

They had big plans together, Jy’Aire and Tina. Big things they were going to accomplish. But first she had to help him get out of prison.

‘I lost a son. But in the process, I gained one’

One night about three months later, Jy’Aire lay awake on his bunk in his cell, too excited and nervous to sleep. His commutation hearing was the next day. There was no way to know what the Delaware Board of Pardons would do. Jy’Aire had friends who’d been in prison for 40 or 50 years and still had their requests for commutation denied.

Jy’Aire sometimes had trouble in the lonely quiet. He kept himself busy all day, getting up at 6 a.m., going from one activity to the next, playing basketball, working out, volunteering, but here in the dark he had time to remember the sound of Ira’s voice.

He’d gone into prison a hard young man, carrying the mental and emotional armor of the streets. But now, at 29, he had shed some of those layers. Little things could make him cry. He had regained enough of his fragile humanity to be haunted by his own crimes, and to say out loud that he had an innocent man’s blood on his hands.

It was there on that prison bunk on an earlier night that Ira came to him. Jy’Aire was dreaming, floating away to that night in July, on those steps at the Village of Windhover. He heard the gunshots, heard Ira cry out in pain, and somehow it was Jy’Aire who felt the bullets hitting him, as if the dream were giving him a chance to be Ira in the worst moment of Ira’s life. Jy’Aire woke up sweating, tossing, turning, racked with guilt.

On November 21, 2024, he rode in a prison van down to Dover, to the Kent County Courthouse, where the Board of Pardons would decide his fate. He wore an orange jumpsuit and shackles on his ankles. It was slightly more than 10 years after Ira Hopkins was murdered. Jy’Aire was scheduled to be locked up until 2037, unless the board decided otherwise.

Many people had turned out to support him. Perhaps 30 or 40, an unusual number for a hearing like this. When Jy’Aire saw them, he was overwhelmed. His friend Erica Bentley flew in from Chicago. There was Professor Johnson from Swarthmore, Clint Miller from the vacuum-cleaner store, Aunt Wendy and Aunt Cheryl, and Emily Evans, a therapist who’d read an essay Jy’Aire wrote and taken such an interest in his case that she and her husband, Scott, offered to let him stay at their house if and when he got out of prison.

Tina Crawford stood up.

I’m told there is no transcript of this hearing, no verbatim record of what Tina said. But those who were in the room that day remember the power and beauty of her words.

“And you could hear a pin drop when she spoke,” said then-Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long, who presided over the hearing.

Hall-Long had considered several thousand cases in her eight years with the Board of Pardons. In some ways, Jy’Aire’s story was familiar: childhood trauma, substance abuse, repeated misbehavior, guns. What she hadn’t seen before was a murder victim’s mother asking the board to let a man out of prison — and telling them she’d essentially adopted him as her son.

Jy’Aire remembers a few things Tina said that day. She pointed at him and said something like,

“That man hurt me. He took something from me.”

“I lost a son.”

“But in the process, I gained one.”

By this time people were crying. There was one other astonishing thing Tina said, one line that almost everyone recalled. Beneath this line was another story about Ira.

Late in his life he was diagnosed with a severe illness called pulmonary sarcoidosis, a condition that can cause scarring in the lungs. He didn’t talk much about it with his friends, but his mother saw what it did to him. He lost weight and couldn’t gain it back. Sometimes he’d sleep for almost 24 hours straight. Tina was with him in the middle of the night as he coughed up blood.

She thought this disease might kill Ira. That perhaps he didn’t have much time left, even before the shooting. If Jy’Aire’s sentence was commuted, he might gain more time than Ira had lost.

Tina didn’t say all that at the hearing with the Board of Pardons. But she did say something like this:

“My son had to die so Jy’Aire could live.”

A mother and a young man, making plans

There was a deeper meaning to Tina’s statement, one that didn’t occur to her at the time. At gunpoint on the steps outside her apartment, Ira looked at Jy’Aire as if to ask for help. “Come on, young boy,” he said. And Jy’Aire told him to run.

But Ira did not run.

“I can’t,” he told Jy’Aire. “My family’s in the house.”

Ira had told Tina they would always be together. He was near her to the end. And after one of the robbers shot Ira for no good reason, it was Jy’Aire who ran away, on a new path that would lead to mercy.

After Tina’s eloquent speech, the board voted unanimously to commute Jy’Aire’s sentence. All the decision needed was a signature from the governor. As it happened, Lt. Governor Bethany Hall-Long became Governor Hall-Long for a few days in January when the previous governor left office to become mayor of Wilmington. That gave her a chance to sign the commutation order. Jy’Aire was remanded to a community-corrections facility in Delaware. In a few months, he will walk free.

Jy’Aire did not know Ira’s name when he left the apartment steps that night. Now he and Tina are working to start a nonprofit organization named after Ira. A generous donor has offered funding.

When Jy’Aire gets out, he plans to study sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. He and Tina will work together on the IRA Foundation, teaching at-risk kids that there are better options than drugs and violence. Tina wants them to learn bricklaying, carpentry, music, photography. Jy’Aire wants the world to know Ira’s name.

Still, there are debts to be paid. Jy’Aire knows what Ira would want him to do — something Ira would do if he were still here.

Jy’Aire says he will protect Tina until the breath leaves his body. The son without a mother, watching over the mother without a son.