Scratch a prison reform poster boy, find a dismembered torso.
As life after incarceration goes, ex-con Sheldon Johnson Jr. seemed to be on the right path.
Armed with a degree he earned during his 25 years in prison, Johnson, 48, became the poster child for prison reform, working with the city’s Homeless Services Department, counseling at-risk youth at the Queens public defenders’ office and talking about his remarkable turnaround on a popular podcast.
The only question about Johnson Jr.’s new direction seemed to be about who would play him in the movie.
“I was just blown away by the level of accomplishment and mental wherewithal that he possessed to accomplish what he did while incarcerated,” lawyer Josh Dubin said last month on “The Joe Rogan Experience” podcast.
He called Johnson Jr. “a miracle.”
A monster, a miracle, who can tell the difference?
Sheldon Johnson, a 48-year-old staffer for the public law firm Queens Defenders, was led out of the 44th Precinct stationhouse in handcuffs Thursday after police made the grisly discovery — a human torso in a blue bin and a head stashed in a freezer in the sixth-floor apartment, police said.
Sources said the victim in this week’s slaying, identified as 44-year-old Collin Small, may have had a beef with Johnson while both were doing time at Sing Sing prison in Westchester County.
Neighbors told cops the victim was heard desperately pleading with his killer shortly before two shots rang out in the apartment near Odgen Avenue and West 162nd Street shortly after 8 p.m. Tuesday, sources and neighbors said.
“Please don’t,” the doomed man was heard saying.
“I have a family!”
Why were people fooled by this monster? Because they wanted to be. They wanted to believe. And there’s a long history of wanting to believe that criminals are just misunderstood products of an oppressed society, that Hamas was suffering from being in an open-air concentration camp, and that Hitler was just fighting for justice.
But monsters usually are monsters. The signs are always there.
Johnson Jr., sadly, isn’t the first in his family accused of killing another man.
That distinction went to his son — also named Sheldon Johnson — who in 2008 attacked a 24-year-old Columbia University graduate student, Mingui Yu, in Morningside Heights, punching his victim repeatedly in the face. Yu stumbled into traffic and was struck and killed by a passing SUV.
The younger Johnson was charged with manslaughter for Yu’s death and would spend 18 months in a juvenile detention boot camp.
Crime and incarceration run in the Johnson family. After abandoning his family, Johnson’s father — Sheldon Johnson Sr. — was arrested in 1986 for raping his 7-year-old stepdaughter three times.
The elder Johnson, who is deaf, spent time in prison on drug charges during the crack cocaine epidemic.
These people aren’t oppressed, they’re evil. And most of us don’t want to come to terms with that.