Mark DeFriest was only 19 years old when his father died.
He had left him his work tools, the very ones with which he learned a trade, but the estate had still not been settled in Florida courts. He took them anyway. That gesture, more like that of a son who did not want to lose the last thing he had of his father than a crime, ended up becoming the origin of a sentence that would stretch on for decades.
In 1980, he was sentenced to four years for violating probation by possessing firearms. But DeFriest never accepted being locked up: he escaped 7 times, attempted it 13, and each attempt added charges, disciplinary reports, and new years to his story. What began as an inheritance ended up becoming 34 years of a life trapped behind bars and an obsession with being free.
