A taste of hell for gang inmate who died

By Buddy Beachey —

After he died, Kenneth McDonald stood in a wasteland desert valley. At the far end stood the figure of a man, glaring menacingly.

“He was staring at me just like your dad used to stare at you when you did something wrong,” Kenneth said. “I didn’t want to look at him because I just felt shame.”

Then, grey smoke arose from his body. His tongue scorched hot. In his mind’s eye, he relived every evil thing he had done or said — but he he experienced it from the victim’s perspective, not his.

“There ain’t nothing in this world that will ever compare to the torment of living through that,” Kenneth tells. “I’ve been beat down, stabbed, ran over, tore up. But that is nothing in comparison to the torments of living through the pain that we cause others.”

After his NDE, Kenneth McDonald became a Christian preacher. He’s been paroled from a 70-year sentence for attempted murder from Nevada’s prison system.

Kenneth McDonald’s mom practiced Egyptian witchcraft, so it was natural for get into pagan rituals. The Reno native ran away at 15 and fell into drugs and stealing. He did so many wrong things that eventually, in 1996, as an 18-year-old, he was sent to prison, where he assumed he would die.

He fell into prison gang life and began leading pagan services and rituals.

“To the inmates who would come in, I would teach them Wicca and Druidry,” Kenneth says. “I was performing the ceremonies. I was the high priest.” One palm of his hand has pagan tattoos, and the other has Irish letters with occultic meanings.

A Pagan High Priest

He spent 20 years in prison climbing the ladder of both Paganism and gang life.

“I was a hater,” he says. “I was very anti-Christian.”

During Covid lockdown, he was scrubbing his cell with his cellie when he saw a vision of a glowing gold-dressed man come through the wall. “I ain’t said this about any other man in my life: he was beautiful,” Kenneth remembers. “I was in shock, but there was a peace there.”

The man floated off the ground eight inches. Wingless and hallow-less, he had a tablet jotted down some observations, apparently about both men. Then the cellmate saw him too and shot up and dove to the other side of the cell, covering his head with his hands. “No, no, no, please don’t,” the cellie said.

After jotting a few more things, the man jumped through the wall and left.

For Kenneth, it was just a pagan spirit. He didn’t deduce any meaning other than it was trippy. The two told people about their vision for a few months.

Exactly a year later Dec. 20, 2021, he was in another prison, Southern Desert Correctional Center, he dropped dead and stayed dead for 20 minutes. It took his cellmate a time to notice and then to get guards to come. One guard pounced on him and, administering CPR, cracked his sternum. The nurses came.

He was wheeled out on the yard, seen by everyone. He woke up in the hospital. There were two guards.

“Did you see something over there?” one asked, referring to the fact that he was dead and had just come back.

“It’s all bad,” Kenneth replied.

In the Valley of Shame

What was bad was the judgement that the staring man forced him to relive ever hurt he’d ever done to anyone in the desert Valley of Shame.

“I had about 25 years in prison in at the time and I’ve done some evil things to people,” he says.
“I hurt people bad and I relived all those things that I did to them people but through their eyes. I
relived how I made them feel. I relived what they went through because of my actions.”

His tongue burned inside his mouth, in parallel to the Rich Man in the parable of Lazarus. He deduces what made his mouth fiery hot was all the wicked things he had said to people. The pain he caused others tormented him.

“I cried. I could have I could have filled a swimming pool up 10 times over with all my tears I cried,” he says.

Then a question came to him: “Do you want to live or die?”

“I want to live,” he answered.

Better to live in a nasty, degrading jail cell than in torment in the Valley of Shame with the Figure of Judgement staring at him.

The smoke and intensity of heat lessened. For the first time in his life, he felt gratitude. It was gratitude for the lessening of the agony.

Amber light bodies and beautiful music

It slowly lessened more and more. “My tears of pain became tears of gratitude,” he remembers. The pain lessened until in an instant, he found himself in a completely different place. It was beautiful with beautiful music. There were five other figures with amber glowing bodies standing next to Kenneth, and he fell to his knees to beg to stay but no words came out.

One of the figures looked down at him. “That’s how I felt when I first came here too,” he said.

With perfect love, joy and peace on his face, he returned his gaze forward. Kenneth stood up and looked forward with the others.

“Instantly without a doubt, you know there is a Lord and a Savior and you know there is a Father and his glory is washing down upon you,” Kenneth recalls.

“I could hear this music. For all the music lovers, every rhythm figure is better than the
last and you’ll never hear the same one twice,” he adds. “It’s beautiful, almost like chimes on
a synthesizer. It never ends and at the same time you’re looking forward and it’s just God’s glory washing down on you.”

There was no black, white, Asian, Latino race in Heaven. There was no scores to settle or memories of wrongs or worries about Grandma, he says. There were not theological debates, no “I told you so” from once Christian dogma’s camp to another.

“He he gave me a new heart and a new spirit and I just stood there soaking all this  in,” Kenneth explains. “I promise you, you’ll never get bored in Heaven.”

After 20 minutes clinically dead, Kenneth woke up in the hospital. His chest hurt; the CPR had broken bones. The guards were amazed he was alive. After some chit chat, they asked about what did Kenneth see “on the other side.”

Doctors came to see him and asked how he died — and how he came back to life. “We’ve got your tox screen right here,” the doctors quizzed him. “There’s nothing in your tox (toxicity) screen to kill you. There’s some things in there; we can tell you’ve been partying. But the levels of what you got in there there’s nothing in there to kill you.”

What’s on the other side? people asked

The bigger question: “You’re not brain dead,” the doctors grilled him. “You shouldn’t even be talking right now. You were dead for 20 minutes.”

Without any medical studies himself, Kenneth, of course, couldn’t give an explanation to the doctors. “I don’t know,” he said, but most of the time he was reviewing his NDE.

He also meditated about what he’d seen on the other side. Nothing corresponded to what he’d learned in paganism.

“It was like swallowing a dry brick,” he was thinking. “I almost wasted my whole life believing a lie.”

With nothing wrong with him, Kenneth was released from the hospital to go back to prison. That’s where all the inmates on the yard had seen him wheeled out on the gurney dead. They had questions. Everybody asked what was on the other side — even the warden.

He couldn’t go back to poker, drugs, porn and gangs. He stopped showing up for Pagan ceremonies. Withing four months, he quit cussing. It all lacked gratification. Mostly, he cried in his cell alone.

The prison chaplain gave him a Bible and taught him about the Holy Spirit.

He starting dropping out of his gang. He wanted to give “passes” to everybody who messed up in the gang. “Slowly but surely, I was losing all my friends,” he said. “Half the people I was telling said, ‘I believe you.’ The other half of the people said, ‘Man you done lost your mind, player.'”

With the guys who wanted to still do gangs, he was getting in trouble.

“One day I was walking down the hallway and I got surrounded by 20 inmates,” he tells. “The one in front of me said, ‘Man, you crazy. You not scared of all these cats with these knives?'”

He responded, “Every day you cats come knocking on my door wanting to know what’s after this, and I promise you there’s something after this. I have no fear.”

Cut up by his former gang members

They jumped him and slashed him.

“They stabbed me all in my neck, all in my side, tried to cut the tendons out my knee,” he narrates. “They broke my face all up. I had to go see a plastic surgeon. They tried to kill me.”

After being recovering at the hospital and being released back to prison, Kenneth was placed in isolation. It was, perhaps, to protect him, but isolation is where you go mad — and where you plot revenge.

But as much as he tried to think about revenge, his encounter in the afterlife stopped him from hating. “I couldn’t hold on to the hatred,” he says. “I couldn’t be mad at them because I understood them because I used to be like that.”

In isolation, he read lots and lots of Bible.

Within three months, he preached from the pulpit at non-denominational Monday night service.

His conduct in prison so dramatically improved that he was given the chance to shorten his 70-year sentence. On his pass before the parole board, he was released.

Kenneth doesn’t know who the gold-garbed man who jotted down notes was. But the guy who entered and exited his cell through the wall reminds him of Ezekiel 9.

He spreads the word of God and the word of his testimony everywhere he can.