By Eli Garcia-Mendez —
Chicago police raided and found a quarter kilo of cocaine, two AK-47s, 360 hits acid and $14,000 cash. Juan Gonzalez, 17, a member of the Latin Kings gang, was facing multiple felonies, including manslaughter charges associated with the acid (10 hits = 1 manslaughter charge).
“I was born in America, but I’d never even heard the word Christian. I was raised the Third World of Chicago,” Juan says. “I was raised Catholic. I knew he died for my sins., but I never knew he could change me.”
Juan didn’t know it yet, but he had fallen into a generational curse. His father, hiding his activities from the family, was a trafficker and money-launderer. “He had a secret life,” Juan says.
From age 6, Juan was into baseball and school. As years passed, he found himself drawn to the gang life at age 13 for the feeling of belonging.
“Little did I know I stepped into a generational curse,” he says.
When Juan was released from prison, his father counseled him to leave Chicago.
“You’re doing this wrong,” Dad said. “You either go to Texas and start over, leave this lifestyle, or you’re going to end up becoming a monster.”
Texas didn’t change him. It was 2008, and Juan fell into the same things in El Paso. He met people associated with the Latin Kings and was back at the life of crime.
“I’m running from me. It’s not the environment. It’s not the gangs,” Juan explains. “It’s me. It’s what’s in me already. Me running from a location wasn’t the issue. It’s me dealing with myself.”
At a football game and party afterward, Juan met Claudia and they hooked up and had a son, Armani.
But Claudia, herself a Latin Queen and criminal, wanted to quit the underworld. “I can’t take this no more,” she told Juan and went to “visit” her mother. She never came back.
Juan was blindsided about home completely unprepared he was for a breakup. He lost not only his girl, he lost his son.
“I was struggling because I never knew how empty I would feel when my wife left,” he explains. “I’ve had homes, I’ve had money, I’ve had cars. The lifestyle I was living was parties, women, money. My mindset at that time was it was better for you to know me than me to know you.”
Devastated by the abandonment, he started using the drugs that he previously only pushed. It was 2011, and he was floundering in depression, alcoholism and cocaine addiction.
“I walk into my empty house on Aug 29, 2011. I could hear my very own footsteps,” he recounts. “I tell myself, ‘I’ll do whatever it takes to get my family back.’
“I had never cried out to God, not in prison, not in worst moments,” Juan adds. “But that night I looked at myself in the mirror and told myself, ‘You’re better than this.’ I cried out to Jesus for the first time.”
The next day, trying to win back his girl, he offered and drove her to her probation appointment. They talked things over, and they made a vague commitment to changing their lives.
On Aug. 30, Juan was in his car in a parking lot when Manny Hernandez walked up and knocked on his window.
“I rolled down the window, and he looked me dead in the eyes and said, ‘Jesus has a plan for your life,’
he recalls.
“Isn’t this what you want?” Manny added.
“In a blink of an eye I remembered the things I was crying out for my empty house,” Juan tells.
Manny, who is now a pastor, exchanged numbers with Juan. He called, invited him, and Juan went to church with Claudia on a Wednesday night service. It was his first time ever in a Christian church.
As he listened to the pastor preach, “I started hearing voices to get up and to go, that this wasn’t for me, that it was too good to be true,” Juan says.
Just when he was about to whisper into Claudia’s ear that they should leave, he heard another voice. “Wait,” it said.
At the altar call, Juan walked to the front of the church.
“For the very first time in my whole life I felt convicted and ugly for the way I was living,” Juan says. “In the midst of this, I totally forgot that my wife was with me. I was narrowed in like a race horse. As soon as I said amen, I felt like a backpack of rocks fell at that altar. I looked up and everything was brighter, everything was lighter. I was in awe at what happened at that moment.”
Then he glanced to his left. At that altar also praying was Claudia.
A month after accepting Jesus, they married. He worked as a framer while for 10 years, he was discipled in the church. Juan, his wife and three kids were announced to pioneer a church plant in Denver, CO, where he labors today.
And the eldest son the ex con? Armani is becoming a cop.
Related content: Angel Ortiz “smuggled” the Gospel into Cuba, Nur Rashid wandered in the world until Jesus, Mike Gonzalez took speed before going to church. Sources: Pilgrim Dispatch interviewed Juan Gonzalez directly.
