SOUTH WILLIAMSBURG — Johnny Chavez grew up on the tough streets of South Williamsburg 20 years ago, got mixed up with a street gang and became a heroin dealer when he was a high school sophomore. But luckily for him, he was arrested for robbery at the age of 17.
Wait, luckily?
Yes. When he tells his story, Chavez recounts that the arrest “changed everything for me. It made me straighten myself out. I got off the streets.”
Chavez, who is now 38, not only left his old life behind, but found a new life — as a follower of the Neocatechumenal Way, a spiritual movement within the Catholic Church that emphasizes ongoing faith formation.
He faithfully attends Mass at Sts. Peter and Paul-Epiphany Parish in South Williamsburg every week and is a catechist who visits other churches in the Diocese of Brooklyn to promote faith formation.
In other words, he’s a reformed street criminal who found Jesus. “There is a solution to your life and Christ is that solution,” he explained.
Chavez, now happily married and the father of eight children, looks back on his misspent youth with a certain amount of ruefulness. As a result, he spends a lot of his time talking to young people to convince them to stay out of trouble.
“The first thing I say is that you were born to be free. And when you join a gang, or when you sell drugs, you become a slave,” he said. “If you enter a gang, you’re never going to be happy.”
Born in Ecuador in 1985, he came to the U.S. with his parents at the age of 5. The family settled in Williamsburg, but his parents divorced when he was an adolescent. “It was a traumatic experience for me. I felt like no one loved me,” he recalled. He felt rudderless and alone.
Chavez found solace in the streets, getting involved in gang activity (he wouldn’t name the gang, citing the fact that it’s still operating in Williamsburg) and settling into a life of crime. While he was never formally initiated into the gang, he did take part in many illegal activities.
“I began to do things that the street was inviting me to do,” he explained.
Among other things, he took part in robbing stores in the neighborhood. At age 15, he started selling heroin. At the time, he was a soccer-playing sophomore at Grand Street Educational Campus High School in Bushwick. “I wanted to make money. Besides, some of my friends were doing it,” he recalled.
While he sold heroin, he never took drugs himself. “I liked being in charge. When you sell heroin, you kind of run the show,” he said, adding that he was never caught dealing.
However, the long arm of the law did catch up with Chavez when he was a 17-year-old high school senior. He was arrested for robbery. “It was a group of us,” he explained. “And there was a gun involved. We were all charged with a felony because of that gun possession.”
He remembered what it felt like to be booked. “I was scared to death,” he admitted. He spent four days in jail awaiting his court date. “When you’re in a jail cell with a whole bunch of people, crazy things happen,” he added.
“The arrest helped me because it scared me. I was very involved in soccer. And around that time, I got offered a scholarship to play at Long Island University. And when I got arrested, everything was up in the air,” he recalled, adding that he felt his future slipping away.
What saved him, he said, was the fact that he was a first time offender. His family hired a lawyer who was able to keep him out of prison. A year later, when he turned 18, his case was sealed.
“It was a turning point for me and I took it as a lesson that God was giving me,” he added.
Chavez went to Long Island University, where he played soccer and earned a degree in education. He got a job teaching health at his old high school.
But God wasn’t finished turning his life around. In his early 20s, he was dating the woman who is now his wife, a woman he had known since they were teenagers. “I had met Keila but I was a hot mess. I still had a grudge against my parents over their divorce and I felt empty inside,” he said.
Eduardo Mendoza, an uncle he was close to, asked him a simple question. “He said, ‘What do you want from that girl?’ And when he asked me that question, I asked myself that question,” Chavez said.
Mendoza, who is Chavez’s godfather, asked that he accompany him to a Neocatechumenal Way celebration of the Eucharist at Sts. Peter and Paul-Epiphany. It was an eye-opening experience.
“What struck me was that people were sitting in a circle facing each other. I was used to sitting in a pew facing the front,” he recalled. After the readings, the participants took turns talking about their lives. The talk was candid.
“People were talking freely about real problems with raw honesty — saying things like, ‘I got back on drugs.’ And no one was judging them. I felt like, ‘This is where I belong.’ I’ve been part of the Neocatechumenal Way ever since.”
With his faith renewed, Chavez invited his girlfriend to join the Neocatechumenal Way, an invitation she accepted. The couple married in 2008 and are the proud parents of eight children.
As he looks back at his life so far, he feels lucky. “Jesus came into my life when I needed him most. And now I have a good life because of him,” he said.
