FREE BENNIE HEARD

The Fight of Bennie Heard's Life

by Andre Courtemanche

www.fightnews.com

People in Georgia once thought the name Bennie Heard was going to be synonymous with boxing champion. Instead it has come to symbolize squandered potential and broken dreams.

For Heard, like so many other could-have-been, and should-have-been great fighters, the easy money and beautiful women that come with being a young, hotshot boxer proved a much greater challenge than the flying leather and blood inside the ring. Today he sits in a jail cell at Lee Arrendale Prison in Alto, Georgia, watching what could have been a spectacular career fade away for the unintentional shooting of a close friend in December 1985. Instead of receiving a stern, but not life-erasing amount of time for the accident, Heard was inexplicably convicted of first degree murder and sentenced to life in prison after a one-day trial and 13 total minutes of jury deliberation.

He has now served more than sixteen years in defiance of the wishes of the victim’s own family who say they have forgiven him and have signed a petition to have him released. “I don’t understand how the State can do this because that’s what we pray for, that the family of the victim can forgive us and help us out. If I’m getting all this help, I don’t understand why I’m still in,” he said.

At the time of his conviction, Heard was ordered to spend seven years behind bars before becoming eligible for parole. Despite being classified as a model prisoner his entire stay, he has since failed to secure his release in two separate parole hearings, at the most recent of which he was ordered to serve an additional seven years. “When I came up after the first seven years, they turned me down and told me to do two more years. So after two more years I came up again and this time I even had a letter of reference from the warden. They ended up turning me down and told me to do seven more years in somebody else’s last name! It wasn’t my last name, it was somebody else’s on the piece of paper that rejected my parole. They sent me a letter with my number on it, but somebody else’s last name telling me to do seven more years. My record was too good for them to do that. I’m a professional fighter and I’ve never even gotten into a fight in prison. I had the family of the victim forgiving me and the warden wrote something good about me, so it was all good, but I got turned down for seven more years.”

In the sixteen years he has been incarcerated, Heard, who says he found God a few years ago, has seen men convicted for killing multiple people purposefully walk free, while he sits in a cage. He is 42 years old and the glory and fame that were within his grasp are now memories to hang on the wall.

For most, it is the length of the sentence, not the fact that he was sent to prison that is disturbing. Heard himself will readily admit that he was no angel as a younger man.

The antics of Bennie “Little Red” Heard were legendary in his hometown of Elberton Georgia before and during his boxing days. He lived an often violent life of gambling and sex addiction fueled by a seemingly inexplicable self-destructive nature. Although he was a hero to its people, whispers that Heard had broken men’s bones in street fights, or crashed the Corvette his manager had bought for him were rampant in the town that calls itself “The Granite Capital of the World.”

He started boxing in 1979, at age 19; a very late stage for most highly successful amateurs, but the rock in his fists was as hard as any in Elberton. “This guy told me to spar with this dude and when I was finished, he said man, you look good are you sure you’ve never boxed? I said no sir. He told me to lose fifteen pounds and I could fight next month. I lost the weight and I beat a dude 32-2. His record was 32-2 and that was my first fight. They put me in the open division, I never did fight novice. My next fight was in North Carolina and this man was 20-0. Everybody he fought he knocked out and I knocked him out in the second round. Nobody told me what his record was, it probably would have scared me if I would have known he was 20-0.”

Heard said he amazed himself with his natural abilities, but also did a phenomenal amount of work to support it. “I was beating heavyweights weighing 220. I was amazed at the talent I had, but I was training hard. I was running close to 60 miles a week. I ran at least ten a day.”

In 1982, Heard won the USA-ABF Light-Heavyweight National Title ahead of a younger boxer named Evander Holyfield, and was honored by the Georgia General Assembly for his skills the same year. He also won the Georgia Heavyweight championship despite only weighing 175 lbs and was a four-time Golden Gloves champion. Three years later, during a sparring session before the 1984 Olympics, Heard was asked to ease up on the power of his punches while sparring with Mike Tyson.

“Little Red” Heard fought on national teams that competed in the Soviet Union and Europe and only missed out on going to the 84 games because of a severe hand injury. His replacement, the previously mentioned Holyfield, went on to win a bronze and parlay it into riches untold in professional boxing.

Heard also turned professional, but the demons of his life quickly began to ruin his promise. Having signed a contract with ESPN worth approximately $350,000, the son of supportive, but poor, mother and deserting father says he had a great degree of difficulty learning to live with the abundant wealth and glitzy lifestyle of training in Las Vegas. “When I started winning, it seemed like things were happening for me so fast. I was sort of famous. I started dating a lot of girls, because every time I knocked somebody out I got a different girl. Then when my manager took me to Vegas, I saw a different style of living. I saw a lot of people who were superstars and stuff like that. I even shook hands with Kojak (Telly Savalas) and Howard Cosell. So you know, this country butt did a lot of stuff.”

He also says that pressure from the wrong kinds of friends made it even more difficult. “When I would win a fight and then go back home, I wanted to show the people from my hometown that I still liked them because I came up with them, you know? I didn’t want my friends to call me an Uncle Tom because white people were helping me. I was trying to lift my friends up with me, so they wouldn’t call me names. I ended up being pulled down with the same people I tried to lift up. I love all people now because since I’ve been in, it’s been mostly white people that are trying to help me get out. I’m not prejudiced with nobody anymore.”

Heard won his first fight in November of 1984 and another the following month, but he looked so out of shape that ESPN used a contract stipulation about quality of performance to back out of the agreement. It was a year later and after postponements of a comeback fight that the fateful shooting occurred.

In a neighborhood where shootings and violence are commonplace, a man who had served time for previous shootings accused Heard of cheating at cards and made him give back the money he had won. The next night, with his pride and street reputation slightly damaged, Heard went back to the card game armed with a .357 Magnum, which he says he was going to use to show the person what it felt like to be intimidated with a gun. When the conversation turned to the previous night, Heard pulled the gun out and pointed it in the air. Someone sitting beside him grabbed his arm thinking his intention was to shoot. The gun went off and the man who grabbed his arm was shot dead. The someone who wound up dead was Heard’s longtime close friend Raymond Winn.

Immediately after the shooting, Heard ran to the police station to report what happened. He has been in jail ever since.

“I was in a club the night before and this one person had shot 15 people. He had shot a lady in the mouth and a lady in the stomach. Ever since I was a kid, we’d been knowing this person and we kind of looked up to him because we knew he didn’t take any junk. When he took my money that night I ran because I know he got a gun in his pocket, I saw it. He told people later that he was going to shoot me.

I got mad because he wanted to shoot me for my own money. The next day I went jogging about five miles and I came back and I was still upset, so I went to the pawnshop and bought the .357 Magnum. I didn’t want this guy to mess with me no more.

I had the gun on me that night and this guy drove up to the club I was at. He started playing cards again, so I walked up to the table. This guy that wanted to shoot me kept patting his pocket. People were warning me to watch out because he was going to go for his gun, so I walked back to the table and pulled the gun out before he could because I know I’m not going to shoot like he is, I’m going to talk to him and tell him to give me my money back.

When I pulled the gun out, Raymond Winn jumped up to grab it and it went off and shot him in the head. I saw what happened and I ran to the police station. Raymond died the next day. I didn’t want to shoot nobody. That was December the 20, 1985. I was 26.”

These days, Heard is a Christian man of 42 who’s eager to get out and try to make a difference in the lives of other young people who hold promise. He says he hopes to teach them about the price of wasting the gifts you are given. “I got saved and I don’t do the things I used to do,” he said. He is engaged to a woman he has known most of his life and has been promised a job upon his release. “I want my own gym. First I want to get a job where my lady works at, her boss man said he’d give me a job. But what I most want to do is train some kids and talk to them because the mistakes that I made, I don’t want them to make them. I’m sure that a lot of kids want to win a national championship and I want to talk to them and tell them about who they’re hanging around with and tell them how they got to start treating people. It’ll be easy for me to find a job because I got a lot of talents. A friend told me he has about 300 kids and I would love to come down and talk to them. They’ll listen to me because I can still do nearly the things I used to do. I can do a thousand sit-ups in 25 minutes and a hundred pushups with one hand. I still shadow box and do all my exercises. This life sentence that I’ve been doing, that’s the biggest fight I ever had in my life.”

Bennie Heard chose a life that constantly ran him into trouble, however sixteen years for a shooting that was, by all accounts, accidental is extreme to say the least (by way of comparison, Canadian serial killer Carla Homolka will serve only twelve for her part in at least four intentional killings). He has already served double the state’s minimum requirement for his crime. A petition has been started to help win the release of the man who threw away what few will ever have: unlimited potential. As a grown man who seems to have learned maturity and faith during the passing years, he deserves a chance to fashion a life out of what he has left.

He wants to be synonymous with redemption.