Alan Sudduth Learned Young That You Never Snitch: But the Truth Can Set Him Fr

This was published during the height of the legislative session and I missed it.  Excellent article
Westword.
On the night of April 1, 1995, Alan Sudduth's mother was out, again, leaving the sixteen-year-old and his fourteen-year-old brother alone in their bleak two-bedroom apartment in Aurora. There was a world of ways Nicholas Reed, a kid who lived nearby, stopped by with the suggestion that he invite over a girl he'd met at the Buckingham Square Mall and her friend. A proposition like that would never have flown when Alan was younger and living under the doting care and strict rules of his paternal grandmother and, later, his uncle Reggie. In fact, Reggie had taken Alan to a church concert earlier that evening, and Alan was still wearing some of his best clothes: a dress shirt over black Dickies, clean British Knights. But Alan had been drifting away from that world since he'd moved in with his mother a few years earlier. His dad, lost to alcohol, crack and violence, hadn't been around for years, and his mom wasn't much better. These days, school was optional, while ripping and running the streets, smoking weed and chasing girls were all mandatory. So Alan told Nicholas to give the girls a call.
The two girls, white fifteen-year-olds from the southern suburbs, soon showed up in a car one had snatched from her parents. Alan was usually hyper and goofy — maybe to compensate for his 5' 2" frame, maybe to angle for the attention that came so easily from one side of his family and so rarely from the other — but he kept quiet for a while, unsure of what to do around girls like this. Still, the mood lightened once the boys broke out a deck of cards to play strip poker — as well as a fifth of Hennessy that Alan's mom had left out. Nicholas had also brought over a gun, a chrome 9mm Ruger, and he was flaunting it every chance he got.