Maya Moore Left Basketball. A Prisoner Needed Her Help.

Together, Moore said, they will “make right a terrible wrong.”

It seems fitting that, during a search for her future, Moore has come to Jefferson City.

It is where she was born — where she discovered basketball at age 3, when her mother, Kathryn Moore, attached a plastic hoop to a door in their small apartment.

“She couldn’t get enough of it,” Kathryn Moore said.

When Kathryn was pregnant with Maya, she moved from sprawling Los Angeles to Jefferson City, which had fewer than 45,000 residents. Kathryn was single, but a strong network of cousins lived in town. Two pillars were Reggie Williams and his wife, Cherilyn. They became Maya’s godparents, on hand for her baptism at a little church downtown and for her basketball games in elementary school and junior high.

The grind began. Top teams. Expectations. The pressure that comes with always being the best.

Moore moved with her mother to Atlanta and led her high school team to three state championships. She rapidly grew to 6 feet. Her polished game won comparisons to Michael Jordan’s. Back in Jefferson City her cousins had come to know Irons through a prison ministry. They were impressed by his friendliness, wit and eagerness to learn. “There was something about him,” Reggie Williams said. “Just a peace.”

During her senior year, Moore and her cousins vacationed at a lake near Jefferson City. Williams had developed such an interest in Irons’s case that he spent months investigating it. One day at the lake, he spread court files on a table and studied them.

“What’s this all about?” Moore asked. “Why are you doing this?”

She was shocked by the bare-bones facts. Irons was a poor African-American teenager who had been tried as an adult and convicted by an all-white jury. The crime was violent and involved a gun, but no weapon was found. No blood evidence, no footprints and no fingerprints tied Irons to the crime. His 50-year sentence was handed down at a trial that ended when he was 18 — Moore’s age.

Source: The New York Times

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