A Raw Authentic: Randall McKoy’s Journey from Darkness to Light

Randall McKoy was two weeks into being eighteen when retaliation against a witness case changed everything. He was still in high school, still running track, still living at home with his mom and stepdad in New Mexico. But the streets had already called.

When I talked with Randall on the podcast, he walked me through how that double life worked. His sister always told him he lived two lives because his family never knew half the stuff he was doing. At home, he was the kid helping out, going to church every Sunday, doing poems for Easter and Christmas programs. On the east side of town, he was running with his crew, looking up to his older brother Curtis and his cousin, drawn to the cars, the money, the status.

From High School Track Star to Federal Defendant

Randall had been fast. Real fast. He ran the 100, 200, and 400 in high school, with scouts looking at him. “I love track, but like, my mom was somewhere else. Like, I don’t, my mom was somewhere else, but I had a couple, uh, scouts was looking,” Randall told me. “And I lost it all, but at the time, like I said, I was so caught up in the streets and worried about what I’m going to do in the streets at the school, it really didn’t bother me at the time.”

That retaliation case got knocked down to aggravated battery. He could stay in school but couldn’t play sports. The track career was over before it started. Looking back, Randall can see the fork in the road. But at eighteen, with his head in the streets, losing those college looks didn’t feel like losing much.

The Setup That Changed Two Lives

The call came in 2006 when Randall was in Odessa, Texas. Normal business, normal meeting place at the mall. Nothing seemed off. Randall didn’t know the feds had already picked up the case or that they were looking for a black male but had no identification of what he looked like.

His cousin was with him that day because of his party supply business. They’d gone to AT&T to get a USB chip for a laptop. Walking out of the nail salon, undercover officers grabbed them both. They searched Randall three times, found nothing. They searched his cousin’s truck multiple times, found nothing. Then an undercover female officer showed up and found everything.

“If she wouldn’t came, we probably would have got away. Cause they searched this truck three or four times. They searched me three or four times and found it,” Randall explained. “That lady came and found everything.”

The worst part? His cousin really had nothing to do with it. Wrong place, wrong time, riding with the wrong person. Randall kept telling them his cousin was innocent. At trial, Randall testified that his cousin had nothing to do with it. Even police officers testified they were looking for one person, not two. Didn’t matter. The system wasn’t trying to hear any of that.

A Tour Through the Federal System

Randall got fifteen years. His cousin got thirty-five because of prior convictions. They both started at Beaumont, using the library together, fighting their cases. When Randall’s appeal came back granted and his cousin’s was denied, it hit different. “To this day, I still feel like real bad, because he, he, he, uh, he was in there for something he didn’t have none again. No business being in there,” Randall said.

The appeal knocked Randall’s sentence down when they couldn’t prove the gun charge. His custody level dropped, and they shipped him to Big Springs, a low-security facility. Seven months later, after putting his hands on a child molester, they moved him to Herlong, California. Medium security. Gang territory. Real different energy.

California was where paperwork had to be clean and gang affiliations mattered. Randall had been part of the Gangster Crips in the streets, so when he got to Herlong, they pointed him toward his people. His bunkie Lolo gave him the choice: rep New Mexico or rep Crip. Randall chose his home state. “I told him, straight up, I’m from house and makes it. You know what I mean? He’s like, I respect it.”

Surviving the System, One Day at a Time

The hole was where Randall spent four or five months after the child molester incident. Alone most of the time, trying not to go insane. Showers three times a week if staff felt like taking you. Phone and commissary privileges stripped. No visits because nobody could make the trip from New Mexico to California.

When the hard days hit, Randall had his strategies. “Their phone, their e-mail, stay, feedin’ uncle, um, yeah, I even walked the track list in music,” he told me. The MP3 player made all the difference. Walking the track with headphones on, that was his escape from the concrete and the noise and the constant tension.

The hardest day came New Year’s Day 2009 when his grandma called to tell him his grandpa had passed the day before. That’s when he finally broke down. All those years of blocking stuff out, staying tough, keeping his head right, and losing the man who taught him how to work on cars and be a man hit him like nothing else had.

Coming Home After Nine Years

When Randall finally made it to Leavenworth in 2014, he was already adapted to the lower security routine. By then he’d done time at maximum, medium, and low facilities across the country. Leavenworth felt almost easy after places like Herlong. He worked in the kitchen, then got moved to buffing floors in the medium facility next door. Every day he’d go through those gates the rest of us camp guys never saw.

Six months before release, a CO named Dr. Wells decided to make Randall’s life hell. Petty stuff like untucked shirts, constant searches, slick comments back and forth. Two weeks before release, Wells got Randall’s job taken away and made him sit in the dorm doing nothing. “He sat with him. And he made me go back to the art depth for two weeks in that class or anything,” Randall said.

Even walking out the door didn’t feel real. Not on the bus, not flying back to New Mexico. Reality hit when he saw his mom and his nine-year-old son, who didn’t even know dad was coming home. The reunion with his boy, that moment when it clicked that he was really there, that made it real.

Building Something New

Reentry meant halfway house, new relationships, and figuring out how to be a father again. Randall’s second son’s mom became his anchor during those first months out. She’d drive across town to pick him up for passes, leave work early when he missed the bus from his Subway job, help him navigate all the small details that feel huge when you’re trying to rebuild.

Two months after he got out of the halfway house, she got pregnant. Life kept moving forward, bringing new responsibilities and new reasons to stay on track. The nightmare that started with that phone call in Odessa had cost him nine years, cost his cousin even more, and changed everything about who he thought he’d become.

Today Randall’s building the life that got interrupted when he was twenty-three. No more looking up to the wrong people, no more chasing the wrong things. Just a man from New Mexico who survived the federal system and came out the other side ready to be the father and partner his family needs.