Pennsylvania Lifeline
Pennsylvania Lifeline
Becky Beane
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Editor's Note: Jubilee newsletter ran "Pennsylvania Lifeline" in June 1991. The story has all the key components of what we call a "changed-life story." A prisoner comes to know Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and, through the help of Prison Fellowship volunteers and programs, grows in the knowledge and love of Christ inside prison. Then, surrounded by a loving Christian community, he makes a successful transition to life on the outside. That's the story of Elvin Martes, who is featured in "Pennsylvania Lifeline."
Pulling her infant and two toddlers close, Evelyn Martes flinched and crossed the crowded jail waiting room. Smoke puffed from Winstons and Marlboros assaulted her nostrils and eyes. Four-year-old Vinnie coughed and clutched his mother's pants leg. "You're a good-looking woman," her husband, Elvin, had told her. Now other men's leering eyes confirmed the appraisal.
"It was the most disgusting place," Evelyn recalls of the Philadelphia detention center where Elvin was held in 1986. "Every time I took the kids there, they'd get sick. Emotionally, it was tough. So I just went away."
Far away—to live with relative in Puerto Rico. Foreseeing a long prison term for drug charges, Elvin encouraged Evelyn to leave him—permanently: "Forget about me."
Though angry and frustrated over the incarceration, Evelyn never balked in her love for Elvin. "That was never hard," she says. "In spite of what he did, he wasn't a tough, mean person."
Youthful greed, not meanness, had launched Elvin's drug-dominated lifestyle. He'd spurned school in the fifth grade—enticed by the income of a factory job finagled with a forged birth certificate.
He started dabbling with marijuana—first for the thrill, then for the money from dealing. Deceiving his parents had been easy. "I'd come home with a few dollars and tell them I'd taken an aluminum door I'd found to the aluminum collector," Elvin says. "My folks would buy it."
As a teen Elvin faced a new challenge: "here, man, see if you can sell it," a fellow drug dealer had challenged. "It" was cocaine. And coke meant big money.
"At one time I used to count it," Elvin says of his swelling fortune. "I used to keep the money neat; then I just started throwing it"—around the room.
