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The Baton Rouge Police Department report from May 3, 2003, says Derrick "Gillieboy" Guice, 27, was shot multiple times by Phillip Jones after an argument. Witnesses said Guice and his friends were in Denny's when Jones thought Guice looked at his girlfriend. Jones approached Guice, an argument ensued and Guice punched Jones, who pulled out a concealed Glock semi-automatic and shot Guice multiple times.

Guice, trying to get out of the Denny's, crawled to the door, where his friends said he was shot again in the back. Nearly a third of the 33-round magazine punctured his body. He tried to make it out to the very end.

They cleaned up at Denny's and opened the next day but closed again before lunch because blood was seeping through the carpet.

You can't unhear something like. Can't forget it.

"He's still a part of me," Beulah Guice, Derrick's widow, says. "You would think after all these years that it wouldn't bother me. But it still does."

She was 14 when they met, teenage soul mates who had children early and wanted out of South Baton Rouge. She was 22 when the call came, and she was told the only man she ever loved had been gunned down.

The man who provided for his family and made sure everyone had what they needed.

The man who was always around his sons.

The man who always made time to take his wife anywhere she wanted to show her how much he appreciated her.

Beulah never remarried.

"I've met a lot of fools. I haven't met a good man like [Derrick]," Beulah says. "I had a great marriage with my kids' father, and at a young age. Who wouldn't want that? That part of my life is gone, and it's very hard. I'm sure it's still hard for Derrius, too."

"People tell me, 'Man, you run angry. If you grew up where I grew up, and you knew this game was the only thing that can get you and your family out, you'd run angry, too. Every damn time you touched the ball."

— Derrius Guice

They would get through it, she told her children. They had family, they had a support system and they had sports, which Beulah pushed her boys into to keep them from the alternative: hanging on the street corner and finding trouble.

What Guice found in sports was much more than a way out. He found true, lasting friendship in a group of three friends who had similar problems and ambition. They used each other as emotional and physical crutches.

They were always together, these four from the neighborhood: Guice, Trevell Johnson, Javahn Ferguson and Charles Vaughn. They played little league football together, ran track together and stayed at each other's homes.

They argued, they laughed, they cried. They each suffered through losses in their families, and when they did, they grieved together.

They walked up and down the streets of South Baton Rouge, day after day, night after night, always planning, always searching for a way out.

"They are my brothers," Johnson says. "They are my family."

The four young men had so much potential as football players that by the time they were finishing eighth grade, a choice had to be made: Where would they go to high school?

Only 14 years old, they already were known in the neighborhood as elite athletes. There was tension because Catholic High was recruiting Guice, Johnson and Ferguson to leave their public school, McKinley, and play for the rival Bears. Warrick Dunn—the most famous Catholic alum—even called to talk up the benefits of playing for the private school.

Guice, Johnson and Ferguson decided to go to Catholic, while Vaughn stayed at McKinley.

Trevell Johnson, Catholic defensive coordinator Anthony Camp, Derrius Guice and Javahn Ferguson (courtesy of Trevell Johnson).

It wound up being the best choice each could make. But it also led to criticism from both the locals—Why are you playing for the white school and not your neighborhood?—and from those within Catholic.

A volatile cocktail of criticism, jealousy and racism made those four years at Catholic no easier than avoiding the danger in their neighborhood.

You don't deserve to be here.

You can't even pass the entrance exam.

If you weren't a football player, there's no way you'd be here.

This isn't your school.

"When you're a black person, the only time you really see racism like that, to that full an extent, is when you're watching a movie," Johnson says. "We were living that movie. It was like, Is this really happening? I never thought it was real. We were just kids, and it really affected us mentally."

To understand what the three boys experienced at Catholic, you must understand that it went well beyond academics or sports. It was a cultural bombshell.

Johnson and Guice didn't know how to speak to another race of people—students and teachers—and spent the first year at Catholic not talking to anyone.

If you don't feel comfortable speaking, you're not raising your hand in class. You're not making friends. You're reinforcing every awful stereotype.

"I was the only one who knew how to speak properly," Ferguson says. "I was exposed to more as a child. Both of my parents went to college. Growing up in our neighborhood, no one teaches you how to approach a white man. When they finally got that opportunity, they didn't know how. Experiences are everything. People in our neighborhood in their 20s and 30s still have never shaken a white man's hand.

"Imagine these three young kids, right down the street from LSU, two or three blocks away from the white population, who never walked up to a white person and said, 'Hello, how are you?' Going to class at Catholic was nothing. Living in that world was harder than anything we experienced in our lives."

It should come as no surprise then that the transition was brutal. There were many days of detention and staying late to rake leaves and wash tables and chairs and clean blackboards.

The cultures were colliding, and Guice wanted out. Before his first year ended—by school rule, they couldn't play varsity football as ninth-graders, even though they would've started—Guice was racing home after practice and begging Beulah to let him transfer to McKinley. He couldn't take the negativity anymore.

Forget it, Beulah told him.

The scholarship Guice received didn't cover the entire tuition, and Beulah was working long hours at Wal-Mart to make up for the difference. There's a reason the refrigerator was empty and the pantry was full of empty shelves more often than not.

It was more important for Beulah to pay her share of the tuition—even if she could rarely pay it on time.

"There was no way he was leaving that school," Beulah says. "How many kids where he grew up got this opportunity?

"I can't tell you how many times he came home crying. I told him, 'Years from now, you'll look back on this as the most important time in your life.'"

Says Derrius: "Despite all I went through [at Catholic], I can absolutely say it made me the man I am today."

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