Anisha’s downfall

Anisha Walker’s struggles began long before she went to prison.

Now 32, she grew up living with various relatives. Her mother had her at 15 and struggled with drug use. Walker eventually went to live with her paternal grandparents and thrived. They loved her and she loved them. They tried to shelter her from the world.

At age 11, a visit with her mother altered Walker’s life.

Her mother said the man Walker believed to be her daddy wasn’t. The revelation meant that she was not biologically related to those loving grandparents.

Anisha Walker pleads guilty for the murder of Pedro Enemku before Tarrant County Judge Sharen Wilson in 1997. Moments before her sentencing, Walker stuck her tongue out as a photographer snapped her picture. (Tom Fox/Staff Photographer)

“I kind of got rebellious after that,” said Walker.

She was held in local juvenile detention after running away and was detained by police in 1996 for car theft. Juvenile authorities released Walker to her mother, who Walker said was still using drugs. Their reunion was brief.

“We went our separate ways, and I started selling drugs so I could survive,” Walker said. “It was either that or sell my body.”

Though Walker admits to murder, she is “embarrassed” by prosecutors’ claims that she was a 14-year-old prostitute.

When her much older boyfriend was arrested, Walker tried to rob a buyer to raise bail.

On May 23, 1997, she shot Nigerian immigrant Pedro Enemku in the head after selling him crack cocaine at an Arlington apartment complex.

Walker’s case could have been handled in juvenile court. But she became the youngest person at the time tried as an adult in Tarrant County. She wore a red bow in her hair as prosecutors argued that authorities had done all they could to rehabilitate her even though she’d never been to state juvenile lockup.

Before her trial began, Walker wrote the judge and confessed from jail, where she was isolated from other inmates because of her age. She faced a life sentence.

“God’s going to have mercy on me, and I ask that you please have a little mercy on me, too.”

Minutes before she was sentenced, Walker turned to a News photographer and, in a childish moment, stuck out her tongue.

Her sentence: 35 years.

The ‘hoe squad’

Once she made it through the prison gate, she took off her clothes for a strip search.

“The most demeaning thing was getting naked in front of that officer, bending over and spreading my butt cheeks,” Walker said. “She was very concerned about my age, though, and did not search me in front of the other inmates.”

Inmates work on the “hoe squad” outside a prison unit in Huntsville, where they plant and pick produce. (Rose Baca/Staff Photographer)

She lived apart from other inmates for two weeks before moving into the general population. A program for youthful offenders that now separates young inmates until age 18 and provides education and counseling was only in its infancy. It didn’t alter Walker’s prison experience, she said.

Once in the dorms with other women, she began work in the fields on the “hoe squad.” They planted and picked produce and carried rocks.

The older women noticed her age. They noticed her looks.

“I had a really nice body then,” she said.

But that body ached from the field work, and she said she now has arthritis in her knees and hips.

“I’m in pretty good shape and I always have been, so I never passed out or anything,” she wrote recently in a letter on pink stationery.

Her first cellmate was in her late 30s or early 40s. Her second was in her mid-20s.

Today, Texas cellmates are within 9 years and 40 pounds of each other when possible. Inmates as young as Walker was back then no longer work on the hoe squad.

Breaking the rules

Walker fought and broke the rules throughout her first decade in prison.

“I felt like I was going to have to knock the biggest one out and the rest of them will leave me alone,” Walker said. “I came through the door with a big chip on my shoulder. I fought a lot. I bucked the system a lot. So, I got in a lot of trouble.”

When guards reassigned her to the kitchen, her reaction was immature. She got in trouble on purpose so she could return to the hoe squad and the inmates she knew.

It didn’t register that she was hurting her chances for success in prison.

Walker said growing up in prison didn’t teach her anything useful for life as an adult — inside or outside.

“Prison is not for rehabilitation. I know that’s what they say, but it’s not,” she said. “It teaches you to be a better criminal. So, for my first 10 years, that’s what I was learning, to be a better criminal — until I made decisions that this place has my body, but I’m not going to let them have my mind.”