From the LA Times:
They met when they were 7 years old, their houses 10 minutes apart if they ran the whole way — both precocious and charismatic, both baseball fanatics, one a shortstop, the other a pitcher. Their friendship should have been simple.
But as much as they might have seemed it, they knew from the start that they were not the same: Ronald “Looney” Barron and Tommie “T-Top” Rivers were from different “neighborhoods”: two pockets of the city, one in Mid-Wilshire, one in West Adams, claimed by different gangs. As teenagers, they joined their respective gangs — Barron a Mansfield Hustler, Rivers a Geer Gang Crip. And, under the rules of the street, that was the end of the friendship.
It wasn’t the end, though, of their parallel lives. By 1990, both were serving time for violent, gang-related offenses. In the prison yard in Chino, they discovered common ground, once again.
Then for more than a decade, after their release, they were inseparable, working in tandem as gang interventionists for Amer-I-Can, the foundation started by football great Jim Brown — spreading the gospel of education, sobriety and family to youngsters from some of the toughest schools in the city. They were both 40. They started each day together, at the gym. When it was time to pick up Barron’s daughter from school, Rivers went too.
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