Albert Sanders Jr., the boy with the big dreams and the bigger drive, was scared. He was angry. Worried.
He wanted to become a lawyer, to wow courtrooms just like Ben Matlock and Perry Mason did on his family’s clunky console TV. But in 1994, when he was 14, that dream suddenly seemed beyond reach, hence the anger and worry. He had excelled at a private school but circumstances had brought him to Jefferson High School, one of the worst in Los Angeles.
Before his first day as a freshman, he and his mother, Paula Sanders, sat in front of the campus in her 11-year-old Volvo as she fought to hide tears.