Reflections of a minion: Evil Overlords, Liberal do-gooders, and the Efrén Paredes, Jr. case
by Jennifer Briggs, a friend of Efrén Paredes Jr. and his family
If you’ve never met a minion, you’re meeting one. Me. Minion-in-person to a subtle, conniving, mustache-twirling Evil Overlord.
Before COVID, we’d plot world conquest — at least, it was supposed to be on the agenda, but I’m not sure we ever got to it. Mostly we’d talk about gardens, or family, or laugh at stupid stuff my cat had done, while sitting at a little plastic visitors’ table. The E.O. diabolically crunched spicy tortilla chips, while I fiendishly nibbled Cheetos. Also, we once ate an entire pack of peanut M&M’s for dessert. Scarfing chocolate is just plain depraved.
Then it got serious. Every time before I left, he gave me top-secret minion orders for carrying out his evil plans.
1. Take care of yourself.
2. Be safe.
3. Thanks for coming.
4. See you.
We minions have it rough. Or maybe we just don’t know how rough we have it. We’re poor, deluded creatures. I never even knew I was a minion, but I now have it on good authority that I am — one of several hundred “liberal do-gooders” supposedly under the spell of a mastermind. Translated, that means minions of the Evil Overlord.
Frankly, I’m ok with the title. Sometimes, you’re just proud of who you work for. Or, to cut the irony, I’m very proud of my friend.
Thirty-two years ago, at the age of 15, my friend, Efrén Paredes, Jr., was wrongfully charged with robbery and murder. Many factors influenced his conviction. None of them should have.
No physical evidence established Efrén’s guilt. One piece later surfaced in such a manner as to give ample suspicion that it was planted. False testimony came from boys desperate to avoid life sentences for the killing. Worst of all, Efrén’s own defense attorney gave the terrified teenager an order for courtroom behavior that put the nail in the coffin: whatever you do, don’t act upset or cry.
He didn’t. He sat in court all day with empty eyes and an empty face — a mask that hid exhaustion, numbness, disbelief, anger. At night, he went back to his cell where the lights stayed on all night. Alone, he pulled the blanket over his head and cried himself to sleep.
He was convicted. His courtroom demeanor was accepted as overwhelming evidence. It fit the script being written around him. The super-predator. The cunning, unfathomable psychopath. The junior Evil Overlord.
For more than 30 years, Efrén has lived behind bars, convicted of a murder that took place while he was at home with his family, eating pizza.
Last year, he went back to court again; this time for hearings leading up to his resentencing. (The Supreme Court ruled in 2012 that juveniles can’t automatically be sentenced to life without parole.) Final arguments for a new sentence took place on January 15, 2021.
Again, Berrien County prosecutor Michael Sepic urged the court to uphold Efrén’s previous sentence of life without parole. He spoke of “manipulation and a desire to kill.” He pointed to Efrén’s “charisma, intelligence, and personality” as signs of an unstable mind bent on mayhem. He dismissed a broad rank-and-file of supporters in Efrén’s case — including former prison guards, investigators, academics, legal experts, and journalists — as “liberal do-gooders.” Mere minions.
Suddenly, I was included in the conversation. Backhandedly, unknowingly; but included. So as an official minion, I claim the privilege of a few remarks.
You see, unlike Michael Sepic, I know Efrén.
He was the kid, who, if the teacher put a wrong answer on the board, would argue for the right answer all the way to the principal’s office. He’s still like that.
He was the honor-roll teenager who scribbled N.W.A. rap lyrics in his school notebook because it was edgy, cool, and rebellious. (I used to sing along with Billy Joel for the same reasons.)
He reads academic books and journals sent by friends — as a result, he has the vocabulary of an elderly college professor — but he can laugh at himself when he realizes how strange it sounds.
He listens to me when I argue with him. He never tries to impose an alternate reality over mine. He respects my opinions, even if he doesn’t always go along with them. More, in spite of living for more than thirty years in an environment where toxic masculinity runs wild, he never talks down to me because I’m a woman. I have yet to catch him mansplaining.
He’s so far from making any plays for my sympathy that when he gave an interview on prison life (https://efrenswords.home.blog/), I found out for the first time that he suffers from chronic back pain. “Oh,” he said, when I mentioned it in one of our chats. “I forgot you know about that now.”
He’s a jailhouse lawyer; a confessional priest for lost souls. He preaches redemption. He walks the talk. Society’s outcasts and lepers know what hypocrisy looks like, and none of it gets past them. They know Efrén is real.
He was lost, himself — lost in the darkness of the hopeless world of prisons, for a while. Then he fell in love. There were more bars between them than Romeo and Juliet. Inmates and prison employees aren’t allowed to mingle, even if a prisoner is wrongly convicted — even if he’s been sentenced to live and die alone for something he did not do.
He loved her anyway. She believed in him anyway. They loved each other. Now he has a daughter that he talks about, breathes for, lives for.
His child is a bright, beautiful little girl. She’s as stubborn as he is. As fiercely idealistic. Neither of them can ever believe that justice won’t prevail in the end. They know it will.
And in the end, that’s why Michael Sepic has to portray me as a minion. There’s not much else he can do. It’s not easy to make dozens of credible character witnesses out as liars. It’s even harder to undermine Efrén’s own record of good choices, achievements, and community service in an environment where everything is telling him to go bad. And it takes real imagination to get around the multiple tests given by qualified prison psychologists who all agree this Latinx man is a superb candidate for successful release.
Enter the Evil Overlord.
He’s so convenient. So familiar. He’s the Archdeceiver, the darkest Psychopath, the ultimate Pervert, and the embodiment of Violence and terror. He leads the Stormtroopers, and the pop-up Indians, and the Nazis, and the Borg. He’s a Jewish banker who runs the world. He’s a lazy, murdering rapist racing across the Mexico-U.S. border to register as a fake voter for the Democratic Party. He’s Hilary Clinton and Barack Obama rolled up into a mixed race, gender-confused, proto-Communist who wants to enslave white Christians on the way to establishing a New World Order where feminists eat babies.
Unfortunately, he’s also you and me. And here I say it: I started out with this writing — a little irritably, and a little flippantly — to rip off the rubber Halloween-mask that’s been forced over the face of a real human being who happens to be my friend. By the time I got this far, I realized something else. Nobody is safe from someone else’s scriptwriting. Today, you might be a minion; tomorrow, you’ll be a monster you never recognized. The directors of falsehood aren’t casting a fantasy: they’re making a horror epic, where a blind lie opens the gateway to the bottom of Hell.
Over many yesterdays, that lie sent 6 million Jews to death camps. Crushed indigenous peoples into extermination. Passed race-laws. Served up chain gangs and forced abortions, and too many atrocities to catalog. Today, among other things, it runs the school-to-prison pipeline for young black men, and leaves Central American and Mexican refugees to die of agonizing thirst in the Arizona desert. Only God knows what it will do tomorrow.
We are making tomorrow. We are our brother’s keeper, and our sister’s keeper. We have no right to be silent in the face of the lie.
Mr. Prosecutor, I don’t really know if you’ve written me in as a minion, a sidekick, or just somebody who stands on the drawbridge and screams while the Dark Castle crashes in a cloud of dust for the umpteenth time.
I do know two things.
One, you’ve made a monumental mistake in casting the lead.
And, two, this production isn’t just a B-movie flop. It’s a crime against all of us, everywhere.
