An unlikely friendship is what Michael Kent credits with turning his life around, and what led him to sit in a tattoo parlor in Colorado Springs not because he had a great idea for a new tattoo, but because he wanted to get his old tattoos covered up. Those old tattoos were remnants of a life Michael no longer felt a part of, a life where he wanted to be covered in swastika tattoos.
Michael is a former neo-Nazi, but with the help of an unexpected friend, and a lot of reflection, he has completely left the past behind. His unlikely friend, Tiffany Whittier, is not only a parole officer who was assigned to Michael when he got out of prison but an African-American woman, who did not tolerate any nonsense from Michael. According to Michael, “If it wasn’t for her, I would have seeped back into it. I look at her as family.”
For her part, Tiffany says of Michael, “I’m not here to judge him. That’s not my job to judge. My job is to be that positive person in someone’s life.” To that end, when she learned that Michael’s living room had a large Nazi flag in it, she convinced him that he needed to take those down. She told him to replace those images with something positive. Michael now how smiley faces in his living room instead, saying, “When you wake up and see a smiley face, you’re going to go to work, and you’re going to smile.”
Michael’s work is also something that he feels like he could never have had in his old life because he is the only white man among an otherwise all Hispanic staff. Michael says his coworkers, at the chicken farm, his place of work, are now his friends. He spends weekends going to their get-togethers, quinceañeras, and company parties.
When it came to getting his tattoos covered, Michael knew it would be an expensive process, but he also knew he had to do it. Luckily, Redemption Ink, a national non-profit that helps people with free removals of hate-related tattoos, connected him to a tattoo shop in Colorado Springs called Fallen Heroes Tattoo, where Michael will sit through fifteen hours of tattooing to get his swastika’s covered.
Through this process, he hopes to move forward with his life and be the father to his two young children that he believes they deserve. Thanks to the seeds planted by his friendship with his parole officer, something he could never have seen coming, he now says, “I want my kids to know me for who I am now—a good father, a hard worker, and a good provider.”
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Source: ABC News
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