Second chance
When they pulled away from the Chino, Calif., youth correctional facility Christmas Eve 2001, he asked his mother to slow down – 40 m.ph. was too fast through a world he hadn’t seen in eight years.
“I was getting car sick,” he said.
As David Pak sat in the passenger seat that day – the day before his 25th birthday – he had paid the price for a horrible mistake. He had changed.
A Downward Spiral
According to a story in The Orange County Register, Pak, on the night of Oct. 1, 1993, broke into the second story window of his 23-year-old neighbor’s house, put a knife to her throat and sexually assaulted her.
Two days later, police arrested Pak in his high school.
At 16 years old, he was tried as an adult and pleaded guilty to one count of forcible rape and one count of forcible rape with a deadly weapon, according to The Register.
That night, Pak said he reached the bottom of a life that had just “spiraled down.”
He was sentenced to eight years and sent to the Fred C. Nelles Youth Correctional Facility in Whittier, Calif. It was there Pak said he straightened his life out.
“When I was 16, I was so lost,” Pak said. “I wasn’t thinking … Being away from society for eight years it gave me nothing but time.”
Through extensive counseling, he said he began to dissect his life, his past, his actions, his makeup.
And he began to change slowly.
“It wasn’t overnight,” Pak said. “It was over years.”
As Pak began to open up in group sessions, he also discovered another escape: basketball.
“I would just always practice, dribbling the ball or shooting around,” he said. “It was kind of like my haven.”
Pak had never played organized ball before his incarceration, he said, just pickup games in the park.
Other inmates would ask Pak why he wasted the one hour each day he was allotted for recreation, but he paid no attention.
During his final years at the facility, counselors began to take notice of his development as a basketball player and encouraged him to pursue the game after his release.
It was a phone call from one of those counselors that peaked the interest of Saddleback Junior College Head Coach Bill Brummel.
“She said he hadn’t had one blemish on his record since,” Brummel said. “She said if you were to ever give someone a second chance, this was a guy that deserved it.”
Brummel agreed and Pak walked onto the team.
“It was a great experience. He was one of the most cooperative and pleasant and hardworking guys I’ve ever met,” he said of Pak. “There was no doubt that he had moved on.
“You can always judge a guy better by his actions than his words.”
Stew Morrill
Utah State head coach Stew Morrill sat in the office of then-President Kermit L. Hall, looked him in the eye and asked for permission to recruit Pak.
“I was totally aware that it would raise some eyebrows,” Morrill said.
“I was also totally aware, having been raised in this state, that there’s a lot of talk about forgiveness and giving people second chances.”
Hall exercised what Morrill said was an “almost scary amount of trust” in the basketball coach, giving him permission to exercise his discretion.
“You do what you think is right,” Morrill said. “And this was the right thing to do. David Pak deserved to play Division-I basketball.”
Pak’s past threw up “a huge red flag,” Morrill said.
But Brummel, a friend of Morrill’s for more than 30 years, had given Pak his endorsement and Morrill listened.
“They flat guaranteed us that this guy was good as gold,” he said.
Morrill said Pak looked him in the eye and was honest about his past, the mistake he made, the price he paid.
“And I looked him right in the eye,” Morrill said. “And said there can never be any sort of problem along any lines.”
The two had an understanding.
Home life
“I’ve never seen my biological father,” Pak said.
Pak’s last name is Korean. It is his step-father’s.
With his father gone, Pak’s mother was always busy and passive and distant when he was growing up, Pak said.
“There was not a lot of affection in the house,” he said of his youth. “When I would go hang out with my friends I would see all the care and the love. When I came home, I wouldn’t receive that and I felt like something was wrong.”
Pak said his relationship with his family was strained prior to his incarceration. Still, his mother went to visit him every week.
“She opened up and explained things to me,” Pak said.
He was young and didn’t understand how hard a single, Vietnamese mother had to work to support three children. Through their weekly conversations, they grew close.
His growing bond with his all-female family also helped him to realize the errors of his ways. His mother, his grandmother, his two sisters had raised him and Pak said he began to switch places with his victim.
“I never want anything like that to happen to anyone,” Pak said, “especially my family.”
An ending, a beginning
Now Pak dons the number two on his back during games. His arm is adorned with the Chinese character for life, surrounded by the Roman numeral two. Both, he said, represent his second chance at life.
“Ever since I’ve gotten out, it’s never been about proving wrong everybody who I thought I couldn’t do it,” Pak said. “It was about doing something good for the people who did believe in me.”
Pak’s hard work has not gone unnoticed.
“It’s a good story. It’s a bad story,” Morrill said. “For me it’s a good story. I’ll never regret having done it.”
-acf@cc.usu.edu
Aggie basketball player David Pak talks about his eight-year incarceration in a California correctional facility and the mistake he made that put him there. (Photo by John Zsiray)