The New Yorker:

Under pressure from interrogators, a teen-ager helped send three of his friends to prison for murder. How could he ever make amends?

By Jennifer Gonnerman

Tyrone Woodruff started getting tattoos in the late nineteen-nineties. “To tell the story of my life,” he said. “You know how people get tattoos, ‘Oh, I was drunk, so I put this on’? No. We’re not doing that. Everything has a meaning.” On his lower leg, he has portraits of three family members who have died: his father, his mother, and one of his two sons. A few years ago, he got a large tattoo across the front of his torso, inspired by four lines from the DJ Khaled song “Never Surrender”:

There’s a story in my life.

There’s a story in my pain.

There’s a story in my tears.

There’s a story in me.

The tattoo alludes to his role in a homicide prosecution that occurred fifty years ago. At the time, Woodruff, who is now sixty-seven, was seventeen. He rarely speaks about what happened, but twice last year he travelled to a federal courthouse in upstate New York to recount the story. It began in his home town of Buffalo, on January 11, 1976. That day and the next, detectives from the Buffalo Police Department questioned Woodruff in their headquarters about a recent murder. The choices he made then continue to haunt him. “It has nothing to do with feeling better or forgetting,” Woodruff said, reflecting on his decision to get the tattoo. “I’ll never forget. I’ll never feel better about what I’ve done.”

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