In 2007, the Redwood Gospel Mission accepted him into its 12-step New Life Program. Then, a judge gave him one chance to get clean and reclaim his life through residential treatment. He said he was looking at a seven-year commitment to state prison for his role in keeping the secret of a convicted felon who packed a gun. Though his mother never gave up on him, he said there also wasn’t much she could say to him as he grubbed, lied or stole for speed and racked 13 bookings into the Sonoma County jail.
REDWOOD GOSPEL MISSION NEW LIFE PROGRAM FULL
“I’d burned every bridge I had,” said Keys, at 40 a broad and gregarious man with a full goatee and sapphire eyes. But he couldn’t think of a single person who wouldn’t just hang up on him. He was hooked on methamphetamine, a most miserable drug, and living along Santa Rosa Creek in downtown Santa Rosa.Īt one of the lowest of his low points through seven years of hardcore homelessness, following another seven of couch-surfing, Keys found that he had enough change in his pocket to make a pay-phone call. “And I certainly never thought I’d have my name on a house.”Įight years ago, Keys could scarcely imagine having a pair of clean socks or an indoors place to sleep two nights in a row. I’d never thought I’d be alive and have a baby,” he said. “I never thought I’d be here,” said the former Sonoma Valley High three-sport athlete, now dad to a boisterous toddler named Isaac and to his stepchildren, Parker, 15, and Madison, 11. Chris Keys looks at the door keys as if they’d dropped from the heavens directly into his beefy hands. The keys go to the Santa Rosa house that Keys and his wife, the former Sara Jakel, just purchased with a mortgage. You would have thought from his reaction that they’d let him into Fort Knox or the royal suite aboard the Queen Victoria or maybe even the locker room of the San Francisco Giants. Chris Keys was handed a set of keys the other day.