Discovering Wes Moore: Chapter 10 Summary & Analysis

After college, Wes goes to England on a Rhodes Scholarship. As excited as he is, he can’t stop thinking about the other Wes Moore. The other Wes is serving a life sentence for killing Bruce Prothero, an off-duty police officer working as a security guard at a jewelry store, during a robbery. Wes writes the other Wes a letter, asking him about his life. He can’t stop thinking about how easily their places could have been switched in life. The other Wes responds, beginning a long correspondence in which he divulges his life story.

In his letter, the other Wes describes his upbringing. Wes and his older brother Tony’s father is an alcoholic, and their mother Mary eventually him to raise the kids on her own. Mary got pregnant with Tony at age 15, but she nevertheless stays committed to academics and works hard, getting a Pell Grant to study at Johns Hopkins. Yet when the government slashes the budget for these grants, she is forced to drop out. She continues working hard and saving up, repeatedly moving to less and less dangerous environments for young Wes (while Tony lives with his father).

Tony gets sucked into drug dealing at a very young age and becomes an intimidating figure. He tries to make the other Wes tough like him, but he also tries to dissuade Wes from following in his footsteps, encouraging him to focus on school. Wes has mediocre grades but cares more about football. One day, a man propositions Wes to help out with a drug deal, and he agrees, quickly getting sucked into the dealing world and making lots of money. He lies to Mary that he paid for the expensive sneakers he’s been buying with money from DJing.

Tony finds out about the other Wes’s activity and tells on him to their mom. Dismayed, Mary flushes Wes’ stash down the toilet, which sends Wes into a panic over the money lost. He resolves to keep dealing to make it back.

At age 15, the other Wes impregnates his girlfriend, Alicia. She has the baby, but Wes doesn’t understand what being a father would mean, and he doesn’t intend to be around for his kid. He keeps dealing drugs. In a spat over another girl, Wes gets enraged and shoots his opponent in the shoulder. He’s sent to juvenile detention for six months for attempted murder. Upon release, he continues dealing drugs, becoming highly organized and efficient.

By age 21, the other Wes has grown tired of the frequent arrests and stress of the drug-dealing life. He now has two children with Alicia and two with another woman, Cheryl. His friend convinces Wes to join him at the Job Corps, a campus environment where they spend the next seven months being trained in honest marketable skills. During this time, Wes begins to shine academically and gets his GED with ease. This is a great time in his life, during which he becomes looked on as a leader by the other students.

When the other Wes finishes the Job Corps and returns home, however, the pressures of life in the neighborhood are still the same. Faced with fewer job prospects than he would have liked, and overwhelmed with financial responsibilities for his children, Wes turns to drug dealing again.

One day while watching the news, Mary is stunned to see that two wanted suspects in a jewelry store robbery that led to a fatal shooting of the security guard are the other Wes and Tony. They’re tracked down at their uncle’s house in Philadelphia 12 days later and arrested. Tony takes a plea deal to avoid a possible death penalty. Wes, meanwhile, maintains his innocence and goes to trial. His story, however, is full of holes, and he’s convicted and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The author Wes reflects on how this other Wes Moore could never have seen a crime of this magnitude in his future: he had been committing low-level crimes for a long time as a means of staying alive in the short term, but suddenly, his “future was sealed.”