Drew Cotton pulled his right cheek down and pointed to a lump under his eye. "There it is," he said. "The bullet is still in there."

Almost two years ago, he was watching a boxing match on TV with some "friends" when he found out they weren't his friends at all. "They were plotting to kill me and rob me," he found out.

"I invited them over to watch the fight, and while I was watching the fight one of them kept watching me. When I stood up to get closer to the TV, he walked up behind me and shot me at point-blank range with a .22 in the back of the head."

Cotton said the only thing he felt was blood trickling down his neck, but he knew he needed to call 911. As he went for the phone, the two men ran. "It was divine intervention or an act of God that the gun had only one bullet in it, so he shot me only one time, or I would be dead."

He doesn't remember much after that. An ambulance came to his West Side apartment and took him to an emergency room. For three days he was unconscious. The bullet went through his neck, grazed his spine, severed a nerve in his tongue and finally stopped an inch below his right eye.

He sticks his tongue out and it swerves left - evidence of the damaged nerve. And the bullet stays in his cheek. Removing it could cost him his eye.

"It's a constant reminder of the lifestyle he was living," says Bob Clarke of the Lord's Gym, who is Cotton's part-time boss and full-time friend.

Cotton, a former Crips gangbanger from L.A., describes it this way: "To put it bluntly, I was mainly a thug, selling drugs and committing robberies."

He sold crack and robbed jewelry stores and other small businesses. "We called ourselves the Crips because when we get done with you, you would be crippled. We break bones."

Cotton, now 39, spent 15 years or more "hurting people," he says. He served prison time in California, and he has two strikes there. One more, and he would do life. So he moved to Cincinnati nearly three years ago.

Cotton is a big man, and his presence fills more space than his physical frame. He lifts regularly at the Lord's Gym and it shows. He works there part time and has a second job, doing outreach for the Cincinnati Human Relations Commission, as part of the Cincinnati Initiative to Reduce Violence.

He calls himself a "street advocate - helping youths who are at risk of gun violence."

The former Crip has "street cred." He has no problem approaching young men who loiter on the corners, living the thug life. He speaks their language - but he tells them he wouldn't trade what he has now for all the gangsta glory in a rap video.

"The objective is to build relationships with guys in high-crime areas and tell them there is an alternative to being killed or locked up for life," he says. "Anyone who doesn't have underlying mental problems doesn't want to live that lifestyle."

"I feel that God has put me in this place for a reason."

Cotton knows how lucky he is - how close he came to being killed or disabled. While he lay in a hospital bed, "I wept like a baby for two days, repenting and thanking the Lord for saving my life," he said.

And God spoke to his spirit, he said. "He said very clearly, 'Surrender your life back to me and I'll show you who your true friends are. I will make your body better than it was before."

All that happened. Cotton found friends and recovery at the Lord's Gym in Over-the-Rhine. He's gone from gangbanger to working man, from homeless to his own apartment, from thug to anti-crime counselor, from Crip to Christ.

"I could have had hate for the guy who shot me, but God imparted his love to me. That's not of my doing."

Maybe it's too soon to say how the Cincinnati Initiative is working, but early reports are optimistic. And part of the reason is Drew Cotton, who carries beneath his skin two things that are as much a part of him as his heart - a bullet and a message:

"What I want to convey is that Jesus is the way to a changed life."
About the Author: The Enquirer