Unloaded BB gun sends Black teen to prison for 33 years. Will Craigsville inmate be freed?

Coker “Nick” Robinson

 (Photo: Submitted)

CRAIGSVILLE — Nick Robinson was still a juvenile when he entered prison for the first time in 2010.

Dropping his bags, the 17-year-old scanned the new surroundings of the dimly lighted cell block that stretched three tiers high and held 200 boisterous inmates.

“I looked around, and at that moment I just didn’t know what to do,” recalled Robinson, now 27. “It was fight-or-flight instincts, and my instincts told me to get a weapon.”

He didn’t get a weapon, but as he stood inside the Powhatan Correctional Center the realization was stark: Prison was his new home and it would be for a long, long time.

Prison life is all Robinson has known for the past dozen years. His story is one that is being told far too often these days, but one that could be told by thousands of other Black men across the nation who have been locked up for years if not decades, their punishments far outweighing their crimes against society.

Robinson is now an inmate at the Augusta Correctional Center in Craigsville, where he has been housed since 2014.

After 12 years of incarceration in various Virginia prisons, Robinson, a Richmond native, is hoping his story will be heard. Politicians are taking note, and there is an online petition with more than 100,000 signatures asking “to give Nick a second chance.” 

Robinson’s crime? Providing an unloaded BB gun pistol to his accomplices, then manning the backdoor of a home during a break-in and subsequent robbery. Nobody was hurt during the crime as Robinson, who was unarmed, and his friends made off with some property.

Convicted of numerous felony charges in 2009, Robinson was sentenced to 33 years in prison as a teenager because of mandatory minimum sentences imposed by the state.

Forced out, living with his sister Buy Photo

Guard towers loom over Augusta Correctional Center’s fence in Craigsville.

 (Photo: Mike Tripp/The News Leader )

When he was just 13, Robinson said he and his younger siblings had to move in with his older sister in south Richmond after their mother began living with a convicted sex offender, who was not permitted to have unsupervised contact with juveniles.

Robinson said he tried not to hold his mother’s decision against her, but admits there were some lingering feelings at the time for being forced to move out. “It was more like a silent resentment, in a sense,” he recently said during a phone interview from Augusta Correctional Center.

However, Robinson emphasized that he still loves his mother despite knowing that had the circumstances been different, odds are he wouldn’t have been in the position he found himself in on the night his life was radically changed forever.

“I know she carries that guilt,” Robinson said.

But being 13 and forced to live without any parenting was difficult at best. “It pushed me into this mode of survival and I hated that feeling, like you’re going at it alone,” Robinson said.

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He tried prioritizing school, but it quickly fell off his radar and Robinson ended up repeating the eighth grade. “I started prioritizing living, being able to live week to week,” he said. That included trying to obtain a fake ID card so he could land a construction job. “I did try that,” Robinson said with a chuckle. “It didn’t work at all.”

Looking back on that period in his life, one can almost feel Robinson shaking his head as he speaks. “I’m like, what the hell? No kid should be in that situation,” he said.

For almost two years as a young teen, he lived with his older sister and her two young children, along with his younger brother and sister. The six of them shared a two-bedroom apartment.

“She tried to keep me focused on doing kid things,” said Robinson, who admitted that when his older sister wasn’t around he’d do pretty much whatever he felt like doing.

The night of Dec. 12, 2008, was a Friday, and the choices Robinson made that evening as a 15-year-old boy have haunted him ever since.

Impromptu home robbery

Nick Robinson as a 12-year-old child.

 (Photo: Submitted)

It was two weeks before Christmas and three of Robinson’s friends were conversing in the kitchen of his apartment when he walked in and overheard them discussing a robbery and “talking about gettin’ a lick,” he said. 

There was no elaborate, longterm planning for the scheme, just a quick, impromptu conversation among friends. With his sister struggling financially, Robinson didn’t hesitate to tell them he was in.

“That decision, summed up in this little period of time, changed the next 30 years of my life,” he said.

Robinson grabbed an unloaded BB gun pistol and handed it over to the others.

The group didn’t have far to go. Their target was a home that sat next to Robinson’s apartment complex, the closest residence to them and one where they thought they would find some fast cash.

Robinson stationed himself at the back door as the other three went into the home through a front door after a knock was answered. All four were wearing face coverings of some sort, he said.

Within less than a minute, the backdoor swung open. Robinson said he briefly stepped into the home and was handed some wallets, cash and a cell phone before the four of them sprinted away.

A victim who’d wrestled the BB gun away from one of the assailants tried firing at the group as they ran, Robinson learned at his trial. The unloaded BB gun was useless.

A child was in the home, according to the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office, and the BB gun was pointed at a woman’s head.

Twenty minutes later, the police were at Robinson’s apartment asking questions. He immediately confessed his involvement but later recanted, thinking he could somehow wriggle free of the legal mess he’d found himself in.

“The truth was, I was guilty as hell,” Robinson said. “No one wants to do time.” 

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Robinson and Leon Brown, 19 years old at the time, were arrested. The two other accomplices were never caught. Tried and convicted, Brown is slated for release in 2024, DOC records show.

Robinson said he initially faced just one robbery charge and one gun charge in juvenile court before the prosecutor piled on the charges after he refused to plead guilty and accept a plea deal. 

“The offer was for an indeterminate sentence within the Virginia Department of Juvenile Justice. I declined that deal. The second offer was the day of trial. I cannot accurately recall the terms of that deal, but nevertheless I rejected that deal as well,” Robinson said.

Robinson said he had a juvenile record prior to the home invasion. As a 12-year-old kid, he and another friend walked into an unlocked home and stole a gaming console and a shotgun. 

“It was the first real gun we’d ever touched and for some reason believed it would be a great idea to take it from those folks’ home,” Robinson wrote in a 2017 pardon petition to the governor’s office. He said he immediately gave the gun away to his older half-brother, Mike.

Two weeks later, during the holiday season of 2005, Robinson was playing video games with a buddy when Mike came into his bedroom and cut off the television.

“Let’s go,” Mike said.

“At this point it felt like we no longer had a choice,” Robinson wrote in the pardon petition. Just 12 years old, he then helped his brother rob a pizza delivery driver.

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He was probably right about not having a choice to go or not. When Robinson was 8, Mike once head-butted him so hard he had to receive 13 stitches in his forehead. Two years later, Mike shot his little brother in the head with a pellet gun. The pellet lodged near Robinson’s right temporal lobe and he has worn a hearing aid ever since, he said.

Following Robinson’s arrest for the 2008 armed robbery of the Richmond home, and after he rejected the plea offer, the Richmond Commonwealth’s Attorney’s Office opted to try him as an adult and slapped him with a robbery charge for each victim, seven in all. To go along with the seven robbery charges, he was also hit with eight charges of use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, each charge carrying a mandatory minimum of five years in prison, except for one, which was a mandatory three-year term. There was also a burglary charge.

At the conclusion of the 2009 jury trial, during closing arguments Robinson said Kelli Burnett, the prosecutor handling the case, reminded the court the robbery took place on a Friday, a typical payday for many workers, and argued that Robinson was looking for his own payday. Robinson said as Burnett spoke, he realized she was right.

“That stuck with me, her quote,” he said.

After a jury convicted Robinson, and the prosecutor opted not to prosecute one of the firearm charges, the judge sentenced him to 33 years in prison because of the mandatory minimums that came with each of the seven gun convictions.

“It was the least that I could get,” Robinson said. “I couldn’t comprehend it.”

Just 15 when he was arrested and 16 years old when sentenced as an adult to more than three decades behind bars, looking back, Robinson said it was an emotional time because with the lengthy sentence it seemed as if society had already decided he had nothing to give back despite his young age.

“I just felt like, that the door was shut on me, and I just felt like maybe I should have spoke up sooner,” he said.

Robinson is speaking up now, along with his younger brother, Cory. Together, they hope that freedom for Nick will come sooner than later.

Life without big brother

Cory Robinson, just 14 when his older brother was convicted, said Nick’s lengthy sentence impacted the entire family. He said he no longer had his brother to provide protection for him at school, didn’t hear him cheering any longer from the sidelines at his youth league football games, nor was he there anymore to pal around with for hoop games at the neighborhood basketball courts. Their mother, who Cory said shows little emotion, also exhibited signs of being hurt.

“It was weird,” Cory Robinson said when asked how it felt to have his brother yanked away from his life for so long.

Cory Robinson

 (Photo: By Ahnaveya Wattie.)

But instead of waiting for the 33-year sentence to conclude, the two brothers started an online petition at change.org seeking Robinson’s release. So far, the petition has garnered more than 100,000 signatures. While appreciative of the support, Cory said he feels the petition by itself might not be enough to free his brother, so he’s reached out to several politicians in an effort to educate them about the 2008 case.

“You can get as many people as you want,” he said of the petition, “but once you get senators and delegates that walk behind you on it, it’s a better look.”

With that in mind, Cory recently emailed Sen. Joe Morrissey, D-Richmond, detailing his brother’s plight. Days later, Morrissey spoke about Nick Robinson while addressing the senate. As he spoke, Morrissey noted that is costs anywhere from $30,000 to $40,000 per year to house an inmate in the Virginia Department of Corrections.

“I would ask — does the Commonwealth of Virginia benefit by incarcerating Nick for another 21 years at a cost of $40,000 a year? Or, based on the fact that this young man was 15 when he committed this, had no prior criminal record, do we think that this person warrants parole, perhaps a conditional pardon, a second chance in life, and should we not reevaluate mandatory minimum sentences?” Morrissey said.

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While incarcerated, Robinson has obtained his GED, taken classes through Washington & Lee University and is currently enrolled at Blue Ridge Community College in Weyers Cave. 

Mandatory minimums, which were used to lock Robinson away at such a young age, are being eyed by the General Assembly which failed to take action this year. As it stands, there are 224 crimes in Virginia that require a mandatory minimum sentence, according to a January study by the Virginia Senate Crime Commission. 

The study also noted that Black inmates, on average, have more mandatory minimum sentences than white inmates.

“I want to be able to be a family again,” Robinson said when asked what he hopes to achieve if released early. “I look forward to that because my departure fractured my family.”

He also said he’d like to engage his community in a positive way.

“Many of us have, unfortunately, committed our crimes, and we left our community in a worse way than we found it,” Robinson said.

He remains behind bars with a release date of 2037.

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This article on Nick Robinson is the first in a series of articles that will focus on his sentence and efforts to gain his freedom.

Brad Zinn is the cops, courts and breaking news reporter at The News Leader. Have a news tip? Or something that needs investigating? You can email reporter Brad Zinn (he/him) at bzinn@newsleader.com. You can also follow him on Twitter.

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