Gardner brothers’ blood bond unbreakable

ALBANY — When Eric Gardner got the call from his mom, Gladys Gardner, telling him she needed his help to get her house in order, he initially didn’t know what was going on.

“That just wasn’t my mom,” Gardner said.

But when he got to his mother’s home and she told him what was up, he didn’t hesitate, just pitched in and got the job done.

“My mom said the Spirit had told her that Jimmie was coming home,” Eric Gardner said of his older brother, who had spent the past 27 years of his life in a West Virginia prison for crimes the elder Gardner always swore he didn’t commit. “Normally, I would have been skeptical. I mean, I’d been praying for Jimmie to come home every day of those 27 years and there was no way I was going to give up, but … you know?

“I didn’t have to look at my mother twice, though. She knew in her heart that Jimmie was coming home.”

Whether Gladys Gardner’s certainty was divine assurance or premonition doesn’t much matter in retrospect. Her son, convicted on charges of sexual assault and robbery and imprisoned for 27 of his 50 years, had all charges against him dropped on Sept. 6. He returned to Albany a free man.

Eric Gardner was only a boy when the big brother he idolized, the baseball star who was signed by the Chicago Cubs right out of Tampa Bay Technical High School, was arrested and eventually convicted of crimes Jimmie Gardner always maintained he did not commit.

And while it was Jimmie Gardner who spent day after day after day behind bars, his younger brother’s broken heart was imprisoned with him.

“It was devastating, man,” Eric Gardner, now 40 and a long-haul trucker and part-time entertainer, said. “It hit my whole family, it was like a loss of life. But my brother told me he didn’t do the things they said, and I believed him. And I never stopped believing him. And there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t pray to God to deliver him.

“As I got a little older, I made it my mission in life to help get my brother out of that jail. I started reaching out to religious leaders, to innocence projects all over the nation, to the media, advocating on my brother’s behalf. I got a lot of doors slammed in my face, but there wasn’t a day that went by that I didn’t do something to try and help Jimmie C.”

After graduating Westover High School, Eric Gardner split his time between chasing a future as an entertainer and advocating for his brother’s release from prison. He worked construction, did warehousing, cut hair, all while working on a music/comedy career that took him to the verge of signing a record deal.”

“I’d always been the funny one in the family,” Gardner said. “I wasn’t the class clown or anything, but I could make people laugh. I started messing around with music — my sister and I had been singing Ashford and Simpson songs together since we were little kids — and got involved with (Albany studio owner) Mario Meadows at Platinum Sound. I also did some comedy, including some Christian comedy. I got to be part of the ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’ tour.

“My old schoolmate (and regional recording artist) Ole-E and I did a ‘Hometown Takeover’ radio show on 96.3, where I did a lot of voice-over commercials, and I had a single (‘Cash Flow’) that did well locally. I sold 5,000 copies of a CD I made, and I had an opportunity to sign with (now-defunct) J Records, but I turned that down.”

Jimmie Gardner said his younger brother’s sacrifice of what was a promising career and his never-wavering faith are among the things that allowed him to persevere as he stacked up time in prison.

“My family, man, that’s what got me through,” Gardner, who was released from prison on April 1 when officials discovered, among other things, that the person who had given the most damning testimony against him, state Chief Serologist Fred Zain, had actually falsified information in his and dozens of other defendants’ cases.

Ordered by U.S. District Court Judge Joseph R. Goodwin to grant Jimmie Gardner a new trial or grant him his release, West Virginia officials chose to drop all charges against Gardner. He returned to Albany shortly after securing his release.

“I can’t even begin to imagine how hard that whole thing was on Jimmie C., but it exhausted me,” Eric Gardner said. “I was pulled left and I was pulled right at the same time. But Jimmie kept me focused. He told me that no matter what I went through, he’d have my back when he got home. I believed in my brother, and I believed that God would deliver him.

“My mom always said during his time in prison, ‘I’m glad Jimmie was the one who went through this. None of my other kids could have taken it.’ She was right. But now my brother’s home. My prayers have been answered.”

The Gardner brothers will never have the opportunity to make up for the shared time they each lost. But they both say they learned one of life’s most valuable lessons: There’s a DNA bond in shared blood that’s stronger than any prison bars, stronger even that the years that kept them apart.