In the 80s, Ronald Ennis grew up in Huntington Beach, stood up for the victims of bullies, showed compassion to his friends and excelled so much at surfing and skateboarding that people thought he could turn pro when he got older.
Somehow that Ennis turned into a gun-toting felon with a large, offensive Nazi swastika tattooed on the right side of his shaved head.
There's no mystery to the downfall: drug addictions.
Ennis began drinking alcohol at the age of 12 and smoking marijuana the following year. At the age of 17, he started using cocaine. By the time he was 25 he'd become addicted to methamphetamine and heroin.
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The drug use resulted in a wasted life plus numerous adversarial contacts with prosecutors inside the Orange County District Attorney's office and five criminal convictions, including carjacking.
In Dec. 2012, law enforcement agents found Ennis carrying a Walther P-38, 9mm pistol and this week inside Orange County's Ronald Reagan Federal Courthouse U.S. District Court Judge Josephine L. Staton sentenced him to a term of 51 months in prison.
Felons are banned from possessing weapons.
The 39-year-old defendant apologized to Staton and promised he plans to remove certain tattoos.
His dream?
He hopes to become a drug counselor when he emerges back into society in late 2017 or early 2018.
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CNN-featured investigative reporter R. Scott Moxley has won Journalist of the Year honors at the Los Angeles Press Club; been named Distinguished Journalist of the Year by the LA Society of Professional Journalists; obtained one of the last exclusive prison interviews with Charles Manson disciple Susan Atkins; won inclusion in Jeffrey Toobin’s The Best American Crime Reporting for his coverage of a white supremacist’s senseless murder of a beloved Vietnamese refugee; launched multi-year probes that resulted in the FBI arrests and convictions of the top three ranking members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department; and gained praise from New York Times Magazine writers for his “herculean job” exposing entrenched Southern California law enforcement corruption.