His voice quiets to virtually a whisper, and from a patio chair outside a suburban Kansas City condo, Chiefs cornerback L’Jarius Sneed leans forward to preserve his next thought for an audience of one.
His father, Non Sneed, is within earshot, barbecuing marinated chicken on the gas grill, moving in and out of the sliding door to the home he shares with a blossoming NFL star. And L’Jarius isn’t certain he wants his father to overhear what he has to say about growing up.
Sneed doesn’t waste words, buzzing through short phrases with a Southern drawl entrenched in his Louisiana hometown. His past is always with him in that sense. Much as he tried to elude it, his mind won’t cooperate.
To be sure, the Sneeds are a tight-knit family now. At a recent Chiefs game in Kansas City, they occupied an entire row in the lower bowl of Arrowhead Stadium. Mom. Dad. Grandma. Two older brothers. They were decked out in No. 38 Sneed jerseys, most of them, the only difference the color of uniform they wore.
But there’s something else you should know about the Sneeds. Something of which most everyone back in Minden, Louisiana, is already well aware.
In a town of 12,000, they carry a legacy much different than football. They are a family of generational imprisonment. A family with murder convictions, drug arrests and life sentences in their past and present.
A 24-year-old’s thriving football career has freed them from that history, they believe, but it’s not been enough to release the burden from its actual savior. NFL stardom, as it turns out, is not enough to relieve the anxiety, not enough to ease the insecurity. Not when those roots were planted decades ago.
And that’s what L’Jarius Sneed isn’t quite sure he is ready to share as he leans forward in his patio chair.
“What I’m still trying to understand,” he says quietly, “is how the childhood trauma I went through is still messing with my head.”
With his index and middle fingers, he taps his right temple.
“Because it’s in there, man. I can feel it.”
How life started in Minden
L’Jarius Sneed doesn’t know how he came into this world, only that when he backtracks to his earliest memories, they don’t include his mother or father. He’s never directly asked either of them for all the specific details, learning bits and pieces along the way.
Here’s the story.
His dad served 17 years and 6 months in correctional centers across Louisiana, a term that started shortly after he met a woman, Jane Mims, at a club. Although their relationship unraveled a chain of events in Minden that led to Non’s incarceration, they married in a ceremony that took place while he lived in a prison cell.
Good behavior offered him special privileges. Increased hours outside. Picnics. And conjugal visits with his new wife.
Within a few months, Jane was pregnant with her third son. She’d name him L’Jarius, and eventually come to call him J.J.
“Was I surprised? I wouldn’t say that,” Non says before adding, with a laugh, “because I knew what we were doing.”
Jane took her newborn to see his father in prison, a parental bond fashioned through one-hour weekly visits. She wrestled with normalizing that setting, so on the trip home, she’d explain to her baby that he need not follow in his father’s footsteps.
But then she did.
When L’Jarius was 1 year old, Jane rushed him to the hospital after he fell off a toy bicycle in their apartment. On the drive there, she got into a confrontation with people she said were blocking the road. Jane would be charged with stabbing two, one requiring stitches and the other staples to sew a neck wound. She pleaded guilty to one charge; the other was dismissed.
She would spend the next 51 months locked up, leaving three sons without either parent at home. L’Jarius lived with his maternal grandmother in a Section 8 apartment complex. Other extended relatives pitched in. But if you ask him who raised him, L’Jarius answers without hesitation.
“My two brothers,” he says.
His oldest, TQ Harrison, is 9 years his elder. Harrison changed diapers and cooked meals. He ironed clothes and walked his brothers to school. He still remembers the bottle regimen because he had such a tough time progressing L’Jarius to regular food.
To this day, Harrison talks about L’Jarius more like a son than a brother. He affectionately calls him “my little dude.” Mimicking a proud parent, his Facebook profile picture is a photo not of himself, but of L’Jarius.
“Man, yeah, it was hard,” Harrison says. “But what choice (did) I have?”
In the same month L’Jarius celebrated a sixth birthday, his mom surprised him on the walk home from elementary school. She was free, six years before her husband, and for the first time in his life L’Jarius talked about having a family.
He was 12 when his dad got out. L’Jarius had longed for that day. Made plans for the things they’d do together. Shoot hoops. Toss the football around.
But his father made other arrangements.
He wasn’t coming home.
‘Some people awaken and some people don’t’
In a room he calls the man cave, L’Jarius Sneed powers off the TV. Using the YouTube app on his iPhone, he clicks on meditation music, reclines his seat and closes his eyes.
On occasion, an entire Chiefs game will play through his head. At other times, he’s on a beach somewhere. But far more often, he’s just thinking about life.
“I’ve been having crazy thoughts in my head,” he says. “Like, doubting myself. Not confident in myself. I know who I really am, but I still second-guess myself.”
In just his second season with the Chiefs, who drafted him in the fourth round out of Louisiana Tech, Sneed has developed into one of their most valuable defensive players. He wasn’t exactly a highly touted college prospect, but his NFL impact has been immediate and undeniable. A teammate in the defensive backfield, veteran safety Tyrann Mathieu, says, “I think the whole world will know his name by the end of the season.”
He’s appreciative of how this is all unfolding. But it doesn’t erase how he arrived here. He can’t trick his brain that way.
Anxiety will sometimes take over. The insecurity, too. With Sneed, there’s uneasiness from his past and his future. Privately, he’s considered professional therapy in hopes of talking through it. He’ll eventually get there.
“Just seeing what I saw at a young age, and then my dad wasn’t around in my life,” Sneed says, “I never realized how much of an effect it can be on my life — childhood trauma — from seeing all that type of stuff. It’s really carried on in (my) life and to adulthood.”
As a toddler and into elementary school, Sneed’s relationships with both of his parents consisted of visits to detention centers across the state. Long drives, some of them. He saw his mom on the weekends. They would stay an hour, sometimes talking over a meal. When a guard opened the door as Jane exited their conversations, young L’Jarius would peek into the prison’s population.
“I saw some wild fights, things like that. That’s just something that’s stuck with me,” L’Jarius says. “You finna leave her and you see her walking back there to that? That’s painful, you know?”
On occasion, L’Jarius’ grandmother would drive him by the facility during hours they knew his mom would be outside. He’d walk to the gate, close as he could get, and shout her name. She’d turn and smile. The distance preventing a lengthy conversation, they developed a form of sign language.
Jane would touch her eye, cross her arms over her heart and then point at her son.
I love you.
He’d do the same in response. That communication carried on in their relationship long after her release. Still does. They see it as an understanding of all they’ve been through together, and an important reminder of where they are now.
Jane raised her three kids — L’Jarius, TQ Harrison and TQ Mims — on her own after she got out. She felt it important to take ownership of her absence and correct her faults. She says she had “problems with my anger” that spread into her adult years.
The 51-month confinement changed her, certainly. The real impetus, though, wasn’t the experience itself, but rather what the experience caused her to miss.
“Some people awaken and some people don’t,” she says. “I was never leaving my children again. Never. One time and one time only.”
Their bond grew stronger as another frayed.
The sins of a father
Non Sneed spent 17 years in prison for attempted murder. He’d ignited a shootout with one of Jane’s ex-boyfriends, which he called payback for a previous altercation.
A bullet struck his intended target in the arm. Another grazed an innocent bystander. Non’s half-brother, who was on his side of the shootout, was killed. Non, a self-described drug dealer at the time, was found guilty of two counts of attempted murder, carrying a 30-year sentence.
Parole came after the sentence reached 60% completion. Upon his release, he divorced Jane and moved to Dallas, a three-hour drive from Minden.
He didn’t initially share that with the kids who’d visited him every week. They figured him gone for good. As he attempted to stay connected through phone calls, L’Jarius refused to talk to his dad for a year. His father’s release from prison had caused more turmoil than his incarceration. At least then there was a reason for his absence.
Now? “He chose not to come home,” L’Jarius says. “I couldn’t get over that.”
Around the time L’Jarius reached middle school, though, disobedience prompted Jane to wonder if a father figure might re-shape him. He’d become “good with his hands,” mostly because he had no choice but to learn to fight. Jane drove him to Dallas to spend the school year there.
The arrangement didn’t last long. He skipped class one afternoon, and when Non attempted to discipline him for it, the anger that had bubbled for years finally burst forth.
“He (walked) up on me like he wanted to fight me,” Non says. “I said, ‘Man, you my son. You think you can whoop me, J.J.?’ So he tried it.”
Non pinned L’Jarius to the floor.
“I didn’t accept him as my father in that moment,” L’Jarius says.
Within a few days, he packed his things. His mom drove to Dallas and picked him up for a six-hour round trip back to Minden.
He left angry.
His dad stayed, devastated.
“Woo, I cried,” Non says. “That situation, man, that hurt me so bad. That hurt me so bad. I couldn’t understand why my son had that kind of anger toward me.”
In an honest moment, Non will tell you he struggled for years with that. What he doesn’t know is L’Jarius did, too. After years of praying for his father to come home, he faced the consequences of returning to a childhood all too familiar — a life without one.
But as he literally distanced himself from his father, he grew closer to the path his father had forged.
The Sneed family curse
Sneed sat in the back of a police car, his hands cuffed together, watching a friend get wheeled into an ambulance with a gunshot wound.
He can still hear the sirens from that night.
“Wow, my life is over,” he recalls thinking. “Like, I came this far, and my life is over. I’m honestly headed down the same road as my parents.”
The road travels back even further than that.
Sneed’s paternal grandfather has spent half a century in the Louisiana State Penitentiary. Bobby Sneed was given a life sentence for a 1974 crime in which he stood lookout for a burglary that resulted in a resident being killed. Earlier this year, he had his parole granted, then later revoked after he allegedly tested positive for drugs, though he’s contested that.
He’s been imprisoned 47 years. For seven of those, he lived with his own son. Non Sneed finished out his time sharing a room with his father, their first interaction of any kind since Non was 4.
The family tree on the Sneed side is littered with arrests and time in prison. Two of L’Jarius’ uncles were jailed on drug offenses. Another great uncle was, too. Basically, Non says, all the men on his side of the family have been incarcerated.
For all intents and purposes, L’Jarius felt the weight of that generational curse, as though it was predetermined he’d spend part of his life in jail.
And he did.
One night.
L’Jarius was arrested twice while in college at Louisiana Tech. Those incidents popped up during his pre-draft interviews with the Chiefs.
In the first arrest, on New Year’s Eve, he was riding in a car that was pulled over by police. He was charged with possession of marijuana and a firearm, as was a friend. L’Jarius spent the night in jail before charges were dropped.
He caught a break. Momentarily.
A year later, L’Jarius sat in the back of that police car, the aftermath of a drug robbery gone bad. A friend who’d orchestrated the attempt was shot in the back. When police arrived, they searched the vehicle and charged all four passengers, L’Jarius included, with possession of marijuana.
That evening, Jane picked up the phone. Her son was on the other end of the line, crying. This isn’t a normal progression in life, she told him, same as she had when he was an infant.
Then he talked to his father.
“Don’t be like your daddy,” Non said. “You are our chance to break this curse.”
The one who made it
Half an hour into the conversation on his patio, as his father stepped outside to check on the progress of dinner, L’Jarius gathered his attention.
“Dad, I want you to get interviewed about my story, too,” he said.
Non walked closer.
“What do you mean?” he replied.
“I don’t wanna be afraid of my past,” L’Jarius said. “I need to talk about it. We need to talk about it.”
“We good,” Non replied. “Just tell me when.”
L’Jarius invited his father to live with him here in Kansas City. They reconnected shortly after the incident in Dallas. When signing his rookie contract with the Chiefs last summer, L’Jarius was offered a personal chef, and he picked his dad, who had gone to culinary school during his time in jail.
“We’re straight now,” L’Jarius says. “Like it never happened, you know? I forgave him. He is my father, you know? He brought me into this world.”
A prison sentence cost Non 17 years with his son, but he’s been clean since his release. Another cost Jane more than four years, and she walked out saying, “Never again.”
L’Jarius needed only one night. He called the second arrest “my last wake-up call.” He’s a father now, of 4-year-old Kyson, and by God, he doesn’t plan to spend any of his son’s life behind bars.
He suddenly has a lot to lose. The Pro Football Writers Association included Sneed on its All-Rookie team last year. And his coach with the Chiefs, Andy Reid, says Sneed is playing the best football of his life right now. A four-year contract will pay him nearly $4 million, and he’s on a path to earn a raise once that expires.
The anxiety still creeps in, though. In July, his childhood preacher called him. He sounded worried. Are you OK? Sneed had experienced too much as a kid, his preacher said, to put it all behind him without truly addressing it. Sneed felt comfort from the call, perhaps finding answers for what he’s feeling.
Meditation will always be part of his routine. He carries the pressure of being the one in his family who made it and therefore has the responsibility of getting everyone else out. His first purchase as a professional athlete was a four-bedroom home for his mother, but his long-term goal is for the family to leave town entirely.
To leave their past in Minden, Louisiana.
But not necessarily forget it.
At a recent Chiefs game, he secured sideline passes for his mom. Jane has an unapologetically loud scream when she sees her baby boy on the football field, and on that Sunday afternoon, she drew the attention of L’Jarius with it.
When he looked over, she pointed at her eyes.
She crossed her hands over her heart.
And she pointed at him.
He returned a salute.
“Look at him now,” she says. “My son, he could’ve had this curse all his life, but he’s not what the statistics say about him. He’s not what the past says about him. Look at him now.”