A recent Quora thread asked how it felt to murder someone and the answer given by a current inmate at San Quentin State Prison startled us with its honesty and emotion.
Tommy Winfrey is serving at least a 25-year sentence at San Quentin on a second-degree murder charge.
He wrote on Quora he killed a man when he was 19 years old and did so because of the "immense peer pressure to go through with the murder."
Winfrey was a drug dealer at the time and wanted to uphold his reputation.
"My lashing out cost another human his life. I am ashamed to admit it, but at the time I felt a great weight was lifted off my shoulders when I pulled the trigger," Winfrey wrote about what it felt like to cost another man his life. "I felt like I had finally stood up for myself. I was completely irrational. I realize now it is like my friend David Monroe always says, 'hurt people, hurt people.' I was really hurting and I didn’t know how to ask for help."
Winfrey said he justified his crime for as long as he could but eventually admitted to himself that he had done something terrible.
"I feel sadness over murdering someone," he wrote on Quora. "I feel I have robbed my victim’s family of the most precious thing in life. I feel immense sorrow for this. I feel I have robbed my family out of truly ever knowing me."
He called the murder the "worst mistake" of his life.
We can't be completely sure the person who answered is actually Tommy Winfrey, an inmate at San Quentin, but his Quora profile confirms the information given in his answer.
To find out more about what it's like to commit a crime and spend time in prison, check out Business Insider's series The Faces Behind America's Prison Crisis. You can read the first story here and read the second story tomorrow.
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