CRIME LEADS TO LOSS OF CHILDREN

BUTNER -- When Eddie Smith Jr.'s children were babies, in the late 1980s
and the early 1990s, he sold crack cocaine to feed them and pay the rent on
their trailer.

He sold rocks to drug addicts in the Grove View Terrace housing project,
where he grew up, and wherever else his customers demanded the drug.

Smith said he had tried to find work.

He made furniture for a while, but that didn't last. He thought the hours
were long and the paychecks small.

So in 1987, Smith said, he turned to the easy money many of his friends had
already found. He could pocket $500, $1,000, sometimes thousands of dollars
a day dealing crack.

James Edward Smith Jr., who is now 36, did not know then that the easy
money would end up costing him, and his children, dearly.

He rarely sees his five children now. Three of them -- 13-year-old Nicole,
12-year-old Justin and 10-year-old Sheheba -- are part of a new family.

Their aunt and uncle, Sharon and Thomas Dixon, have adopted them, along
with their two half sisters, twins LaTarsha and LaToya, and their half
brother, Matthew.

All six of the children have lived with the Dixons since July 1998, when
police and social workers took them from their mother, Brenda Dixon. By
then, Smith had been absent from their lives for three years.

Smith grew up in Grove View Terrace, a federal public-housing project off
Grove Street with a history of drug activity and crime.

Gentle ways

Smith said part of his attraction for Brenda Dixon grew from her gentle way
with her babies. He had two children himself, and she already had the twins
when he met her. He said he helped celebrate her twins' first birthday.

"When I was with her, she was a loving, caring person, devoted to her
children," Smith said.

When their children -- Nicole, Justin and twins Sheheba and Shehia -- were
born, Smith said he changed his mind about settling down.

"Although we didn't get married, I wanted to marry her," Smith said. "I
proposed several times."

Smith said when it came to selling drugs, he had no choice. He was
supporting or helping to support eight children. He said he was a good
father, nonetheless.

"By my being a drug dealer, that in itself would paint the picture that I
was not a good father," he said. "But when you have that many children, you
tend to do whatever you have to do to take care of your family. ...

"Even though I sold drugs, I still believed in family values and the family
structure. I was still home every day and every night."

On March 15, 1995, Smith's job caught up with him. He was arrested that
day. By June, he had been convicted of selling crack.

Smith was one of a gang of drug dealers, known as the Court Boys, who sold
around $10 million worth of crack in Grove View Terrace in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, authorities said.

He was 29 when he walked into a federal prison in Manchester, Ky., to begin
his 15-year sentence.

That same month, one of his twin daughters, Shehia, choked to death. She was 3.

Smith lives at a federal low-security prison in Butner, near Durham. He
keeps his hair cut close to his head and his beard trimmed in a goatee.

Smith rarely sees his children. He keeps pictures, he said. Sometimes he
talks with them on the phone.

A judge in Cumberland County terminated his parental rights last summer,
which helped free the Dixons to adopt his children.

Daphne Harris, a social worker who has worked with the Dixons, said there
was nothing Smith could do to prevent that termination of his rights.

"Nobody from his family had stepped forward to take them in, so Sharon and
Thomas stepped forward," Harris said. "We couldn't put the children's lives
on hold because his was."

Smith is supposed to be released from prison in 2010. He bides his time
working in the prison's cafeteria, taking horticulture classes, reading,
attending religious services and working out in the gym.

Selling drugs was a big mistake, he says.

"The only thing I have to show for it is a lot of time," Smith said, "and
the disintegration of my family."

He said he wants to be their father again after his release.

"I was incarcerated for a crime that I committed, but I was not sentenced
to lose my children."