Joseph Flowers has high hopes that he can support himself with a maintenance job while he takes classes to get his commercial driver’s license.

He learns fast and said he has built up quite the library in his two decades behind bars.

That hope has a shot at reality now.

Flowers was 17 when he shot and killed Carlos Bray and injured his cousin, Michael Bray, in McKeesport. Convicted of first-degree murder, Flowers was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. On Tuesday, he and his attorney, Scott Coffey, received the opportunity to argue for a lighter resentencing.

A 2012 Supreme Court case, Miller v. Alabama ruled that sentencing children to life without parole was unconstitutional. A subsequent ruling made that decision retroactive.

Flowers, 37, formerly of Clairton, was resentenced Tuesday to 30 years to life for the 1999 homicide. A five- to 10-year concurrent sentence for aggravated assault still stands. He has about 10 more years before he is eligible for parole, according to the decision by Common Pleas President Judge Jeffrey A. Manning.

“When he was a kid, he did what kids do, but he’s a man now,” said his mother, Jacqueline Miles. “He speaks like a man.”

Absent for much of her son’s early life – he lived with his grandmother during his childhood — Miles said she reconnected with him while he was in prison after she, herself, got clean after years of drug abuse.

She said they cried together, said the things they needed to say to each other, and developed trust. They talked about that day in January 1999, too, she said.

She said her son asked her to reach out to the Bray family for him – to ask if there was anything at all he could do to help them. Miles said she had no desire to do so, but her son insisted. She said she never heard back from the family.

Flowers’ aunt, Cynthia Norfleet-Jackson, lives in Georgia but visited her nephew in prison at least annually for years. She said she saw him heading in the wrong direction as a child and young teen.

“From 1992 on, something was going on … leading him to the wrong side of the tracks,” she said.

Visiting him in prison, she said, meant watching him transform. He began focusing less on not being free and more on what he could do to be a better person regardless of imprisonment.

She said he has been a positive role model for her grandsons, warning them that the wrong path could lead them to prison — a place, he told them, they do not want to be.

Both Miles and Norfleet-Jackson noted they began to see the changes in Flowers long before the 2012 Supreme Court decision that meant he could someday see freedom.

Flowers himself said he has changed – particularly in that he no longer lives his life based on what other might think, he said, something that ruled him as a teenager.

“I started finding ways to find positive things to do, positive people to be around,” he said. “Going home or not, why not better myself?”

Flowers also said he wished the Bray family were in court so he could apologize to them. He called the day of the shooting the most tragic day in his history, because “that light I extinguished can never be brought back.”

Norfleet-Jackson said after the resentencing the family was pleased — prosecutors had argued for him to be resentenced to 35 years to life.

“Faith helps keep us patient,” she said.

Megan Guza is a Tribune-Review staff writer. You can contact Megan at 412-380-8519, mguza@tribweb.com or via Twitter @meganguzaTrib.

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