The recognition that one’s choices led to harm is a different thing from the enjoyment of harm, and the distinction matters. People who enjoy causing harm tend to require external forces — incarceration, legal consequences, severe social isolation — to stop. People who recognize the harm and don’t enjoy it tend to be accessible, when the right moment comes, to something that looks more like genuine change.
For Trejo, the right moment came in solitary at Soledad in 1968. The recognition that preceded it had been building for years — the overdose as a child, the prison years, the accumulated evidence of what his life was producing. The solitary cell was the moment of crystallization, not the beginning of the awareness. And the change it produced was not performed for an audience. He has said himself that adjusting to life outside prison after his release was genuinely difficult — that the structured world of the institution had become more familiar to him than the unstructured outside world. The change was real, but it was hard, and the hardness is part of what makes it credible.
## The People Beside Him: Monica Jackson and the Others
In the accounts of the Sylmar rescue that have been most widely circulated, Monica Jackson’s name appears in some reports and not in others. The Global News account names her. The Good Morning America account does not. The ABC7 coverage describes the rescue as a collaborative effort without identifying the other bystander by name in the version most widely circulated.