Two recent articles on rebuilding your life after a killing someone.

With a gun:

He’s lost, in a way, though he wouldn’t say that. He says you don’t “find” yourself; you create yourself, and that’s what he’s doing now. He’s creating the person he wants to become, a person who would make Devin’s mother proud. He hasn’t forgotten what she asked of him years ago. Get out of jail and change your life around for me. That way my son can live through you.

“I’m giving myself till my 25th birthday to find out what I really want to do,” Erik says. “I just hope my good outweighs my bad.”

Accidentally with a car:

Todd is 23 now. He’s 5-foot-9, lean and muscular with dark, thinning hair, and a jaw of right angles. His piercing blue eyes look like crystal, so clear and so bright that you trust him immediately. He is polite, perhaps overly so, always wanting to please. He has an almost permanent acquiescence about him—the way he turns his eyes away. People feel his wariness. Todd Stansfield is barely an adult, but he is a convicted killer. A felon. And he worries that is all anyone will ever see.