Old Weather Forum

On Sunday, Paul Winestock, 55, scooped spoonfuls of mashed potatoes into plastic to-go boxes, drizzled gravy onto slices of turkey and shoveled in a helping of green beans.

He ran outside to help half a dozen volunteers distribute masks near his Rhode Island Avenue restaurant, His and Hers, and directed more to hand out masks outside a Family Dollar store across the street. Then, adding another item to a growing to-do list, Winestock dashed down the street, to his event space called Fun It Up, to check on a group of women learning how to apply eyelash extensions.

“I had a vision when I came out, this is what I wanted to do,” said Winestock, a D.C. native who has spent the past seven years since leaving prison rebuilding his home in Ward 5.

He was arrested and indicted as the head of a loose-knit drug organization in 1990 and sentenced to two life terms, without the possibility of parole, in 1993.

More than two decades later, with a change in federal sentencing rules and good behavior, Winestock was released in 2013 to “be part of the solution, not the problem,” he said.

On Sunday morning, Winestock oversaw the visions he dreamed up in prison — a Thanksgiving meal giveaway that will feed nearly 3,000 Washingtonians by Thursday and a cosmetology class for budding entrepreneurs. He also distributed free masks to a community disproportionately ravaged by the coronavirus.

https://www.cnn.com/videos/us/2021/02/1 ... ng-videos/