A magnetic Philly kid runs into big trouble 

Born in February 1966, Cotton grew up an only child in North Philly. He attended parochial schools until he reached his teens when he would graduate from Dobbins Technical High School.

Those who knew him say Cotton loved playing softball and handball from a young age, and he rooted for the Los Angeles Lakers as long as anyone could remember.

As a teen, Cotton had a magnetic energy about him. He was social, and childhood friends and relatives said he often found school wasn’t challenging enough, which led his mind to wander.

After he graduated from high school, Cotton often held down multiple jobs, looking to provide for his first son, Dezmond.

What led Cotton, at age 25, to take part in a 1991 drug house robbery in which two men were fatally shot is unclear.

Cotton was found guilty and sentenced to two life sentences for the murders. A trial judge would later grant Cotton’s motions to vacate those sentences. In 1995, the trial court dismissed the two second-degree murder charges, and Cotton continued serving time for aggravated assault and other charges.

Though academics who worked closely and taught with Cotton during and after his release from prison say he was transparent when students asked about his convictions, it’s something he never discussed in detail with the love of his life, Karen Watson.

“I can’t really say [why],” said his wife who knew Cotton for close to three decades. “It wasn’t a proud time in his life, so I don’t know if he thought that that would change how I saw him.”

Gaining degrees and ‘giving game’

What Watson and most people know and remember best is the Cotton who emerged during his years at Graterford State Correctional Institution in Montgomery County.

In fact, Watson first “met” Cotton during his initial incarceration at Philadelphia’s now-shuttered Holmesburg Prison. She worked with a friend at a hotel front desk. Cotton often called that friend from prison and one day, Watson happened to pick up the phone.

The charming man on the other end soon started calling for her. Early on, he ordered her a lunch she craved, delivered right to the front desk — the beginning of a lifetime of “little gestures.”

It wasn’t until Watson asked to meet Cotton that they realized she didn’t know about his incarceration.

“At this point, I was already smitten,” Watson said.

Cotton talked to Watson constantly. In what became Cotton’s signature trademark among those he loved, he would call Watson and other family members multiple times a day, no special occasion required.

Thomas Gavin, one of Cotton’s cousins, described a relative so involved in people’s lives, it felt like he wasn’t behind bars. Whether it was dropping life lessons that could only come from an older cousin who’d made mistakes (he called it “giving game”), offering Gavin advice on how to woo girls during his teenage years, or promoting Gavin’s flower business, Cotton was always there.

When Cotton wasn’t keeping up with his family, he kept busy with his other passion: the law.

He worked as a paralegal in Graterford’s Para-Professional Law Clinic and whenever he saw someone who lacked legal representation, Cotton offered to help research legal strategies for their cases or guide them through the endless forms going to parole boards.

In less than a decade, Cotton had developed a reputation for being a self-taught legal wiz.

Cotton was known for spending his free time in hearty debates about criminal justice policy and he would mull the philosophical writings of Michel Foucault and Immanuel Kant for hours at a time.

By taking a class or two a semester, Cotton received his associate’s degree from Montgomery County Community College and his bachelor’s from Villanova University while incarcerated.

Cotton also believed he needed to share his experience with people from different backgrounds to spark changes in the criminal justice system. He jumped at the chance to take part in the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, in which college students are brought into prisons to meet with incarcerated people and learn about social justice issues.

After serving a lengthy prison sentence, Thomas ‘Reem’ Cotton was hired as Supervisor of Education and Community Engagement at Eastern State Penitentiary. (Courtesy of Sean Kelley)

‘Little gestures’

Still, it’s the things that rarely make the news that Watson cherishes the most about her husband, like the first time she was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2003 and how Cotton learned everything he could about the illness so he could help her and support her from prison.

She said she’ll miss how understanding he was when they split up in 2005 and how he reached out to offer his support when her oldest son died in 2012.

Watson remembers how happy they were when they remarried in 2014, and how, in the roughly one year they had together after Cotton’s release, he brought her a token of his affection every day.

Nothing big. It might be a hard candy, or an hors d’oeuvre from an event wrapped in a napkin.

Thomas ‘Reem’ Cotton with his wife, Karen Watson. (Courtesy of Karen Watson)

Watson, who is once again battling cancer and needs an oxygen tank to breathe, said no matter how long of a day Cotton had, he’d come home and woo her to go out for a drive with her pet name, “Sugar.”

“We’d get in the car and he’d say, ‘Pick a direction’ and he would just drive and we would end up somewhere,” she said.

Cotton made those kinds of gestures until the very end. One of the last things he did was to leave his daughter a voicemail, just because, telling her he loved her and wishing her goodnight.

WHYY is the leading public media station serving the Philadelphia region, including Delaware, South Jersey and Pennsylvania. This story originally appeared on WHYY.org.