Delinquent: Shakorie went to prison twice. Now he runs one of the largest construction companies in Cuyahoga – ‘You can overcome’Even young people who repeatedly offend and spend time in adult prison are capable of change, Shakorie Davis proves. He'd peddled drugs on street corners for over a decade but now owns Next Generation Construction, a multimillion-dollar business that is helping to reshape Cuyahoga County – “You can overcome.
To avoid that fate, Shakorie accepted a plea deal to a lesser attempted robbery charge that would grant him probation but still label him a felon. He remembers the judge, Nancy Margaret Russo, advising against the plea because of how it might affect his future, but his public defender didn’t show, and the attorney who filled in thought it was OK. Probation, the young Shakorie agreed, “seemed like a much better deal” than potentially spending years in prison.
Today, he owns Next Generation Construction, a multimillion-dollar company that counts among its clients Sherwin Williams, Cleveland Clinic, University Hospital and Cuyahoga County itself. Then his parents became addicted to crack cocaine, and some of the care fell away. “It was almost like overnight it was horrible,” he recalls. When he was 11, the family moved in with his grandmother on Lee Road for about a year but then got a house in the Union-Miles neighborhood, where Shakorie says his life was confined to a city block. No one had a car, so everyone in the neighborhood hung out together.
“I was going to graduate to do what? Get a city job? We were still poor,” Shakorie says. “Why rush to live like I’m living right now with my parents?” When Shakorie’s name appeared in the paper as part of the bust, he lost his job. He went back to selling drugs until his case concluded, and, at age 23, he was sentenced to federal prison for a year. After release, he worked miscellaneous jobs, but he had three toddlers by then and gravitated back to selling drugs to make more money.
He returned home in 2004, at age 25. It might have been easy, then, to slip back into old habits, but he says his environment had changed. One of Shakorie’s closest friends was killed in a shooting prior to his return, and nearly everyone else he knew was serving time. He only had his wife and kids, who had moved out of his old neighborhood and were living in Shaker Heights.He leaned into his faith and tried a new approach.
the money to buy his family a new house for $15,000. He went back to work with the Bedford company, earning $10 an hour, but this time he spent his days in the office, learning estimating and how to run a business. “It will always be a fight,” Shakorie says of the collateral sanctions that come with a felony record. But that’s the reality, he adds; there will always be things you can’t do. “The quicker you accept that, the quicker you can build your foundation on what youToday, Shakorie says it’s almost comical to talk about who he was in his youth. “I was a totally different character from who I am now.”