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EDITOR’S NOTE: The life of onetime outlaw biker Ron DePriest was filled with anger and brutality. Not all bikers live this way. The following account shows that, no matter how dead a man is spiritually, God can rescue anyone.
“All I saw about Christians was a bunch of lyin’, back-stabbin’ no-gut punk sissies that couldn’t stand for nothin’. They grumbled and complained. I was in the construction business. You’d go to work with them and [they] couldn’t put up a day’s work. Then they’d whine about not gettin’ this and not gettin’ that. And then they’d say, ‘Well, I’m going to pray for you.’”
Ron DePriest had no respect for Christians. Yet 10 days earlier, he became one. Now he was sitting on the tailgate of his truck on an Arizona roadside, arguing with God. DePriest was being called into ministry and he wanted no part of it.
“I don’t want to do that. That sounds like preachers and I hate preachers. I don’t like Christians. The whole deal’s just a mess. I don’t want no part of this,” he said.
DePriest had just turned in his colors to the president of the nation’s most notorious motorcycle club. It was the end of his life as a biker with such a hair-trigger temper that his patch name was “Loco.”
He was returning to Tucson, where he had shot two men in a bar fight a few weeks earlier. After a lifetime on the run, he was voluntarily facing the one thing he said he would never do again. He was prepared to go back to prison.
By the time he was 26, DePriest had killed five men. In San Quentin, he spent seven months alone in the hole – a pitch black 5x6-foot steel cell with no bed or plumbing, where he lived on bread and water and was occasionally given meat.
While serving three consecutive 25-year-to-life sentences for murder, he was pardoned when the verdict was revised to justifiable homicide. As he was released he made a vow, “Never again will you ever lock me up. [If] anybody comes after me from this day on, everybody dies.” His life meant nothing to him anymore.
He had lived by his own rules. “I didn’t do nobody, I didn’t hurt nobody unless you did me. And if you did, I’d pay you back 100-fold,” was his code.
“My drug of choice was violence,” he said. “I was a snake that had no rattles. When I came after you, I didn’t say, ‘I’m going to kill you.’ You just started sucking blood.”
It wasn’t always that way. Even though he grew up poor, DePriest once had a lot going for him. He knew how to hit people hard enough to excel in football, and hoped to ride that star to fame. But it never happened. When he was 15, he took his first life.
“I shot a friend that I’d gone to school with – shot him in the chest with a .38 for calling me a punk,” he said. “He didn’t even know what he was saying, but I was so angry and so bitter.”
MEAN AND BAD ENOUGH
The dark side of his nature appeared when he was eight. His father came home after serving a prison sentence for train robbery. DePriest was looking for a dad. Instead, he got a nightmare.
For five years, his father used weekly beatings to toughen him into his own image. If the boy cried, the beatings lasted longer. DePriest’s torso, where he was punched, was so bruised that he always wore a T-shirt. When a gym teacher questioned the marks, DePriest said he was hit by a car while riding his bike. If he had told the truth, he knew he would pay for it with worse beatings.
“I’m going to make you mean enough and bad enough to deal with this world,” his father told him. He never called his son “Ron,” only “boy” or “punk.”
When DePriest was 12, a bigger boy spit on him at the school bus stop. His father gave him a choice: Fight him or the other boy. Although frightened, DePriest went after the boy. All his pent-up anger emerged, and the boy was taken to the hospital with a broken jaw. DePriest was taken to jail. When his father picked him up from the police station, he said, “Now that’s the way to take care of business.” It was the only time DePriest remembers receiving his father’s approval.
At school, word spread fast that he was bad. “I kinda liked that,” he said.
In his sophomore year, when he was expelled, he was already living on his own and riding motorcycles. He got his first bike, a 1938 Harley-Davidson “knucklehead,” when he was 13.
“I had a lot of promise, a lot of hopes, but I made decisions not based on things that were positive but based on the bitterness and hatred in my own heart,” he recalled.
VIETNAM
At 17, he became a Marine and was sent to Vietnam. He came home “blown up pretty bad.” He continued to make bad choices, not realizing that he had an enemy he could not see whose plan was to destroy his life.
After his wounds healed, he went out with a girl who had dated a member of an outlaw motorcycle gang. “He came over to the house to adjust my attitude,” DePriest continued.
He was in the alley, working on his bike, when he saw three men approach. One pulled a gun from behind his back. DePriest was also armed, and they shot each other.
While DePriest recovered in a hospital, some visitors came to his room unannounced. “Anybody who can be shot by one of my men and put all three of them in the hospital is going to have a choice. You’re going to ride with us or you’re going to die,” said one, who produced a shotgun and put it to DePriest’s head. “Make up your mind now.”
It didn’t take DePriest long to gain a reputation with the club. He had grown into the full stature and meanness of his father, plus he was trained in martial arts. Only his friends could call him “Loco.”
The years of outlaw living took their toll, as if he had to live up to his name. He had been shot and stabbed numerous times. Every major bone in his body had been broken, including his back and his neck. Once, he was pronounced dead at a hospital. By the time he was 26, the pain he had both inflicted and suffered were like gall in his mouth. He was alienated from society, alive with nothing to live for.
“If you have ever seen a human being lose their life, you will never, ever forget it. I saw it in Nam. I saw it in the streets of this country. I’ve seen it in my arms. I’ve seen it at the end of my hand,”? he said.
‘SHE NEEDS A CRUTCH’
His mother was remarried and had written to DePriest about finding Jesus and being filled with the Holy Ghost. DePriest was functionally illiterate. His wife, Minnie, had to read the letter to him.
“She’s an old lady and she needs a crutch,”?he concluded.
Right after the Tucson shootings, DePriest went to his mother’s house in California to retrieve some possessions he could sell for money to go to Mexico before the law caught up with him.
“I had no desire about God,” he remembered. Christians were his enemies.
When his mother came out to meet him, she smiled as he had never seen her smile before. In his coarse way, he told her, “Shut your mouth about your Jesus. Don’t talk to me about no God.”
She invited him inside for coffee, took him by the arm and said, “Now that you brought it up…” Ordinarily she would not have said anything to him. Something really was different about her.
“From the time I sat down, that woman never shut her mouth about God. With everything she’d say, she’d look at me and start crying and say, ‘Jesus loves you, honey.’”
When she asked if he wanted to go with her to visit his brother Bob, DePriest agreed, hoping for some relief. After a three-hour ride, they arrived to find Bob with a Bible in his lap.
“Years ago, Bob and I would go out and party and chase the ladies,” DePriest explained. “It was like bad news, man, when the brothers would come to town because we’d just be haulin’ some people out.”
When Bob looked up, the first thing he said was, “Ron, Jesus loves you.” He, too, had accepted Christ, and the same dialog started all over again.
A STRANGE IMPULSE
DePriest uncharacteristically agreed to go to church with his mother the next day, not for an encounter with God but because a strange impulse had crossed his mind. He had done almost everything else in life. He imagined himself going down the aisle and punching out the preacher.
When he went and saw the size of the congregation, he knew he couldn’t carry out his plan. But God carried out His plan.
Walking through the sanctuary as he gave his sermon, the pastor stopped in front of DePriest several times, pointed at him and said, “Jesus loves you.” DePriest couldn’t wait to get back to the house. Neither could a half-dozen of his relatives. Everyone in his family had been born again except for him.
In the den with his mother, DePriest planned to wait until they left, get his stuff and return to Los Angeles. Even with the door closed, he could hear them praying in the adjoining room. He became increasingly agitated as the hours passed and they kept praying. When he could stand it no longer, he decided to leave. As he attempted to get out of the recliner, something seemed to push him back into it. He couldn’t escape – he was trapped.
The sun went down and he was still stuck there, angrily listening to the people praying for him, hour after hour, until it was 11 o’clock.
He described what happened next.
“All of a sudden, the Spirit of God speaks to the six of them in the other room. He said, ‘You go in there and lay hands on him, cast the devil out of him, and I’m going to set him free. And he’ll have the opportunity to accept Me, one way or the other.’”
The door flew open and they came into the den and did something he never permitted anyone to do. Surrounding the seething biker, they put their hands on him. Still, he couldn’t move. They prayed, “Devil, in the name of Jesus, release him.”
He said it was as if he were thrown out of the chair, spun around and landed on his knees. Then he did what he learned to hate the most. He began to weep.
‘I WOULDN’T DO THAT’
He was looking out the window when it seemed as though a curtain were drawn back. He could see two men walking down a path. “And all of a sudden, a guy picked up a whip and struck this man. Then he hit him again. Then he spit on him. Then he started cursing him. Then he kicked him, and he did it again and again. He just kept picking him up and making him walk and kicking him.
“He reached up and pulled hair out of his face. I didn’t see his face but I saw him pull it out. He was bleedin’ just terrible. In my mind, I started saying, ‘What is this?’ I couldn’t understand it because I didn’t see the guy do anything. He never said a word, never opened his mouth.
“Finally he got him up on top of a little hill, and the guy kicked him in the back and knocked him to the ground. He picked up a big piece of wood [and] shoved it underneath his back. Then he took a nail and nailed one hand, then the other hand. Then he reached down and grabbed him by his arms, lifted him up and hung him in a tree. And he gathered his feet together and nailed his feet to the tree.”
DePriest could not understand what he was seeing until the abusive man turned around, and he was looking into his own face.
“I just went nuts! I said, ‘Wait a minute, man. I wouldn’t do that.’ Then I heard a voice call my name. I looked up and I looked into what was left of a face. He said, ‘Ron, I love you. And I’m going to set you free.’ That’s when I lifted my hands.”
It was the universal gesture of surrender.
“I said, ‘Lord, forgive me. Help me. I’m sorry I did this.’ And that night, I got saved. Fifteen minutes later, I got baptized in the Spirit. The next day, I got baptized in water.”
He had so many questions.
“I told my mama, ‘Why now? I’m no good. There just ain’t nothin’ left of me.’ I was a cripple – couldn’t read, couldn’t write, couldn’t spell, couldn’t talk.”
His mother replied, “Son, I don’t know. But I know He loves you.”
‘YOU’RE DEAD’
When he explained the reason for turning in his colors, the president of the motorcycle club said, “Ron, you’re dead.”? A?contract was put out on his life and he was shot at several times. After many years in the ministry, he finally learned the contract had been cancelled.
“I often used to say to God, ‘Why, at 26, did You come into my life?’ And He said, ‘All your life, I’ve preserved you, even when you thought you were dying.’”
It was a message which became his life’s verse from the Bible—
“As for you, you were dead in your transgressions and sins, in which you used to live when you followed the ways of this world and of the ruler of the kingdom of the air, the spirit who is now at work in those who are disobedient. All of us also lived among them at one time, gratifying the cravings of our sinful nature and following its desires and thoughts. Like the rest, we were by nature objects of wrath. But because of His great love for us, God, who is rich in mercy, made us alive with Christ even when we were dead in transgressions – it is by grace you have been saved” (Ephesians 2:1-5).
Ten days after his conversion, DePriest was sitting on the tailgate of his truck, on his way back to Tucson, when God told him, “Tell My people who they are, where they’re going and how to get there. Call My Church to order.”
He was already preparing himself to return to prison. Now he had to be a preacher too??No way.
Rather than explain Himself, God simply said, “Do you love Me?”
All DePriest could answer was, “Yeah, Man, I do.”
“Then do what I tell you,” came the loving yet stern response. When DePriest objected because he was illiterate, God told him that His Spirit would teach him as he studied the Scriptures.
‘IT WASN’T EASY’
He worked hard to get his G.E.D., then enrolled in Bethany Bible College. “It wasn’t easy,” he said with detectable understatement. “With men, it’s impossible. But with God, there’s no limitations.”
During over 30 years of ministry, the DePriests have traveled the nation. Ron appeared on almost every prominent Christian television program. Some years he earned over $1 million. Based in Texas, he established 12 churches and a Bible training center. His passion was to raise up spiritual fathers to bless future generations. Yet there was one more hard lesson to come.
About 10 years ago, he became disgusted. He had earned a doctorate. He knew how to present himself and preach in the pulpit. He knew “how to tell people things without telling them anything.” He saw that he had turned into what he loathed. He felt like a phony.
“I was worse then, in a different way, than the day I met Him. I was religious, hypocritical, arrogant, full of pride and position. I thought I was a somebody.”
He drove to an overlook, put a .9mm pistol in his mouth and pulled the trigger. When it misfired, he stuck the gun out the window and squeezed off five rounds.
He was spared again, but for what??One more time, he asked God why. “Ron, I love you,” came the reply.
His ministry suffered. DePriest fed and preached to the homeless in Ft. Worth. “They were as screwed up as I was,” he said cynically. “I just hated what I was. I was sick. I said, ‘God, what’s wrong? I’ve lost my life. I’ve lost my destiny. Whatever You sent me for, whatever You saved me for, is gone.’”
At age 53, DePriest found himself buffing cars. “Big-time preacher!” he thought to himself in disdain.
Through this experience, DePriest learned about humility and restoration. He learned the lesson all people in ministry must learn: “It’s about God, not me.”
He finally understood Psalm 127:1—
“Unless the Lord builds the house, its builders labor in vain.”
God was the only One who could ever satisfy that father hunger in him. His earthly father pushed him away, but God drew him close. His earthly father beat him, but God loved him. His earthly father left him a legacy of bitterness and violence and death, but God gave him life.
“The thief’s purpose is to steal and kill and destroy. My purpose is to give life in all its fullness” (John 10:10).