David Lee Windecher

David's Story

David Lee Windecher was arrested for the first time at eleven years old.

By the time he reached adulthood, he had been arrested thirteen times, lived inside Miami's street and drug culture, and spent seven months incarcerated.

Survival became a language he learned before he ever had the chance to imagine a different life.

In his book, The AmerIcan Dream: HisStory in the Making, David writes:

"The hood is an addiction. Living in it is a daily exercise in survival."

It is easy to look at the man he is today and call his story inspiring.

An attorney. An author. A father. A man who dedicated his life to changing the system that once defined him.

But those titles do not tell you what it took to get there.

They do not tell you about the boy who learned to fight before he learned to dream. The choices made when there seemed to be no good choices. The people he lost. The consequences that followed him. Or the moment he realized that surviving the streets would not be enough.

He would have to become someone no one expected him to be.

Years later, David returned to the same justice system that once processed him as a defendant.

This time, he walked in as an attorney.

But he did not stop after saving himself.

In 2015, David founded Rehabilitation Enables Dreams, known as RED, a restorative justice program created to address the deeper reasons young people become trapped in the criminal justice system.

Through education, mentorship, accountability, and opportunity, RED gives young offenders something David once desperately needed himself:

A real second chance.

While filming, we took David back.

Back to the streets. The courthouse. The bridge. His childhood neighborhood. His parents' home.

I watched the accomplished attorney disappear for a moment, and the boy he once was enter the room.

Some memories were spoken.

Others sat silently between us while the cameras continued rolling.

David's story is not only about a man who escaped his past.

It is about a man who returned to it, faced it, and built a doorway out for someone else.

Watch Episode One of the Extraordinary People Documentary Series to hear David tell his story in his own words and discover everything that happened between the defendant he once was and the attorney he fought to become.