Cheryl Love and Bobby Love met at Baptist Medical Center in Brooklyn. Their love story was shared on the Instagram page “Humans of New York,” which talks about intimate stories of New York City Residents. In it, they revisited his story from his and his wife’s perspective.
What We Know:
- Cheryl opened up about the day that changed her life in 2016 after finding out her husband was living a double life. She said, “it was just a normal morning. Almost exactly five years ago. I was making tea in the kitchen. Bobby was still in bed. And we get this knock on the door. I opened it up slowly, and saw the police standing there. At first, I wasn’t worried. We had this crazy lady that lived next door, and the police were always checking up on her.” She also said when she opened the door the officers ran past her and entered their bedroom and asked her husband for his name, where he reluctantly responded Walter Miller and was placed in handcuffs.
- Bobby then opened up about his troubled path. He talked about an incident that occurred in 1964. He went to a Sam Cooke concert and Cooke didn’t like the fact that people were dancing. After telling people to sit down several times, Cooke decided to walk off stage. It was then that Bobby yelled, “Sam Cooke ain’t shit!”
- That outburst led to his first arrest for disorderly conduct. After that, his life began spiraling out of control.
- That is when he started stealing, and it landed him in a juvenile detention center. Bobby describes his experience in the center as terrible because the food was awful, and the “kids were violent”. He also added that he still has scars from when he got into physical altercations. “Every night, while I was falling asleep, I could hear the whistle of a freight train in the distance,” he continued. “And I always wanted to know where that train was going. So one night, when the guard turned his back to check the clock, I ran out the back door– toward the sound of that whistle. And that was the first place I ever escaped from.”
- After his incarceration, Bobby went to Washington D.C. where his brother lived and attended high school. He got involved in sports, but he fell back into old habits when he befriended a group of kids who robbed banks in North Carolina because there were fewer surveillance cameras. One of the banks he and his friends ended up robbing had a silent alarm and that cost Bobby his freedom, although he tried to get away.
- He was later sentenced to 25-30 years in prison and was sent to Central Prison in Raleigh, North Carolina. Bobby had hoped to receive an appeal or acquittal on a technicality but that never happened. One thing that affected him the most was his mother’s death while he was still locked up. She always prayed that he would get his life together.
- After her death, he was committed to change his life for the better. Bobby became the perfect inmate. He said, “I never had a mark on my record. My behavior was so good that they transferred me down the hill to a minimum-security facility. This place was more like a camp. They still had gun towers and everything, but there was a lot of freedom.”
- Bobby never planned on escaping prison. He explained the incident that changed the course of his life. He said someone had yelled “punk a**” at the prison captain, and he was held responsible although he was working in the prison’s kitchen at the time. The prison captain then began picking on Bobby. The more good deeds he would do, the more punishments he would face. He said one job he was given was trash duty and he described it as the worst job at the prison. He said that he would ride the bus all over Raleigh and pick up trash. One day, Bobby observed that the bus stopped at a wooded area and the guard that would normally work on Tuesday wouldn’t search the prisoners as they boarded the bus. That is when he made his escape.
- Bobby made it to New York with $100 in small bills, one pair of clothes, and a new identity. He was living in a motel for two weeks and he lived off of hotdogs and weed. When his money ran out, he had to sleep on a train. Bobby said he was able to get his set of official documents after he explained he had lost everything. He said he found his original birth certificate and scratched his name out and typed Bobby Love and photocopied it “many times until it didn’t look fake anymore”. He then found someone to put a notary stamp on his birth certificate. The reason why he was able to obtain a driver’s license was because he found someone at the DMV who pretended not to notice. That’s how he was able to get a job at the cafeteria at the Baptist Medical Center where he met his wife.
- In a New York Daily News article published in 2016, Cheryl said although she had a loving relationship with her husband in 2015 their relationship became strained and now she knows why. Neither Cheryl nor their children were aware of his double life.
After his arrest, Bobby was sent back to North Carolina where his escape offense was handled through a disciplinary process, leaving him to complete under a year in jail.
