Former professional baseball player Roberto “Robbie” Smalls delivered a powerful warning to young people at the Virgin Islands Anti-Crime Summit 2025, telling them that one bad decision can erase years of promise and talent.

Smalls — who once pitched five consecutive no-hitters and signed a professional baseball contract before being sentenced to natural life in prison — spoke on 24 September about how quickly success can unravel when young people fall into crime.

“I played baseball real great,” Smalls said. “But when I made that transition and let the streets engulf me, instead of baseball trophies, the street represented me with gunshot and stab wounds. The first time that I ever did time was natural life.”

Smalls said his path to prison was not obvious early on. “I was shy, quiet, reserved,” he recalled. “But once I got to a certain age, got off that porch and started to follow bad company, I got a taste of the streets just like everybody else before me. If I had that support entity behind me, maybe my outcome would have been a little different.”

He described prison as more than punishment. “Prison is the biggest inconvenience in your life,” Smalls said. “It’s the biggest disrespect you could do to your family — your mother, your father, all the sacrifices they made on your behalf — and how do you repay them? By going astray, ending up in prison or worse, death.”

Smalls told the audience that when he went to trial in 1994, the friends who had influenced him disappeared. “Only my mum and my two sisters stayed with me through that 25-year journey,” he said. “For the kids out here following bad company, don’t think it will be different for you. It will happen to you — maybe even worse.”

He urged young people to help keep their peers out of trouble. “You might not be the one who needs the message, but you could be the facilitator of the message,” he said. “Tell them: ‘I don’t want to see you go to prison or, even worse, die.’”

Smalls praised the summit’s decision to bring together students, teachers, community leaders and elected officials, saying he hopes his story of remorse, reflection and redemption will reach those most at risk. “Now I’m the poster child of who not to be when you find yourself at that crossroad at a tender age,” he said. “If you can just be patient and resist that first temptation, time will work itself out and you can be a successful individual.”