Hammonds remembers the void left when his mother finally walked away and how their lives were never the same. By four years old he was getting drunk with his father. As fate would have it, after his two fingers got cut off in a door at school, he went to live with his aunt. Though he adjusted well to his new environment as he got older he began drinking, smoking and doping. A superior student in high school but longed to taste more of the life his father had introduced him to.

Upon graduation from high school he convinced his aunt to give him his savings and let him go out to explore the world. And that he did through riotous living which introduced him to drugs.

His life began to spiral out of control when his brother taught him how to shoot drugs into his veins. Eventually, he graduated to smoking crack. In his brothers’ words, “a monster was created. From that day we never had respect for each other.”

Hammonds spent 20 years on drugs, homeless, with no direction, desire, or control over his life. He lived to get high, picking up cans from sun up to sun down, begged, borrowed, stole, lied, cheated, whatever he could to get money for drugs. His appetite was only for drugs. It didn’t matter he was spitting up blood or was malnourished; the high was all that mattered.

Driven by drugs to the point he acted like an animal at times and was beat almost to death on more than one occasion, Hammond wouldn’t give it up. Nothing could turn his life around until a supernatural encounter, removed the desire and physical dependence from his life, and redirected his path. He went from a man who got high with other addicts, pulled out the Bible to preach to them, to a man with a powerful testimony of change, restoration and hope for addicts, free of drugs.