WNBA star Maya Moore left the game to help free Jonathan Irons. On Wednesday, he walked free.
—Erika
As Jonathan Irons walked out of the Jefferson City Correctional Center on Wednesday evening, Maya Moore felt overwhelmed.
For Irons, 40, these were his first steps outside of the Missouri state maximum-security prison in 23 years. His first breaths outside the prison as an adult.
For Moore, 31, this was the moment she had waited for years to materialize — one she sacrificed her WNBA career for.
As the two embraced, Moore had a question for the man she had known since she was 18.
“How does it feel?” she asked.
“Life,” said Irons, wearing a cloth mask with the word “hope” on it around his neck. “I feel like I can live life now.
“I’m free.”
In 2019, Moore, at the peak of her career and the top of the sport, decided to leave the WNBA to focus on freeing Irons, who had been sentenced to 50 years in a Missouri state prison after being convicted of burglary and assault at the age of 16. He wouldn’t have been eligible for parole for another 20 years. Taking on this task would come with no guarantees of success for Moore.
But in March, Irons and Moore received their long-awaited breakthrough. A Missouri judge vacated Irons’ 1998 conviction. And after a string of failed appeals and the Supreme Court refusing to take the case, the lead prosecutor in St. Charles County, Missouri, declined a retrial for Irons.
They had won.
“This journey was deep,” Moore said in a telephone conference Thursday morning. “We were invested. Jonathan was invested. It was a deep-rooted experience.
“If you’re not committed to being deeply committed and invested over time, it’s not how legacies are made. Legacies are made and held by deep, over-time commitments to people.”
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