After losing his sister and spending nearly seven years locked down, Mondo didn’t come home looking for sympathy. He came home with a blueprint. Through fitness, music, and a relentless belief that he could rebuild from the rubble, he’s showing that redemption isn’t a finish line. It’s a rewrite.

When Mondo talks about his past, there’s no flinching, just raw truth.

“I was a good kid,” he says. “But when my sister passed away, everything changed.” His sister passed suddenly and unexpectedly. In one moment his world detonated. The grief swallowed him, and the choices that followed dragged him straight into a nearly seven-year prison sentence.

“I thought I was functioning,” he admits. “I worked, paid bills, and told myself I was fine. But after she died, I wasn’t living. I was just trying to breathe.”

“Prison was reality. But in the grind of long days and dead-quiet nights, he started rebuilding from scratch.”

“Fitness came first,” he says. “It gave me control. It gave me progress I could measure. Then the music came back. Writing was therapy. It was the only place I could put the pain.”

He took every course he could get his hands on. Parenting, anger management, and reentry planning. Through those programs, he learned how structure could turn ambition into direction. “SMART goals. Actual steps, not chaos. I always had drive, but it was wild. I learned how to build something from scratch brick by brick.”

Before release, he heard about Awake and how it was a company supporting people coming home. “I needed a job that saw more than my record,” he says. “So when I got out, I showed up in a suit. I needed that job, it was life or death for me.”

“Now he brings that same fire to work every single day.”

And he pays it forward helping others find rides, housing, whatever it takes to not slip back. “Because I know what starting from nothing feels like. I lived it.”

These days, he’s stacking wins by rebuilding credit, strengthening bonds with his kids, staying grounded. And he’s still in the studio, sharpening his craft. When I say he’s got bars, I mean it. The talent runs deep with his music, visuals, all of it. Whatever lane he chooses, he’s going to own it.

His message to others coming home? “Pace yourself. Don’t obsess over what you lost. Focus on what you can do today. One step. Then another.”

“And to employers still scared to take a chance? ‘Try it. Judge someone by who they are now and not who they were.'”

Looking ahead, Mondo’s grin says everything. “I can’t wait to tell this story again,” he says. “Not from the struggle, but from the success. When people see how far I’ve come they won’t believe where I started.”