Travra Zanders can’t recall exactly when he started hearing voices. But unwelcome changes settled over his life as his promising childhood drew to a close.
Zanders had been an honor roll student growing up in North Charleston’s Midland Park neighborhood. But as he entered his teenage years, his grades slipped. He failed seventh grade. And by high school, he was out, expelled for selling marijuana.
Soon after, Zanders said, he fatally shot a man who tried to rob him during a drug deal. He ultimately accepted a voluntary manslaughter plea without admitting guilt. He was barely a legal adult when he started a 12-year prison sentence in January 2000.
It was in prison that he finally told someone about the voices in his head. Doctors there diagnosed him with a mental illness at age 19. His first taste of mental health treatment came inside a prison psychiatric hospital. He returned three more times, with staff noting a range of symptoms: bizarre behavior, hallucinations, rambling speech.
Zanders said he got into fights with other inmates, which led to long stretches in solitary confinement. Alone in his cell, the voices grew louder.
“I can just remember being in the room all day,” he said. “I don’t like being on my own because of that.”
Zanders’ diagnoses fluctuated. So did his medication, which he didn’t always take. Doctors told him in 2008 that he had schizophrenia, he said. The state paroled him in 2009 — about a month after his last admission to Gilliam.
Zanders’ mother didn’t recognize the man he’d become, and his family struggled to care for him, records show. Hospital visits and calls for police became frequent. By 2012, he landed back in jail after swiping at his mother’s boyfriend with a knife. Prosecutors dropped the case in 2016 after he was found not competent to assist in his own defense multiple times. A Columbia state mental health facility released him in 2020.
Had he been able to stand trial, Zanders would have faced a maximum punishment of three years behind bars on the assault charge — about a year less than the time he was hospitalized.
Now 45, Zanders lives with his mother and still hears voices. He has good and bad moments. He hopes to find love one day and be an artist.
“I’m just trying to be the best person I can be while I’m here,” he said on a recent afternoon.
But his front porch is as far into the outside world as he’ll venture. A set of wicker furniture and a bowl of tightly packed sand and cigarette butts mark the threshold he rarely crosses. Zanders is afraid of people, of police, of suffering another psychiatric crisis. And of returning to prison.