Joe "Truth" Parker was born & raised in Northern New Jersey to a young, single and struggling mother.
As a child, Truth quickly became a product of his environment, learning the importance of how to fend for himself.
As many others around him, the infamous "Brick City" with all its glitz & Glam, poverty, drugs, crime, & hardship, surrounded him and produced experiences that would later on shape his life into what it would eventually become.
At age 7, his mother married an abusive NJ State Trooper. At age 9, while regularly suffering, emotional and mental abuse at the hand of his step father, he would ultimately witness the brutal execution of his mother, and after be sent to live with his grandparents & alcoholic father in the neighboring town of East Orange.
While not much different than Newark, in East Orange, he quickly adopted a rebellious and destructive lifestyle charachterized by wtolen cars, using and dealing drugs, drinking, fighting, carrying weapons, and harboring hatred for all authority figures.
As a early teen, he helped in forming a neighborhood gang that became notoriously well known throughout the city for "all the wrong reasons". This was long before the Bloods & Crips ran rampant thru those same streets.
