When he was one year old, he and his family moved to Los Angeles County, California, where they settled in Watts and later Compton.
When he began junior high, they had moved to nearby Lakewood, where his father invested in his own church.
In 1979, he started to take Karate classes and earned a second degree black belt.
The marriage ended in the early 1990s, and he later married a woman he had met while working at the post office.
In 2001, Fletcher received a phone call from his doctor regarding his hypertension and how it could be life-threatening.
The following year, he was admitted to a hospital in Long Beach, California; from there, he was transported to UCI Medical Center for open-heart surgery.