A Very Interesting Comment from a GangWar.com Reader

I'd like to add a couple of comments which you are free to publish, but please do not attribute me or use my name. My information is based on my field work counseling black gangs in South Los Angeles in the 1990s.

1. Of course there are many legends of gang history. We also know that until recently, most street gangs of young people settled their disputes not by fighting with guns but by the use of knives, chains or boards. In fact, the agreements were often almost courtly:

Representatives would offer a choice, enemies would choose "boards" for example, and at a designated time, two groups of representatives would meet to do combat and actually form 2 fighting lines. Then they would fight with boards, fists and feet.

This style persisted and was popular in South LA into the late 60s at least. According to several young men I spoke to, a change occurred in one memorable event:

"We used to go swimming in the Coliseum Swimming Pool". One day in 1972, there was a kid there who was messing around, dunking people and stuff like that. The lifeguard kept warning him and finally kicked him out. This guy went home, got a gun, came back and blew the lifeguard away. That was what made guns popular and acceptable."

2. A popular misunderstanding about gang members is the belief that they all sell drugs. Most do not, although almost all have participated in sales at least a few times. Most Crips and Bloods "don't do much of anything", as gang members told me many times. "They shoot pool or hang around, they watch TV or play basketball, or if they have a woman they lay up with her. Some of them even have jobs. But not many actually sell drugs. Maybe 10% do."

3. Almost everyone including scholars exaggerate the existence or complexity of an individual gang structure. In reality, there is hardly ever much to speak of. A typical South LA crew or set might have 20 members. They will range in age from about 13 to 25. The activities of most of them can be found described in #2 above. Most people including scholars seem to think the Crips, Bloods, Brims or any gang is structured in the same way as the United States Army, with a true hierarchy expressed in a number of levels between the equivalent of buck private and 5 star general.

Actually, there is neither hierarchy nor levels except in a general, nebulous way determined by many factors: age, reputation, size and weight, family and relatives, social skills, fighting ability, courage, daring, number of arrests, prison time served, and so forth, including capacity for beer, wine and liquor as well as drugs.

You can imagine what a gang member of high status might be like:
perhaps tall, muscular, smart in practical ways, an excellent fighter with great daring and courage, possibly known (or believed) to have killed a cop with a tire arm during a struggle; someone women adore, someone who always has pretty girlfriends, a good dancer, a good sense of humor, and so forth.

At any rate, it's usually by composition of these criteria that a gang member gains status and respect, and not because he's a "Crips leader".

Of course, having lots of money and a fancy car from proceeds of selling rock can have this effect of local fame and stardom, too. It's also true that members of various gangs may form associations or agreements, but not in any way resembling agreements between nations or formal organizations. Actual gang relationships can dissolve quickly or be misunderstood by members or outsiders.

4. Disputes and causes of blood revenge are generally or sometimes exclusively believed to be over matters of drug sales, murder or other obviously compelling reasons. This generalization is not valid, although these causes are often present. More likely, though, the cause of a "beef" is:

A. Thinking or hearing that someone looked at, "dissed" or "messed with" your girlfriend at a party.
B. Thinking someone challenged or insulted you as by looking you in the eye a fraction of a second too long.
C. Someone "trespassing" in your gang turf.

These are precipitating incidents and almost always escalate through a series of events. For example, an aggrieved party informs others he will seek revenge; then the accused party may send word out that he will harm the person accusing him; people related to either of these main combatants may be challenged, insulted or harmed; people may lay in wait to harm others, or set traps, until finally:

A. (Most often) The two combatants meet by chance, running into each other, and start shooting.
B. A driveby or other ambush.

5. The most accurate way to explain why kids join gangs is to understand that they feel a void in themselves and their lives. They feel something of aching importance is missing. They believe they are not good enough in any way, that they have no status or bearing or membership in anything at all, and indeed that they are 100% disenfranchised from society and the world. They believe they belong to nothing: they are not even citizens. Many believe they are close to being like objects: like trash, or used or damaged goods. Again, this self-perception is unbearable, so a kid will seek to fill the void he feels in himself. By joining a gang he believes he becomes something, is now part of a tradition, has power and status, has friends and access to sex and liquor and drugs, and even has enemies.


Steve Comments: Please feel free to post a comment if you agree or disagree, that's fine, just keep it civil. S/

From the Glenwood Springs (CO) Newspaper

June 24, 2005

Two groups of young men stood on opposite corners of the Grand Avenue and 14th Street intersection last Friday evening and flashed gang signs at each other.

On Saturday, a police officer working the Strawberry Days carnival told a man to take off his gang colors and emblems or he couldn't go inside. The man told the officer he didn't have any right to tell him where he could and couldn't go, and swung at the officer, Glenwood Springs Police Chief Terry Wilson said.

Finally, on Sunday, tension that had built all weekend broke loose at the carnival in a fight between a group of six to 12 men, Wilson said.

After a foot pursuit about 10:15 p.m., police arrested Pedro Tamirez-Topete, 18, of Basalt, and Carlos Silva-Landa, 19, of Carbondale, on suspicion of assault during the fight, and three other individuals, ages 16-17, on charges of assault and illegal weapons possession.

The men involved were primarily Latinos from different towns up and down the Roaring Fork Valley, Wilson said.

Wilson hesitated to call the groups gangs, but said, "We have had, over the years, small groups that are conducting themselves in ways that are consistent with the way gangs would act."

Wilson doesn't see much in the way of gang activity all year, except at Strawberry Days, and only at the carnival. "It was actually a darn good Strawberry Days," Wilson said. But this year, as in previous years, the police department had problems at the carnival.

Wilson acknowledged the name of the nationwide Latino gang Sur 13 spray painted on walls around Glenwood, but said gang activity shows up only once a year. "It's the carnival," he said. "That's consistently been the place where these folks end up."

Wilson didn't know what it was about the Strawberry Days carnival that attracted trouble but said it had happened for the past few years. Four or five years ago, police heard rumors of a big showdown between groups that was supposed to happen at the Strawberry Days carnival, but police arrested a leader for previous threats made to a police officer, and the rest of the group went home, Wilson said.

The reason for trouble is a mystery, but "It's a repeated annual pattern of behavior," he said.

A Retrospective on Nawojczyk and the Streets

Coroner's crusade against the killing

By Tony Moser
Special to the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette
Friday, March 12, 1994

LITTLE ROCK, ARK. -- For Steve Nawojczyk, a pensive Saturday drive through the mean streets of Pulaski County is like paging through an old photo album filled with nothing but the saddest of souvenirs.

He's a man whose mind teems with images of the meaningless, tragic waste of young lives; images of the bodies he's scraped off these streets. They are lives lived dangerously and taken casually; the lives of frenetic, impatient young men whose futures sail away with a bullet through a bloody exit wound.

Finally, these lives - which were so often led in a cruel haze of drugs, alcohol, gangs and desperation - leave nothing behind but an inert mass of flesh for Coroner Nawojczyk and his staff to zip up in a body bag and deliver to the state Crime Lab for autopsy.

Nawojczyk -- a rumpled, affable man of 41 who does his grim business in scruffy cowboy boots and bluejeans, while alternating between a Sherlock Holmesian pipe and well-savored cigars -- will step aside as Pulaski County coroner when his term ends in January 1995.

He hasn't given up on slowing the exponential growth of public carnage, but he feels he must move on.

He's seen all the body bags he can handle for right now.

"It's gotten to the point that it is affecting me personally," Nawojczyk says of his job.

Normally a loquacious sort, he slows to a crawl and chooses his works with a sad lethargy.

"More and more, I'm finding it hard to look at the people I encounter as just 'victims' and 'perpetrators,' he explains. "I look at a crime scene and, instead, what I see is two lives that are ruined -- the life of the person who is killed, and the life of the person who did the killing. I look out beyond the crime at hand and I see thousands of young kids who desperately need some direction and meaning in their lives, and I'm frustrated by the way our society is responding to this tragedy."

So Nawojczyk has spent much of his free time for the past several years bearing an urgent witness; taking his message of gang violence, urban decay, and the breakdown of families and communities to those who might not fully hear it otherwise.

Equipped with both still and video cameras, he combs the gang-haunted 'hoods of Little Rock and North Little Rock, befriending hundreds of troubled youths -- black and white -- and documenting their despair. He's distilled the fruits of this labor into a three hour audiovisual and lecture extravaganza that he takes to all sorts of gatherings of public officials, school administrators and church groups and, on a recent day, to a convention of regional public housing officials.

MAN ON A MISSION

Now, in case Nawojczyk -- who began his career as Garland County Coroner and was also director of the state Crime Lab during Bill Clinton's first administration -- is beginning to sound like just another bleeding heart, well, think again. He's an enthusiastic booster of local police agencies, and favors "zero tolerance" enforcement to hit hard against criminals with guns and kids who bring weapons to school. His lectures include a bitter denunciation of so-called "gangsta rap" music and its glorification of murderous mayhem.

Yet he also believes that, as far as today's inner-city problems are concerned, traditional ideological divisions are almost irrelevant. And he views such alluringly simple penal palliatives as "three strikes and you're out" as prodigiously shallow.

"There's an old African proverb that says, 'It takes a whole village to raise a child." We have to bring everyone on the board to become part of the solution. People from way to the right of Rush Limbaugh and people from way to the left of Ted Kennedy are going to have to come together somewhere in the middle. We can't leave anyone out, and we don't want to leave anyone behind."

Today Nawojczyk says old prejudices and the intransigence of the political system may finally be ripe for conquest, because the public demands it.

"Look around you -- we live in a world of cryptic fear," he says. "Fear alone isn't constructive, but people are beginning to learn that they can't run away from these problems; that they're everywhere. It's not just a black thing or a central Little Rock thing. It's affecting everybody. That's something people need to realize."

Indeed. A reporter mentioned spending his early childhood days in the Beaver Cleaverized womb of the Park Hill and Lakewood neighborhoods of North Little Rock, circa 1950's and 60's. Nawojczyk then drives to a park next to a Lakewood Property Owners' Association swimming lake, the scene of many sepia-toned memories, and points out the gang graffiti that now adorns the area.

Isolation -- suburban cocooning, white flight, all those tiny little apartheids of geography and of the spirit -- aren't working for anyone, he said. Murder is now the nation's leading cause of death among teen-age males.

The Centers for Disease Control has classified this phenomenon as an "epidemic." And during the decade in which he has served as coroner and deputy coroner, Nawojczyk has watched the county's homicide rate go from 38 in 1983 to 111 last year.

In short, it sickens him.

At first blush, of course, Nawojczyk's personal case of sensory overload may sound like the stuff of bad jokes, i.e.: Just how awful is violent crime in Little Rock? Why, it's so bad, even the coroner can't stomach it anymore.

But Nawojczyk is a man with a mission.

Call it preventive coronering if you will. He puts it thusly: "Everything I do in the investigation of death is to benefit the living."

That's why he's turning his experiences -- his meticulously compiled heaps of amateur sociology and late 20th century urban history -- into a living testament. His lexicon is a melange of death and hope, and he'll offer this witness to anyone with the patience to listen.

THE KILLING FIELDS

Driving down a street on the outskirts of North Little Rock's Silver City Courts housing project, Nawojczyk points to a decrepit dwelling where a recent homicide occurred, one of the many landmarks he notes as he roams through the killing fields.

Then he lets a melancholy half-smile cross his face, and says, "You know, it's terrible that I can drive all around the county and mark my path by listing every killing that happened on the streets I pass. But that's what it's come to."

He winces when people refer to him as a "gang expert," and explains, "The experts on gangs are the gang bangers themselves. You have to go talk to them and get the story firsthand if you want to know what's going on. So that's what I try to do. I'm not an expert, I'm just someone who hopes I'm shining a little light on the reality of what's happening in our community."

His record of this "reality" is often decidedly unpleasant. Nawojczyk displays the autopsy photograph of one of two teen-agers who were shot dead in a foiled liquor store robbery last year.

It was a celebrated case: A clerk at the store vanquished the young duo in a flash of urban combat and was hailed by some as a hero.

Nawojczyk knew the kid whose corpse looks up from the picture, frozen forever in two dimensions. This kid and his accomplice, ages 14 and 15, were among the youngest and newest members of their gang. According to the buzz on the street, a gang leader had coerced them into robbing the store so he would have walking-around money. And in the gang, the cost of refusing such a suggestion can be death or worse. Another gang banger, age 13, was told the only way out of the gang was to kill his own mother.

"It doesn't lessen the crime, and it doesn't justify it by any means," Nawojczyk says. "But it's an example of what's going on in our city. These kids turn to the gangs for the types of things they're not getting at home: Recognition, belonging, discipline, love and respect. ... I can understand that. I was an Air Force brat who moved around a lot, and my parents got divorced when I was 12. If the present gang structure had been in place then, I might have gone right into a gang. But luckily, I had the Boy Scouts and sports to provide those things for me."

There are many more cases that haunt Nawojczyk as he drives to the scene of each crime; to the spots of blacktop that bear silent witness. There is the 10-year-old boy who had most of his left upper arm blown off in a walk-by shooting in east Little Rock and the 18-month-old boy whose lower body was shattered in the same hail of bullets.

He has a picture of the 10-year-old -- a heart-stopping, stomach-turning photo. Most of the flesh has disappeared, leaving behind more air than boy where his shoulder ought to be. It look as though a shark bit him, leaving behind its gnarled calling card.

And then there was T-Bone, a 19-year-old banger who Nawojczyk sought out after seeing his name repeated again and again in the gang graffiti around town. T-Bone was morose, surly and mad, but something about him got to Nawojczyk.

"I finally found him right here," Nawojczyk said, as he drove by the spot. "I said, 'T-Bone, why do you want to live like this?' and he kept saying, `Man, I just wanna be free! I just gotta be free!' Once, he even said, `I wanna be like you. I wanna have a house and a job and a nice car.' But then he went back to `I just wanna be free.'"

The phrase puzzled Nawojczyk, who does, after all, come from another sociocultural world. But he finally concluded that "free" simply translated into getting out of the pervasive poverty of the "hood," the incessant imploding of opportunity, the water-torture diminution of the human spirit.

T-Bone is dead. Shot in the back on Cumberland Street.

VICTIMS ON THE HORIZON

But even as Nawojczyk picks up the broken bodies, he glimpses the next victims on the horizon. Among his collection of Arkansas' unfunniest videos is a tape that helps explain why. For every attack, there is retaliation, in a vocabulary that mistakenly regards "respect" and "fear" as synonyms.

The smirking face of an angry, sullen 19-year-old black man burns with rage as the amateur video runs. The face is that of a Little Rock gang member, sitting outside a tired old house, drinking malt liquor at 10 a.m. with his "homies."

The occasion, it seems, is that of a crude wake. They are toasting the memory of a fallen comrade-in-arms, who was "smoked" -- killed by gunfire -- by members of a rival gang. The young man on the video is vowing revenge. He's going to "smoke" the rival bangers who "smoked" his homey.

Nawojczyk, who can be heard talking to the young man on the tape's audio track, shuts off the VCR with a sigh and a rueful shake of his head. The he walks over to a slide projector and flips on the power.

It is another autopsy photograph; the fallen homey of the angry young man from the tape. Metal tubes are protruding from his mouth and skull, mementos of a forensic pathologist's grisly duties.

Nawojczyk has reached out to dozens of these young men and boys over the last 10 years, only to watch them turn up days, weeks or months later on one of the cold, shiny slabs that are the unforgiving emblems of his trade.

"I'm the first to say that I don't have the solution. I don't pretend that I do," he says. "But I do know that it's going to take all of us working together, without political posturing and backbiting, to find the solution. That's the first step."

Obviously, what the community has done until now hasn't worked, he said. Little Rock's per capital homicide rate surpassed those of New York and Los Angeles. This phenomenon -- the city that produced a president suddenly becoming a crime capital -- has brought a steady stream of national and international reports and TV crews to Nawojczyk's office, where they find autographed pictures of Clinton with inscriptions of praise for the coroner's "long support and friendship."

Indeed, it was while he was escorting a crew from Home Box Office through the city a few months ago that Nawojczyk suddenly found himself caught in a cross fire from rival gangs. For the first time in his life, he felt the white heat of bullets whizzing past his ear. It drove home the message even more cogently than before.

"Until you've experienced it yourself -- until you've been there and felt it -- you don't really know what it's like," he said, reluctant to talk further about the incident. "It's just another illustration of the fact that none of us are immune."

Not even the smallest among us.

Nawojczyk tells of an 8-year-old boy he met recently riding around on his bicycle in front of a crack house, with a cellular phone in his hand. When the coroner asked the tyke what he was up to, the kid unabashedly explained that he was paid $50 a day, for four hours work, and all he had to do was keep a lookout and punch in a code on the cell phone if he saw the cops coming.

That would beep his bosses' pagers inside the house, so they could scatter before the police arrived.

"Then I asked him what he did with the money," Nawojczyk recalls. "And the kid, for the first time, looked a little sheepish and said, 'Well, I keep $5 for myself." So then I said, "'What do you do with the rest?' And the kid answered, 'I give it to my mom so she can pay rent, and buy food, and pay the light bill.'"

Nawojczyk is encouraged, though, by positive signs he sees in the community. He downplays his own efforts, and is growing more reticent about giving interviews. He says he'd just as soon direct the attention to men such as the Rev. Hezekiah Stewart whose work with families and mentoring programs at the Watershed Agency are models for what Nawojczyk hopes the future will hold.

"There are a lot of people out there doing a lot of very good work," he says. "But we're always going to need more."

For information on the very successful school assembly program:

The Nawojczyk Group, Inc.
Post Office Box 1932
North Little Rock, AR 72115
(501) 940-GANG
e-mail GangWarSteve@comcast.net

Uh-Oh, Troubles on the Horizon? from the Ark. Democrat-Gazette

Two injured in shootings 6 minutes, 7 blocks apart

BY DANIEL NASAW ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Two shootings that occurred within seven blocks and six minutes of each other early Thursday morning aren’t related, police said. The shootings, which left one man in serious condition with a bullet wound in his head and another man shot in the leg and arm, come on the heels of more than half a dozen shootings this month, including two killings.

On Thursday detectives were looking for the people who shot Glen Jackson, 48, as he slept in his car in a yard behind 4300 W. 29th St. about 1:30 a.m. and then Torian Porter, 23, near 22nd and Abigail streets six minutes later.

Jackson told police he was awakened by the shots that struck him twice in the lower right leg and once in the upper left arm. He ran to a gas station on Asher Avenue and called 911.

Officers investigating that shooting heard several more shots near 4300 W. 22nd St. There they found Porter slumped over the passenger seat of a maroon Buick with a bullet wound in his head. The rear windshield of the car had been shot out.

Witnesses to the second shooting told police that they saw four men run into a house at 4310 W. 17th St. For three and a half hours, the department’s Special Weapons and Tactics team tried unsuccessfully to talk the four men out, then fired tear gas into the house and detained the four men as they ran outside, police said.

The four were questioned by detectives and then were released.

Porter was in serious condition Thursday at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Medical Center, said spokesman Jerri Jackson.

Glen Jackson’s condition was unavailable, but emergency medical workers who took him to UAMS told police that his injuries weren’t life-threatening.

Detectives say they are increasing patrols in central Little Rock, which has seen most of the unsolved shootings this month. "The residents in the area are concerned," police spokesman Cassandra Davis said. "Officers will maintain a visible presence in the area, both to deter crime and so residents will know they’re safe."

On June 15, a man shot and killed Jesse James Howard, 33, as they were driving from a convenience store near 15th and Booker streets. A woman in the car at

Left Coast Police Crack Down on Gangs- LA Times

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-062105gang_lat,0,4703548.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Police Stage Massive Gang Raid

Members of the Vineland Boys gang are suspected in the shooting deaths of two police officers.

By Andrew Blankstein and Richard Winton
Times Staff Writers

10:37 AM PDT, June 21, 2005

Hundreds of heavily armed police officers descended on neighborhoods across Southern California before dawn today, arresting two dozen gang members who authorities say have been involved in drug dealing and violence that included the slayings of two police officers.

The raids targeting the Vineland Boyz street gang culminated an 18-month investigation by the Los Angeles and Burbank police departments, as well as the federal Drug Enforcement Administration and U.S. attorney's office.

Backed by seven special weapons and tactics teams, armored vehicles and nine helicopters, officers served search warrants at 42 locations in Sun Valley and Los Angeles, and as far as the Antelope and Simi valleys and Bakersfield.

Dubbed "Silent Night," the predawn crackdown was one of the largest law enforcement multi-operation agency operations of its kind in the area.

Some 1,300 members of the operation filled the Burbank High School Auditorium to capacity at 1 a.m. during a pre-raid briefing.

Officers from the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department as well as the Glendale and Pasadena police departments and the Marshals Service and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms participated.

The suspects, most of whom were named in federal grand jury indictments, are accused of violating federal drug and weapons laws.The gang became the focus of law enforcement in November 2003 when reputed gang member David Garcia fatally shot Burbank Police Officer Matthew Pavelka near Bob Hope Airport and then fled across the Mexican border before being captured 13 days later by the U.S. Marshals Service.

Authorities believe Vineland Boyz members were also responsible for the 1998 killing of James Beyea, an LAPD officer who was shot during a burglary.

Los Angeles Police Chief William J. Bratton said the gang was a "major criminal enterprise."

By dawn, officers had arrested nearly half of the 43 gang members being sought.

The gang has 259 documented members, Bratton said. In the past 18 months, he said, authorities have arrested 231 suspected Violent Boyz members and seized 25 cars, 75 firearms, more than 300 pounds of narcotics and more than $500,000.

Former Crip Leader on the Radio

To hear an interview with Leifel Jackson (OG of the HBO documentary Gang War: Bangin' in Little Rock and Back in the 'Hood: Gang War 2) click on the title and go to the Pat Lynch Classic archives dated 6-21-05 Interview with Leifel Jackson.

It is quite an insightful hour. Thanks to www.WAIRadio.com for allowing me to post it.

Steve

Breaking News

Breaking News -- 6/21/2005

Killen convicted in killings of civil-rights workers

PHILADELPHIA, Miss. — A former Ku Klux Klansman was convicted of manslaughter Tuesday in the 1964 slayings of three civil rights workers — exactly 41 years to the date that James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner were ambushed, beaten, and shot. The jury of nine whites and three blacks reached the verdict on their second day of deliberations, rejecting murder charges against Edgar Ray Killen, 80. THE ASSOCIATED PRESS --

The City of Brotherly Love...oops, wrong state-- From the NY Times

In a Small Town, a Trial Mirrors Familiar Divisions
By SHAILA DEWAN

PHILADELPHIA, Miss.,
June 20 -

It was bad enough that Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman wanted racial integration and blacks in the voting booth. But to many people here in 1964, they were also outsiders: Jews, Yankees and, some said, Communists.

Forty-one years later, the tension between outsiders and residents here still reverberates, as prosecutors try to make the case that Edgar Ray Killen organized the murders of Mr. Schwerner, Mr. Goodman and a third civil rights worker, James Earl Chaney, who was from a nearby town.

Before the trial began, the district attorney, Mark Duncan, extracted a promise from potential jurors. "Tell me you'll treat them like they were from here and were our neighbors," Mr. Duncan said.

His request was all the more significant because many in the courtroom were indeed neighbors, their histories intertwined in births and funerals, weddings and business deals.

This is a place where restaurants are decorated with framed photos of the owners' grandchildren, where customers at the antique shop on the courthouse square know about the proprietor's hip problem, where a case involving the Ku Klux Klan - whose members were responsible for the three men's deaths - can divide sisters and brothers.

Even the judge, Marcus Gordon, and the defendant, a preacher and sawmill operator, are connected; Mr. Killen presided at the funerals for Mr. Gordon's parents.

No one has accused Judge Gordon of favoring the defense. Rather, people seem to accept such connections as inevitable in Neshoba County, with its population of only about 28,000.

Stanley Dearman, the former owner of the local weekly newspaper, The Neshoba Democrat, said that although he did not believe that behind-the-scenes relationships affected what happened in the courtroom, such links might have contributed to the 40-year delay in the state's prosecution of the case.

"There's what I call a grass-roots politics, and it has a great deal to do with whether things are done or not done," Mr. Dearman said, recalling a Neshoba County constable who refused to serve arrest warrants for fear of losing votes.

Mr. Dearman, who has long called for the killers to be brought to justice, is himself distantly connected to the case. Mr. Killen has said he was at a funeral home on the night of the killings. The visitation he attended was for the 4-year-old daughter of Carolyn Barrett, who is now Mr. Dearman's wife. Mrs. Dearman still has the guest book with Mr. Killen's signature in a safe-deposit box.

Mrs. Dearman's brother, Harlan Majure, who was at the funeral home that night, testified for the defense on Monday that he saw Mr. Killen at the visitation, and that he thought the Klan was a peaceful organization that "did a lot of good."

The intricate ties in the case extend beyond the county line. Take, for example, State Senator Gloria Williamson, who delivered one of the more dramatic moments on Sunday at a memorial service for the three victims at Mount Zion United Methodist Church. Ms. Williamson, who is white, apologized to blacks for "all the wrong that was done" to them. She added, "Change had to come from outside of this little society."

The allegiances and grievances of residents posed a particular problem when it came to selecting a jury for the Killen trial.

"People don't move around that much, and lots of people have been here their whole lives," said Beth Bonora, a jury consultant for the prosecutors. "So the question becomes, how well do you know this person?"

Throughout the trial, the defense subtly underscored the fact that many involved in the case in 1964 were not from the area. "You were one of the F.B.I. agents sent down here to investigate the civil rights cases?" a defense lawyer, James McIntyre, asked a retired F.B.I. agent during cross-examination.

Editorials and news accounts from the 1960's portrayed the Freedom Riders and other civil rights supporters who came here as unkempt intruders looking for trouble.

"A lot of people to justify things say, 'Oh, they were filthy,' " Mr. Dearman said, "and that seems to be all you need to say."

Deborah Posey, a resident, recalled that when she finally saw photos of Mr. Chaney, Mr. Goodman and Mr. Schwerner on a poster offering a reward for information about their disappearance, she was shocked at how well-groomed they were. "I was told, 'Well, they cleaned them up for the pictures,' " Ms. Posey said.

Of course, not everyone shunned the civil rights workers. Mount Zion, the black church whose burning by the Klan drew the three workers to Neshoba County, has held a memorial service for them every year since their deaths, church members say.

Jewel Rush McDonald, a member of the church, said it worried her that Judge Gordon had allowed the sequestered jury to go home for the weekend.

"This is a small town; someone is going to call them," Ms. McDonald said. In the 1967 federal trial, in which 7 of 18 defendants were convicted of conspiring to deprive the three victims of their civil rights, jurors reported receiving threatening phone calls telling them not to convict.
Some trace the dislike of outsiders to the Civil War and even earlier, when abolitionists were seen as condescending by Southerners.

"It was when the North came into the South and told the South, 'You have to do this, this and this,' " Ms. Posey said. "They didn't want to be told what to do."

Mr. Dearman made a similar point. "The ghost of the carpetbagger," he said, "casts a long shadow."

Killen using Michael Jackson Stalling Tactics? NY Times

June 17, 2005

Widow Recalls Ghosts of '64 at Rights Trial
By SHAILA DEWAN

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 16 -

As soon as word got out about where they were staying, it was time to leave.

A man who rented a house for them was threatened.

A minister's wife gave them an apartment, but there was no running water and they had to go to a black-owned hotel every morning to wash, sneaking through the back door because they were white and did not want to draw attention.

When they had a phone, it rang constantly. People on the other end would tell Rita Schwerner that her husband was a dead man. Their license-plate number was circulated to law enforcement officers.

That was the welcome given a young couple who arrived in Mississippi from New York in 1964 to join the civil rights movement, the former Ms. Schwerner, now Rita Bender, told a jury on Thursday.

She was the first witness in the state murder trial of a onetime member of the Ku Klux Klan accused of orchestrating the killing of her husband, Michael Schwerner, and two other civil rights workers, James Earl Chaney and Andrew Goodman, more than 40 years ago.

Articulate and serene, with close-cropped white hair and a soft, sad smile, Ms. Bender told the jury of her marriage to Mr. Schwerner - she was 20, he 22 - and their move, soon after, to the South. She also told of his disappearance near Philadelphia, while she was at a training program in Ohio, and how when she returned to Mississippi after hearing the news, the only place she could stay was the black-owned hotel, with a guard organized by black ministers keeping watch outside.

It was a close-up view of a time when terror was commonplace and the mere act of helping people could endanger them. The jury paid close attention, but the defendant, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, was absent from the courtroom. Mr. Killen had retreated, complaining of shortness of breath and a "smothering sensation," his lawyer said, and was later taken from the Neshoba County Courthouse on a stretcher.

After a recess, the presiding circuit judge, Marcus Gordon, announced that Mr. Killen was in the hospital undergoing tests and that the trial would resume on Friday morning if doctors approved.

Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator and preacher in a wheelchair because of a tree-felling accident in January, had been in court for the first part of the morning while the judge dealt with procedural matters. But as the jury entered for the first day of testimony, his lawyer James McIntyre approached the bench and asked for permission for Mr. Killen to retire.
Because of Mr. Killen's poor health, a bed and a nurse had been provided for him in the courthouse.

With Mr. Killen's permission, the trial proceeded without him, and Ms. Bender was the first witness. The jury was not told the reason for Mr. Killen's absence because the judge did not want them to be swayed by sympathy, the judge said.

With James Hood, the state attorney general, questioning her, Ms. Bender, now a lawyer living in Seattle, described the community center for children that she and her husband helped open in Meridian, Miss., about 30 miles from Philadelphia.

Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney, who was from Meridian, built shelves to house the donated books that were not available in the public library for blacks. There was a Ping-Pong table. But the workers were also trying to help blacks register to vote, making contacts and looking for places to hold training classes. Mr. Schwerner and Mr. Chaney had visited the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a black church in Neshoba County near Philadelphia.

In June, while they were at a training session in Ohio where they met Mr. Goodman, they learned that church leaders had been beaten by Klansmen, the church burned to the ground, Ms. Bender said.

At this point, Judge Gordon gently admonished Ms. Bender, saying she was speaking too quietly. "I'm sorry," she replied, still composed. "It's a little bit emotional. I'm sorry."

In the courtroom, Ms. Bender's husband and relatives of Mr. Chaney watched, as did Bettie Dahmer, the daughter of Vernon Dahmer, another Mississippi civil rights leader, whose killer was tried and imprisoned in 1998. Two men occupied a row set aside for Mr. Killen's family.

Ms. Bender spoke up, saying that her first husband, who was known as Mickey, and Mr. Chaney, whom she called J.E., had decided to return to Mississippi to see the church.

"They had to go back and see those people," she said. "You don't abandon people who have put themselves at risk." The two men, joined by Mr. Goodman, climbed into the blue station wagon the Schwerners used and returned to Mississippi.

They reached Meridian safely, and the next day, Sunday, June 21, they drove to Philadelphia to see the church. Late that night, Ms. Schwerner received a phone call saying they had not returned.

They had been missing for two days when Ms. Schwerner learned that the station wagon had been found, burned, in the Bogue Chitto swamp in Neshoba County. By then she was at the Cincinnati airport, on her way back to Mississippi. Coincidentally a fellow civil rights proponent, Fannie Lou Hamer, was there, and the two heard the news together. Ms. Hamer, the granddaughter of slaves, drew Ms. Schwerner into her arms and the two of them cried. "Our tears were mingling with each other," Ms. Bender said.

Out of fear for Ms. Schwerner's safety, the rights workers had sent her home with an escort, who accompanied her to Neshoba County. "I wanted to see the burned-out car," she said. "I was absolutely insistent."

It was in a garage, scorched bare on the inside and perched on blocks because the tires had melted away, she said.

During cross-examination, Mr. McIntyre had essentially one question for Ms. Bender: Did she have any personal knowledge of Mr. Killen's involvement in the killings?
Ms. Bender said she did not.

In the broiling sun on the courthouse lawn afterward, Ms. Bender took advantage of the attention from reporters to press an idea she has repeated in the years since 1964.
"You're treating this trial as the most important trial of the civil rights movement because two of these three men were white," she said. "That means we all have a discussion about racism in this country that has to continue. And if this trial is a way for you to all acknowledge that, for us to all acknowledge that and to have that discussion openly, then this trial has meaning."

Early in the day, the judge said he would admit testimony from the transcript of the 1967 federal trial in the case, in which 18 men, including Mr. Killen, were accused of conspiring to deny the three victims their civil rights. Seven were convicted, but the jury deadlocked on Mr. Killen because of one holdout juror.

Crucial witnesses from that trial are now dead, but prosecutors intend to introduce their testimony from the transcript. The defense had sought to bar the old testimony.

After Ms. Bender, a second witness was called but had barely begun to testify when the judge sent the jury from the room again. Mr. Killen had been given oxygen, and paramedics were taking him to Neshoba County General Hospital.

Later in the afternoon, Dr. Patrick Eakes, the head of intensive care there, told reporters that Mr. Killen, who has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder, would probably be able to return to court in the morning. He had high blood pressure, and it had spiked, the doctor said, perhaps because of his injuries. When pressed, he conceded that the spike could have been caused by the stress of the trial.

"I imagine everyone's blood pressure in that room is probably a little high right now," Dr. Eakes said.

Mississippi Burned, But it's Coming Around- NY Times

Note from Steve: Several years ago I had an involvement with this case. I was asked Jerry Mitchell, the reporter from the Clarion-Ledger, to examine the autopsy evidence and photos. It was a moving experience for me. While I could not answer the reporters direct questions because of the poor nature of the autopsies, I still grasped the feelings of people at the time. It was scary, and the scarier part is this...there are still people in the world who hate one another merely because of skin color. S/


By SHAILA DEWAN of the New York Times

PHILADELPHIA, Miss., June 9 - It is just a fork in a country road, with nothing to mark it but a retired newspaper editor named Stanley Dearman, standing there with a slight tremor in his stout frame, saying, "This is where it happened. Right in the center here. The cars all pulled around in a circle and they were in the center."

He was talking about James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael H. Schwerner, three young civil rights workers who were killed here by a mob of Klansmen on June 21, 1964. Their disappearance - they were found 44 days later buried in an earthen dam - riveted the nation and proved to be a pivotal event in civil rights history. On Monday, the first man to be charged with their murders, Edgar Ray Killen, 80, will stand trial, for a second time, in the killings.

In 1967, the federal government tried 18 men, including Mr. Killen, on charges that they had conspired to violate the victims' civil rights. Seven were convicted, and none served more than six years; in Mr. Killen's case, an all-white jury deadlocked. Five of the original defendants, none of whom took the stand in the first trial, have been subpoenaed to testify in the new trial.
[Prosecutors continued to subpoena new witnesses, the court clerk reported on Friday, including Mr. Killen's brother, Oscar Kenneth Killen.]

Mr. Killen, an avowed segregationist, maintains his innocence.

The trial will be one of the biggest of what some have called the South's "atonement trials" revisiting the most notorious atrocities of the civil rights era. One after another, new prosecutors have returned to these old crimes, spurred by news media investigations, relatives of the victims, the success of other prosecutors and even their own youthful memories.

In 1994, Byron de la Beckwith was convicted in the assassination of Medgar Evers, a leader in the Mississippi National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Mr. Beckwith died in prison in 2001. Three years ago, Bobby Frank Cherry was convicted in Alabama for the 1963 bombing of a Birmingham church that killed four black girls. He died of cancer in prison last year.

In Chicago this month, prosecutors exhumed the body of Emmett Till, a black 14-year-old who was kidnapped and killed in Mississippi in 1955. Two men were acquitted of his killing by an all-white jury but later admitted they were responsible. The men have died, but prosecutors believe others were involved and are seeking DNA evidence.

The literal, and figurative, exhumations of the past are the result of increasing black political power and younger, more enlightened whites, said Susan M. Glisson, the director of the William Winter Institute for Racial Reconciliation at the University of Mississippi. "It represents a maturing South," she said.

In Philadelphia, the case against Mr. Killen will be tried by the Neshoba County district attorney, Mark Duncan, and the state attorney general, Jim Hood, who are serving their first terms in office.

According to testimony at the 1967 trial, Mr. Killen was not present at the killings but masterminded them. The three civil rights workers went to Neshoba County to inspect the Mount Zion United Methodist Church, a black church that had been burned by the Klan the preceding week. They were stopped for speeding by Cecil R. Price, a deputy sheriff, and taken to the Philadelphia jail.

Deputy Price, according to testimony, was himself a Klan member and held the three for hours until a mob could gather. Mr. Killen, witnesses said, a preacher and local Klan leader, summoned Klansmen and chose the killing and burial sites. Eleven members of the jury wanted to convict him, but there was one holdout - a woman who said she could "never convict a preacher."

For years, the case was closed. Mr. Dearman, who is a former editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, said the prevailing opinion among whites was that it was best to let time erode the painful memories of that era. But the stories refused to be forgotten. Standing at the site of the killings, Mr. Dearman said, "I have brought literally hundreds of people over 40 years here."

In 1988, the killings were dramatized in the film "Mississippi Burning." The killings were not just a stain on Neshoba County's image - they were Neshoba County's image.

The first suggestions that the case could be revisited came at a 25th anniversary observance of the killings in 1989 at Mount Zion, where Secretary of State Dick Molpus offered the first apology by a Mississippi official to the families of the victims.

Even at that late date, his remark is widely seen as having wounded his political career. In 1995, during Mr. Molpus's unsuccessful run for governor, his opponent, Gov. Kirk Fordice, won cheers at the Neshoba County Fair when he said, "I don't think we need to keep running this state by 'Mississippi Burning,' apologizing for what happened 30 years ago."

Over time, however, the idea of reopening the case picked up steam, with the help of a report in The Clarion-Ledger, a Jackson newspaper, that one of those convicted in 1967, Sam Bowers, had boasted to a state archivist that the "main instigator" of the Philadelphia killings had gone free. Later Mr. Bowers, since convicted in the killing of Vernon Dahmer, a prominent civil rights worker, confirmed to the state authorities that he had been referring to Mr. Killen.

In 1999, Mr. Hood's predecessor, Mike Moore, reopened the case. But the evidence, which included 40,000 pages from the F.B.I., was daunting, and the investigation wore on. In 2001, Mr. Price, the former deputy sheriff, who was reportedly cooperating with the authorities, died in a fall from a cherry picker.

Meanwhile, another group formed in Neshoba County to observe the 40th anniversary of the killings. The Philadelphia Coalition included the mayor, the publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, elders from the Mount Zion church and other leaders. This time, they did more than plan an event. They called for the state to take action. At the time, only a plaque at the Mount Zion church memorialized the three victims. The coalition published a tour guide detailing all the sites related to the killings and the civil rights movement in the county.

To some residents, these actions were long overdue. Deborah Posey, who was once related by marriage to a defendant in the 1967 trial, joined the coalition. "It was what I'd been wanting and what I'd been praying here for years," Ms. Posey said. "That they would say, 'This took place here; we're not going to hide it any more. We're going to deal with it.' "

But others resisted, questioning the necessity of bringing up the case. Hugh Thomasson, a local businessman, suggested in a letter to The Neshoba Democrat, that the victims had been "outside troublemakers." He added: "The media has profited for four decades by smearing Neshoba County and Mississippi. I ask, 'When is enough enough?' "

In January, the state attorney general, Mr. Hood, convened a grand jury and presented evidence against eight of the original defendants still living, a spokesman said. According to news reports, at least two of them testified. The jury returned an indictment against Mr. Killen. Shortly afterward, Mr. Killen, a sawmill operator, was hit by a falling tree and hospitalized. The trial, set for March, was postponed until June 13.

Jim Prince, a co-chairman of the Philadelphia Coalition and the current editor and publisher of The Neshoba Democrat, estimates that about 70 percent of the county's residents now support re-examining the case.

Still, as the town prepares for droves of reporters, closed-off streets and even, potentially, white supremacist demonstrators, there is an air of stoicism.

"They should have done it 40 years ago," said Teresa Pace, an owner of Stribling Printing, on the courthouse square. "If they'd done the right thing then, they wouldn't have to be fussing with it now."

While many whites view the trial as a chance to show that Philadelphia has changed, many blacks, like Elsie Kirksey, a police dispatcher, see it slightly differently. "The trial is a starting point," said Ms. Kirksey, who is in the coalition. "We can't get a miracle out of the trial. One trial can't change Neshoba County. Although, it can help."

The Writing's On the Wall- From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Rogers : Graffiti of gangs puts law on guard

BY SHARON CRAWFORD ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTEROGERS

— Police officials are concerned that changes they’ve seen in Hispanic gang graffiti are a sign of future violence. But community leaders are hoping that a new group will find ways to offer youths alternatives to violence.

Over the last year, there has been an increase in gang graffiti written on public buildings, private businesses and homes throughout the city, police said. Gang experts say graffiti — in this case spray-painted messages and symbols — is considered by gang members to be a "newspaper" for their rivals to see.

Rogers police Cpl. Kelley Cradduck said that although the city’s overall increase in criminal activity can’t be directly tied to gangs, there are signs the problem is becoming more prominent in Rogers.

Recently, gangs have been marking through their rivals’ graffiti with their own insignias, he said. Gang experts say this is a sign of disrespect and a potential turf war. "That is a dangerous sign," Cradduck said. "When you start seeing that, it means they are sending messages to each other. I hate to think of the day these two groups meet. Someone will end up dead. "We either take it seriously now, or we’ll regret it 10 years from now," he said.

Cradduck said that gangs are known to be involved in drug activity and violence against rival gangs.

A group of community leaders will meet Tuesday to discuss ways to reach out to the Hispanic community. Eventually, they hope to open the meetings up to the public for more input. Cesar Aguilar, director for the Rogers Community Center, said he decided to form a committee to look at Rogers’ gang problem after seeing Cradduck’s presentation on local gang activity. "I got really concerned because it could be dangerous for kids," Aguilar said. "For a long time, I thought it was just kids being kids. We want to do this because we need to create more awareness."

Aguilar said the committee will be made up of community leaders, school officials, religious representatives, people in the Hispanic community and law enforcement. Cradduck said police started seeing examples of gang graffiti several years ago, but it’s been on the increase in the last year. Police have identified graffiti from at least four different gangs with mostly Hispanic members, he said.

Police have identified graffiti from the Mara Salvatrucha or MS-13, 18th Street, Surenos 13 and Brown Pride gangs, he said. "At first, the graffiti wasn’t what you consider traditional hard-core graffiti," Cradduck said. "But now they’re more hateful towards each other. You’re not seeing these little loosely organized kids who consider themselves gang members."

Cradduck and other police officers have started talking to school officials and community leaders about gangs and the importance of looking out for possible signs of gang activity. In the past few years, they’ve confiscated artwork and homework decorated with known gang symbols. "The graffiti is not a cultural issue, it’s a community issue," Cradduck said. [...]

Steve Nawojczyk, a gang expert based in North Little Rock, said Rogers officials are forward-thinking to make an effort to curb the gang problem early on. Officials in Little Rock "buried their heads in the sand" in the late 1980s when evidence of black gang graffiti started showing up on the streets, he said. "They acted like it wasn’t a problem until we had a murder rate that was higher per capita than many larger cities," Nawojczyk said.

Once a community sees gang graffiti on their streets, it’s important for law enforcement to come in and document the writings and then have them removed, Nawojczyk said. In Rogers, the city cleans up any graffiti on public buildings but leaves cleanup on privately owned buildings to the owners.

Nawojczyk said graffiti is just the beginning to what could happen if nothing is done. "The very next step is violence," Nawojczyk said.

This story was published Sunday, June 12, 2005

Please Visit the www.CityYear.org Website

City Year is a wonderful way for young people 17-24 to give a little service to their country.

I am honored to sit on the City Year Little Rock site board so I can see the worth of this great program from the inside out.

The young Corps Members of City Year Little Rock have made a huge impact in the lives of the children of Little Rock, as well as my city of North Little Rock. Our communities are better than we were since City Year arrived.

Visit the City Year website at www.CityYear.org (or click on the title of this post) and while you are there, be sure to look at the Cyzygy Blog. Cyzygy just left our cities after being here for a week revitalizing all of us. It is hard not to catch the energy from all of these dedicated soldiers in the war to make our country a better place for all of us.

From the bottom of this old warrior's heart-- job well done, very well done.

Steve

Straight Outta Compton--From USA Today

13 L.A. deputies to be punished for shooting

COMPTON, Calif. (AP) — Thirteen sheriff's deputies will be disciplined for firing about 120 shots at an unarmed driver last month, an incident that sparked outrage in the community and prompted some deputies to apologize.

One deputy will be suspended for 15 days. The others will receive shorter suspensions or written reprimands, Los Angeles County Sheriff Lee Baca said Thursday.

While some community members hailed the announcement, others said they were disappointed. Lolitha Jones, who held a sign protesting the shooting, said the deputies should have faced tougher measures.

"An ordinary citizen going down the street on a rampage like that would have gone straight to jail," she said.

Winston Hayes, 44, was struck by four bullets in the May 9 shooting, which was captured on videotape following a brief pursuit of Hayes' sport utility vehicle. The vehicle matched the description of one thought to be involved in a previous shooting. It was later determined that Hayes was not involved in that incident.

Hayes was hospitalized for about two weeks and now faces charges of evading police and driving under the influence of drugs. One deputy was also slightly wounded.

The shooting spurred anger in Compton, where bullets smashed through windows and hit houses. Distrust of law enforcement runs deep in the community known for its street violence and gangster rap.

Days after the shooting, some deputies issued an apology through their lawyer, Gregory Emerson, who said the officers did not try to "harm or injure or otherwise jeopardize the safety of the individuals" in the community.

Also Thursday, Baca announced a change in the department's shooting policy regarding vehicles. The policy now mandates that officers train a weapon on a suspect and give specific commands to surrender before considering shootings.

Deputies can still fire when they feel a vehicle is an immediate threat of death or serious injury to deputies or bystanders. However, each deputy must now use his or her own "independent reasoning for using deadly force," according to the policy.

"We want and will have increased public confidence," Baca said. "The sheriff's department can do better and it will do better."

Boredom Causes Grief and Loss of Life- From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Officer: Rock tosser ‘bored’Teen admitted hurling stone on I-630, witness says

BY JIM BROOKS ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE

Before he realized anyone had died, a Little Rock teenager told investigators that he was "bored" when he threw a chunk of concrete onto Interstate 630 that hit a vehicle driven by Carolyn Mirek on May 28, a state police special agent told a judge Wednesday at a bond hearing.

Mirek, 50, of Little Rock died of the injuries she suffered after the concrete struck her while she drove west on I-630 near the Woodrow Street overpass. She was on her way home from Mass with her 15-year-old daughter in the passenger seat.

Arkansas State Police arrested Every Donnelle Richardson, 17, three days later on charges of first-degree murder and committing terroristic acts. He has pleaded innocent. At the end of the 15-minute hearing in Pulaski County District Court on Wednesday, Judge Wayne Gruber ordered that Richardson’s bond remain at $200,000, a figure the teenager’s defense attorney said has the same effect as bond being denied.

The key witness at the hearing, state police Special Agent Stuart Woodward, outlined for the judge the investigation that resulted in Richardson’s arrest. Woodward said Richardson at first denied his involvement. But after investigators told him that two of his companions had said Richardson threw the concrete, he confessed that he did throw it, Woodward said.

"It was me," Richardson said, according to the detective. "I was just bored, really. I went down by the railroad tracks and started throwing rocks." Woodward said that at the time Richardson gave the statement, he didn’t realize that anyone had been killed. "At the time of the interview, he didn’t know it was a fatality," Woodward said, adding that Richardson also described the rock he threw and the vehicles he thought had been hit. "Detectives then told him it was a fatality."

"That wasn’t just throwing rocks," Pulaski County Prosecuting Attorney Larry Jegley said in an interview after the hearing. "This wasn’t some kid tossing rocks into a pond. ... It was a substantial enough boulder that it would take two hands and a great amount of effort to hurl it into a moving car."

Richardson’s two counts of committing a terroristic act are related to Mirek’s daughter, Mary Catherine Mirek, being in the vehicle when it was hit and to the striking of another vehicle. No one in the other vehicle was injured.

Two other teens questioned by police have not yet been charged, but authorities said the investigation is continuing and more charges are possible.

Mirek and her daughter were in a Chevrolet Tahoe driving home after Mass about 5 p.m. when the concrete smashed through the windshield. Mary Catherine said she saw concrete fall toward the vehicle, smash through the windshield and strike her mother’s head.

Friends and relatives of Carolyn Mirek described her as a devout Catholic who loved her family and worked as a portrait artist. She died the day after she was injured.

At first, authorities investigated whether the concrete was thrown or fell from the overpass. They eventually learned that the object was thrown from the roadside near the viaduct where the interstate crosses the railroad tracks. Woodward said investigators first contacted the three teenagers shortly after the vehicles were hit, at a "block party" on Booker Street.

Investigators eventually went to Central High School to talk to one of the other teens but left when they were told that school had let out early on the day investigators were there. A short time later, Little Rock detectives spotted the teens sitting on a porch on South Woodrow Street, Woodward testified. When the youths were approached by detectives, they ran, with Richardson splitting from the other two, Woodward said. The two younger teens were captured, but Richardson escaped, Woodward said. While police interviewed the other teens at state police headquarters, the mother of one of the boys called to say she was taking Richardson in to be interviewed as a witness. Richardson admitted his involvement during that interview, Woodward said.

Later, when investigators talked by telephone with Richardson’s mother, "She said he is a troubled child, and he wouldn’t go to school," Woodward testified. "He will lie. He’s a good liar," the woman said, according to Woodward. "He has been going in the wrong direction."

The investigator said the two other teens admitted that they were present when the rocks were thrown, but they denied throwing any.

During Wednesday’s hearing, defense attorney Bill James asked Woodward how he could be sure that the other teens didn’t throw anything onto the interstate. "We know of only two rocks that were thrown on the interstate, and [Richardson] claimed both of them," Woodward said.

Richardson’s father, James Richardson, testified that his son didn’t have a criminal history and that the family didn’t have enough money to post a high bond. Richardson’s mother didn’t attend the hearing.

In a low voice, the younger Richardson also testified, telling the judge that he left school during his junior year. He said he had been charged with truancy, which landed him in an alternative school, and he was accused of breaking some windows. That accusation was dismissed after his mother agreed to make compensation, he said. James asked the younger Richardson if he had a job. "I was supposed to start last Friday at McDonald’s," Richardson responded.

The 17-year-old admitted to having a tattoo on his right arm that reads, "West Side Pimp," but he denied that it had anything to do with gangs.

After the hearing, James described his client as being "very immature." "He’s operating on the level of a 12-year-old," James said. "The idea that he was doing this by himself is preposterous."

The case has not yet been filed in circuit court. The penalty for first-degree murder is 10-40 years or life in prison.

This story was published Thursday, June 09, 2005

Gang Hand Signs

Click on the title to see some typical gang hand-signs. Please remember these will take on local flavor so you must check with your area gang interventionists or police officers to determine actual useage patterns.

Steve

Some Very Useful Websites on Prevention Tactics

Click on the title to get to some useful websites on youth violence.

Steve

Graffiti Hurts

Available Resource:Graffiti can cause problems in a neighborhood.

Graffiti can give the impression that nobody cares and attract other forms of crime to a neighborhood. The U.S. Department of Justice reports that "graffiti contributes to lost revenue associated with reduced ridership on transit systems, reduced retail sales and declines in property value." If you have graffiti issues in your neighborhood there are things you can do.

For community-based graffiti prevention resources go to www.graffitihurts.org.What is the Graffiti Hurts® Awareness Program?Graffiti Hurts® - Care for Your Community is a grassroots community education program.

It was developed in 1996 by Keep America Beautiful, Inc. through a grant from The Sherwin-Williams Company, producers of Krylon® brand of aerosol paint.

The Graffiti Hurts® Program is dedicated to raising awareness about the harmful effects of graffiti vandalism on communities. At the heart of the Graffiti Hurts® Program are four goals:


* Educate citizens about the importance of graffiti prevention and abatement.

* Provide local municipalities with a platform for delivering graffiti prevention messages.


* Utilize local organizations and Keep America Beautiful affiliates to provide opportunities to give back through community service.

* Create healthier, safer and more livable community environments.

The Graffiti Hurts® Program also helps communities initiate local graffiti prevention activities, and educate youth and adults about the impact of graffiti vandalism.

To do this, the Graffiti Hurts® Program has developed a kit of resources.

The kit contains all the tools to begin graffiti education, prevention, and clean-up in your neighborhood.

Internet Radio begins Streaming from Little Rock

WAIRadio.com is now broadcasting via the internet from Little Rock, Arkansas. The shows are hosted by longtime local radio personalities Pat Lynch (a little to the left) and Ray Lincoln (a little to the right, but now with a new heart) and radio veteran Joe Cobb (last in Chicago). It begins at 6 every morning and is live until 6 PM (Central Time). Click on the title or here www.wairadio.com to check it out.

I'm sure there will be things of interest to people worldwide.

And, there are toll free lines both national and international. Keep up with our area and things of interest worldwide.

Steve

Interesting Cult Crime Site

Visit Tony Kail's Cult Crime site by clicking on the title.

Steve

City Year Cyzygy

I had the honor of speaking at the City Year national Cyzygy conference this week. What a wonderful and energetic group they were! They are in the Little Rock metro area this week doing service projects and meeting to "pump them up."

If your community does not enjoy having City Year, you might visit their website (click on title) to see more about them and what they do.

Steve

Violence in Schools in New York

Click on the title.