The feud began when one group called the other “punks” and “faggots” on MySpace. School brawls ensued. The kids shot at each other in the street. Bystanders started getting hit: three shot one day, a murder another. It may have ended this week with a movie-like nighttime mass pow-wow on Winthrop Avenue.
A truce was struck at that outdoor meeting Tuesday night. As a result, it appears a wave of teen-fueled violence that terrified an entire city has subsided, for now.
The truce was brokered by members of the Street Outreach Workers team led by Tyrone Weston (pictured Thursday afternoon). The city and the Family Alliance formed the team a year ago in the hopes that ex-con gangbangers who went straight might reach the violent young men beyond the reach of cops.
Lt. Ray Hassett, who oversees the Dwight/West River district at the heart of much of the recent violence, reported Thursday that the streets have remained quiet since the truce was struck.
“We’re glad for the help,” Hassett said. “We’re hopeful it will hold.”
“The street are quiet right now. That’s what we want,” confirmed Lt. Holly Wasilewski, who oversees the affected area in the Hill North district. “We don’t want anyone to get hurt.”
At his Family Alliance office on James Street Thursday afternoon, Tyrone Weston detailed the remarkable events that led to the truce, and the feud that preceded it.
About two months ago some members of a youth gang in the Hill start writing hostile comments on the MySpace pages of teen gang members from the Dwight/ West River area on the west side of town, Weston said.
Weston’s staff monitored the MySpace pages, where the Hill kids called the Dwight/ West River kids “faggots,” “punks,” taunting them that they’re “not as tough as they thought.”
The gang members from the west side generally fall under the neighborhood rubric of The Trey. Recently recruiters from the Bloods gang, coming from New York and New Jersey, have found success inducting new members in the neighborhood, according to Weston. Weston and his staff are out on the street observing and talking with the kids day and night.
“The Bloods are taking over there,” Weston reported. “They pay your rent. They put food in your house. Then you take orders: You deal drugs. You do shootings. You put women in prostitution.” The city has recently seen a particularly noticeable rise in prostitution, including among teens, Weston said.
Subsequent to the MySpace taunts, members of the two gangs got into brawls, one at Hillhouse, one at Career High School, Weston said. From there the dispute escalated into targeted shootings. Teens from each group were hit in the back, in the foot.
Then came a more serious shooting three to four weeks ago: A 15-year-old from Hill was shot in the chest and stomach, in the area of Sherman and Winthrop avenues. Trey territory.
“The kids in the Hill felt the Bloods did it. That’s what really turned the heat up,” Weston said. “The kids from the Hill were riding through at night shooting up the houses.”
On the afternoon of June 26, the Hill kids shot up the block — and hit three bystanders. A 17-year-old girl was shot in the face. Two brothers, ages 6 and 9, watched as their mother pleaded with the gunmen to spare their lives.
Two nights later, after midnight, kids from both gangs were shooting at each other on Winthrop Avenue. A 53-year-old woman, Antoinette Joyner, was sitting on a front stoop petting a cat. One of the bullets hit her, and killed her.
Since then, the media has been filled with outraged and fearful reactions from neighbors, and vows from city officials and the cops to crack down.
That proved bad for business for the two warring gangs, Weston said. “The heat is on. Nobody’s getting money in the neighborhood. Some of the higher-ups are concerned things are getting out of hand.”
Those “higher-ups” — gang leaders in their late 20s — started sending messages to each other via teen couriers on Tuesday, Weston said. They wanted to be back in the crack and ecstasy business, even if that meant cooling tensions.
Around 7:30 p.m. Tyrone Weston was closing up a gym at the Truman School where the outreach workers run a sports program for kids. His cell phone rang. Maurice “Blest” Peters, an outreach worker from Stevens Street in the Hill, told Weston he had just received a call from a head of the Hill gang. The man said his group was ready to talk. (The outreach workers have served as truce-brokers before. A Newhallville-Dixwell truce brokered last fall — read about it here — is still keeping Newhallville relatively quiet, according to Weston.)
The phone rang again. This time it was an outreach worker from the Trey. He’d heard from an “O.G.” (“Old Guy,” meaning over, say, 25) from that area’s gang. He, too, was ready to talk.
By a little after 9, Weston was escorting three carloads of Hill gangbangers to Winthrop Avenue, between Chapel and Edgewood.
There waiting were the Bloods. Forty members of the two gangs were there along with the outreach workers. The cops had been notified; uniformed officers kept sentry a block away in either direction. They were not involved in the discussions or the brokering.
At the same time, blocks away at the Berger Apartments, community leaders and neighbors were meeting to discuss what to do about the violence, unaware of the tentative respite being pursued nearby.
Back on Winthrop, the outreach workers patted down the 40 participants. No guns were visible.
From there, it didn’t start well, Weston recalled.
“Everyone starts pointing fingers: ‘You’re a punk!’ ‘You’re a pussy!!’ ‘Without a gun you won’t do nothing!’”
The two camps rushed at each other; the outreach workers interceded. The members then threatened the outreach workers: “I can have you killed,” one said.
The cops a block away started to approach the scene. Organizers waved them off.
Weston and his workers calmed the crowd. Members of the two sides were invited to speak, one at a time. “You shot at me.” “Don’t act like you’re an innocent person: You know why this happened.”
Then, Weston said, he and his outreach workers delivered a message: “You proved you’re not a punk. Now you’ve got a woman murdered. All of you can be in jail tomorrow for murder. You’ve got police sitting on your houses.”
One worker recalled his own decade-plus stint behind bars. “Ten years from now,” Weston recalled him saying, “you’ll be playing chess with each other in prison. You won’t remember why this happened.” (Weston himself, who’s 37, spent 10 years in jail on narcotics and assault charges before going straight.)
Some of the gang members insisted that this talking wasn’t going to end the feud. Only a “fair fight” would.
Four of the original disputants were identified. They left the scene, for a field off Frontage Road. There they fought, with fists, while the crowd waited back on Winthrop.
“It was a straight fight,” Weston said. “There was a winner. There was a loser.”
The quartet returned to Winthrop and reported: It’s over. “All sides shook hands, hugged each other,” Weston said. “I heard old feelings come in: ‘You used to be my boy until you became a punk.’”
No one signed a truce document. (This wasn’t a “signing” crowd, Weston said; With some of them wanted on federal or state charges, they don’t like the idea of putting their names on paper.) Instead, they each “gave their word” orally, “as young men, that this was over with. The beef was over.”
And that was it. Ten-forty five, the street cleared.
Next?
Lt. Hassett vowed to keep the heat on the gangbangers.
“For all the truces,” he said, “in the back of my mind, I remember every day that a woman has been killed. Someone, some person will be brought to justice for that. I want to keep the pressure on these kids. If they get comfortable — ‘I can go back selling drugs’ — I want to keep the thought gnawing at them: A woman was killed. We’re going to find out who did it. She didn’t deserve to die.”
Lt. Wasilewski was effusive in her praise for Weston’s team.
“This is unprecedented that we have such a collaboration with the outreach workers. They work very hard. We refer a lot of cases the them,” she said. “They worked it out on their end. We don’t get the details; they called the truce. That’s all I need to know. Now we’ll work on our end,” investigating the crimes.
In the meantime, Weston and crew are monitoring the tentative truce day by day.
One of the truce participants, who’s 17, phoned Weston Wednesday night.
“I slept last night for the first time in weeks,” Weston quoted the kid as saying. “I didn’t hear a bullet. I didn’t hear no car screeching.”
“Do you think it’s over?” the kid asked Weston.
“If you think it’s over, it’s over,” Weston said he replied. “Nobody can fight if you don’t fight back.”
Awesome article. So glad that something happened, hopefully it ends the shootings...
Props to the Outreach workers!