1. The parents? Here's a recent quote from one, this will tell ya' everything you need to know about the
"parental mind-set" in an area "whitey" refers to as
"the core."
""They got this thing all fouled up," the boy's father said. "They're making a butcher out of a 10-year-old boy and a group of boys. . . . Kids are going to be kids."
"Kids are going to be kids?" Can you f****** believe that?
2. WI does not have the death penalty nor legal CCW. Both are necessary, period.
3. Follows is a 10/2/02 article that provides some background on this part of city. Like all larger metropolitan areas (I've seen em' all, Philly, LA, NYC, Boston, ad nauseum), Milwaukee also has a section of the city that is so insanely fucked-up and disgusting that the average citizen just can't even come close to comprehending or relating to it (e.g. Cabrini Green, Watts, etc.). If you think you're a bad-ass and you want some action, pick any date/time and go there. I gurantee you won't be dissapointed.
Violence, anger brewing in a neighborhood that is poorer, younger than the rest of the city
By JESSICA McBRIDE and VIKKI ORTIZ
Last Updated: Oct. 2, 2002
Residents have a name for the desperate corner of Milwaukee where police say a pack of at least 16 kids fatally beat Charlie Young Jr. Sunday night.
"It's Little Beirut," explains a slim 19-year-old man with a knife scar across his face.
The derogatory title arrived around 1994, when a teenager laid in wait to kill a Milwaukee police officer, three blocks from the scene of Sunday's attack.
The scar-faced teen, who says his name is Cory Brown, is hanging with friends along N. 21st St., a half-block from the duplex where Young died.
Like them, he's brimming with anger. He hates the police. Everyone is against him because he's black. The "narcs" keep kicking his grandma's door in, and he's got six drug-related loitering tickets to pay off.
He's surrounded by half a dozen peers and a few bashful kids who listen in.
"This ain't Wauwatosa," says one of the group, Keith Martin. "These kids - they ain't got nothing to do. Find me an arcade around here or a skating rink or a social center. Everyone throws money away from us."
Eight years after the police officer's murder, little has changed, except maybe for the worse. The idea that a group of nearly 20 kids would beat a man to death might seem incomprehensible - except in Little Beirut.
Almost everyone denies knowing the boys. Some people actually defend them. They save their anger for authorities.
Little Beirut is younger and poorer than most of Milwaukee, according to census figures. More than 43% of its residents are younger than 18, compared with less than a third for the rest of the city. One-third of its households are headed by single mothers, the unemployment rate is more than three times the rest of Milwaukee's, and more than half the people earn less than $9,000 a year, the federal poverty level for an individual.
Trash and shattered glass litter streets pocked with boarded-up houses. Squad cars with four officers apiece circle the neighborhood all day. At times, the officers pile out and confront youths, who spill into streets and yards.
It is a battle zone where almost everyone you talk to needs more than one hand to count the murdered relatives and friends - and blames police and society.
DeShan Vaughn, 29, has lived around N. 22nd to 26th streets most his life. He says he and other people his age spend most of the day bantering, hanging out. The trouble is, he says, many of the children on the block want to do the same thing - and they quit school to do it.
Vaughn says he finished high school and even completed a year at Iowa Lakes Community College with a basketball scholarship - until he was shot during a visit back home. He lifts his shorts and shirt sleeve to show two scars from bullets.
Vaughn says he isn't that bitter; the guy who shot him eventually got killed by someone else.
"It's rough out here," says J.R., a 20-year-old who lives in the neighborhood. "I say 'hi,' I pay my respects, but people might not like how you look."
J.R. didn't want to give his last name, afraid that saying even a little bit to a newspaper might offend.
"Any day you can get yourself in trouble," J.R. continued. "You don't know what's gonna come." Everything around Little Beirut feels reckless, rootless.
Two women drink Milwaukee's Best beer on a porch around noon Tuesday. One is loud and confrontational and spews a stream of expletives. The other says she's a homemaker. The first woman says two nephews and a grandson were murdered in the past year.
And there is the shopkeeper who has called police four times a day to report shoplifters and belligerent loiterers. Sometimes they were members of the mob of boys, more often, adults. Sometimes the police came. Sometimes they didn't.
Almost everyone goes by nicknames, and almost everyone claims (to strangers at least) to be new to the neighborhood. None has any idea who the boys accused of the beating were, even though they seem to know everyone else.
Wide-eyed schoolchildren wearing backpacks stream down the sidewalks in midafternoon.
"I told them not to do it," one girl says loudly to another. A woman nearby overhears and, assuming they are talking about the beating, chews them out.
"They didn't see nothing," she sternly admonishes a reporter after yelling at the girls.
"It's a survival zone," explains Brown, the 19-year-old with the knife scar.
Others with Brown are known solely by nicknames such as "YP" - Young Pimp.
The men defend the beating suspects, whom they call "babies." They live by the same code. They have the same mentality.
"It's like Compton," Calif., Brown says, referring to a notoriously rough community. "You got to protect yourself. If you knock my teeth out, I'd knock your (expletive) teeth out."
He balls his fist.
In trying to explain the danger of the neighborhood, a 27-year-old man with two gold teeth standing nearby identifies the murderer of William Robertson, the police officer, by name and says the officer's killer was his best friend. He won't give his name because the police might come after him, he says, looking over his shoulder. He doesn't explain why.
He says he had two brothers. One murdered someone just down the block; the other was murdered.
Two squad cars drive down the street a half-block away.
Cory Brown and "Young Pimp" see the squads and take off running as fast as they can go.
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