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Gangs, guns and rap videos helped make 2016 Norfolk's deadliest year in a decade

Virginian-Pilot - 2/1/2017

Feb. 01--NORFOLK

Don Brown Jr.'s funeral was as much about the young black men seething in the pews as it was the one lying in the casket.

Five days after Brown was shot to death in June, his cousin, coach, pastor and grandma eulogized him at Gethsemane Community Fellowship Baptist Church. They talked about how the 17-year-old was a good guy: a fine athlete, a compassionate teammate, a kid with a sweet tooth who would steal your snacks, a clown who could annoy you one minute and crack you up the next.

They also tiptoed around the fact that he was a Huntersville gang member, that a gang war had killed him, and that his fellow gang members filled the pews, wallowing in grief and simmering with rage.

There was tension in the Brambleton Avenue church that Sunday. Speakers wanted to honor Brown but feared his friends were gunning for vengeance.

They begged them to put down the guns, to stop killing one another because of neighborhood boundaries and rap lyrics.

"I don't know most of y'all, but I hate seein' some of y'all die," said Brown's cousin, 22-year-old Paris Wilson. "There's more to life than being out in these streets.

"If y'all really love each other, just encourage each other to do better."

Applause and shouts filled the church.

And the guys Wilson was pleading with took his words to heart. Just a day later and a few feet away, they met with rival gang members from south of the Elizabeth River. Together, they brokered a truce and ended a monthslong beef that had killed their friends and struck down innocents.

The feud helped make 2016 Norfolk's deadliest year in a decade. It revealed the existence of a gang culture that the Police Department hasn't talked about publicly. And it terrorized the communities that served as its battlefields.

The truce provided hope. But now, seven months after the combatants promised to stop shooting, the ceasefire is falling apart.

Brown's death was part of a violent peak in the fighting between Huntersville and the Southside neighborhoods of Berkley, Diggs Town, Campostella and Oakleaf Forest, fueled by rap videos and Facebook taunts.

It was but a slice of Norfolk's escalating gun violence over the past two years.

Homicides and shootings have spiked. There were 48 killings in Norfolk in 2016, after an average of 35 per year in the previous five. Guns accounted for 45 of the deaths, including five police shootings, and 240 people survived being shot, compared with 170 the year before.

Homicide rates in South Hampton Roads

Rates per 100,000

The anger that likely led to Brown's killing started -- or at least escalated -- with a song.

On April 14, his close friend Anthony Sinclair, aka VilleBoy Ant, posted a music video on YouTube called "I'm Da Man," threatening to shoot up the Southside and "leave your mama scarred."

A week later, Deontae White, a rapper from the other side of the water who goes by BerkleyBoy Tay, released a remix of Desiigner's 2015 hit "Panda." It's been played 127,000 times on SoundCloud, with 157,000 views on YouTube.

White opens by calling Sinclair and all the other guys north of the Elizabeth cowards.

Then a challenge: "My side the hardest in Norfolk. You wanna rumble? You could take it there. Gunplay? You could take it there."

Three days later, Sinclair dropped his own "Panda" remix.

"BerkleyBoy Tay, he's the softest ... flexin' like he real or somethin'," Then he tells White and his friends they're "all talk to the camera, but when I hop out with the hammer, you run ... like a phantom."

Brown is featured prominently in Sinclair's video -- smiling, wearing a black ski mask and flashing a handgun.

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BerkleyBoy Tay

* From YouTube

Deontae White, aka BerkleyBoy Tay, released a "Panda" remix threatening his rivals north of the Elizabeth River in Norfolk.

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addasset json 5d2fff1e-80c7-52fb-ad4a-8752b8993293 editorial true images Save

VilleBoy Ant

* From YouTube

Anthony Sinclair, aka VilleBoy Ant, released his own "Panda" remix in retaliation against the Southside.

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addasset json b3fd7f23-482e-5e5a-a8cf-2ee2ff89d42e editorial true images Save

Don Brown

* From YouTube

Don Brown pretends to shoot at the camera during his friend Anthony Sinclair's video.

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Southside and Huntersville rappers square off

BerkleyBoy Tay

* From YouTube

Deontae White, aka BerkleyBoy Tay, released a "Panda" remix threatening his rivals north of the Elizabeth River in Norfolk.

VilleBoy Ant

* From YouTube

Anthony Sinclair, aka VilleBoy Ant, released his own "Panda" remix in retaliation against the Southside.

Don Brown

* From YouTube

Don Brown pretends to shoot at the camera during his friend Anthony Sinclair's video.

His mom, Bon-Aravia Green, said she doesn't want to sugarcoat what happened to her son, or why it happened. Yes, he was a gang member, and yes, he carried a gun.

"This is gang-related," Green said.

Former Norfolk police Chief Michael Goldsmith and other higher-ups have said gang violence isn't happening in Norfolk, but they're wrong, a longtime officer told The Pilot during an interview last year. He and two other officers spoke on the condition of anonymity because the department forbids the rank-and-file from talking to the media.

In April, seven months before he was replaced by his chief deputy, Goldsmith told City Council members that none of the homicides they'd seen in 2016 was gang-related.

The veteran officer said the NPD's head of investigative services has pounded out the same drumbeat: Gangs aren't a problem in Norfolk.

"Those of us on the street know different," the officer said in June. "There's no doubt that what's happening now is absolutely, 100 percent gang-related."

Now a deputy city manager, Goldsmith declined to comment for this article. But his replacement, Larry Boone, said gangs are harder to define than they were 25 years ago, which may account for the disconnect. They're not as structured and hierarchical, so there's no godfather-type leader ordering around his captains and foot soldiers. They're more amorphous, more loosely attached, but still tied to neighborhoods.

Gang crime is lower than it once was and normal for a city the size of Norfolk, Boone said at an interview in late January.

"Our gangs -- on a scale of 1 to 10 -- are a 2," he said.

But violent crime started going up around 2011, when the gang unit was folded back into the detective division, two officers told The Pilot.

Before that, Boone was doing a good job heading the unit, they said. He had his investigators talking with informants, gathering good intelligence, figuring out when homegrown gangs were cropping up and when out-of-towners were moving in.

Federal grant money for the gang unit ran dry, Boone said, forcing it to return to the detective division and shed half its officers.

Boone moved to the K9 Unit.

"We knew the day would come when we'd have an uptick in violence," the veteran officer said.

Homicides and shootings in Norfolk

2015

2015-homicide homicides

2015-non-fatal shootings

2016

2016-homicide homicides

2016-non-fatal shootings

*Eight incidents (two in 2016 and six in 2016) occurred in unknown locations

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0homicides

0non-fatal shootings

Brown and his mom moved around a lot, so he had roots in Huntersville and the Southside. He ran with Huntersville guys because he'd known them since he was little and lived in Coleman Place, Green said. But she moved him to Diggs Town twice and then Oakleaf, and her son made friends in middle and high school at Lake Taylor.

Then it was back across the river to Booker T. Washington and finally to Renaissance Academy, an alternative school in Virginia Beach where he planned to get his GED this school year.

When the neighborhoods started fighting, his Southside friends accused him of being a traitor. But he wasn't, Green said. He just felt caught in the middle.

"It's not like he had hatred for everybody out there because he had friends out there," said Djimon Rollins, who played football with Brown when he started at quarterback for Lake Taylor's JV squad. "It was tough for him."

Green said she wished there had been more options for her son growing up.

Brown was a junior in high school when he was shot, but he probably had no more than a middle school education, she said. Being so far behind, he couldn't understand his coursework. Bad grades took him off the football field and kept him out of the boxing gym, two of his passions.

Two months before Brown died, 30-year-old Travis Stone was shot in the head and killed in the 800 block of East Princess Anne Road. Brown spotted the guy rumored to have done it and wanted revenge, his grandmother Gwen Bailey said.

She said Brown sent her this text message about it: "Pray for me, because I really wanted to kill that boy."

A few weeks later, Brown was rumored to have shot someone else, Bailey said. The man survived, and Brown denied any involvement, but it inspired her to have a conversation with her grandson.

She told him she was scared because his enemies feared him. It was one of the last things she ever said to him: "When people are scared of you, they will hurt you."

Then came the night of June 20.

Brown was hanging out with friends from Huntersville just before midnight.

He had been talking about getting out of the gang life, his mother said, but a buddy had come back to Hampton Roads to visit, and they were heading to a club at the Oceanfront.

The group stopped at the Wal-Mart on North Military Highway, two friends from the car told police, according to court documents. As they walked inside, one of Brown's friends saw two Southside guys standing near the Subway, a detective wrote. He knew them by their nicknames, which he gave to police when it was all over. They were eyeing him and his friends suspiciously.

Bailey said the situation was just what she feared. "It was already something that was riled up ... that's been steaming for a long time, so seeing each other face-to-face, it just went from there."

Brown and his friends spent about five minutes in the store, then hopped into their Chevy Impala and headed south toward the interstate. They didn't notice anyone following them, one told police.

They got caught at a red light at Poplar Hall Drive. It was almost exactly midnight. The street was empty and dark. As they were waiting, they didn't see a car pull up next to them.

Until gunshots.

The driver of the Impala gunned it, flew over a curb and ended up in the Boston Market parking lot.

Brown was yelling that he'd been hit. One of his friends was bleeding, and he and another guy jumped out of the Impala and ran as they watched the shooters' car go south, make a U-turn and drive back toward them.

They opened fire again and took off.

Paramedics took Brown and the other victim to Sentara Norfolk General Hospital. His friend lived; Brown didn't.

Police recovered some 30 shell casings from the scene, records show.

After getting out of the hospital, Brown's friend told police he thought the shooters were the same men he'd seen at Wal-Mart.

Then he identified two suspects in a photo lineup, and police charged two men, one with malicious wounding and the other with felony assault. Prosecutors dropped those charges, though, in September.

No one else has been charged, and Norfolk police refused to talk about their investigation. The Pilot wrote one story in June -- 144 words -- about Brown's death.

It mattered a lot more to his family.

Green didn't let anyone move her son's shoes from her front door in the first few days afterward; to take them away would make it all real, confirm that he wouldn't just come bursting back through. She's a nurse, but after Brown died, she didn't go back to work for two months.

Her car got repossessed, and she was overdue on rent because she didn't care about paying bills. She's since paid some, but it all still seems unimportant.

"You don't care about anything," Green said.

And reminders of the feud that took away her son often bubble up.

Green said she went to a concert at the Attucks Theatre a few weeks after he died, just to get out of the house and think about something else, even for a little bit. But the mothers of the men accused of killing him were there, women she had gone to school with. They weren't sad or sorry, she said, but bragging.

"It's very close quarters," Green said. "We all travel in the same circles."

Brown's 18th birthday would've been Aug. 24. Green and Bailey wanted to throw a party so his relatives and friends could get together and remember him. But they struggled to find a place. If they held it in Huntersville, no one from the Southside would come. Same with the other way around.

"There's no neutral ground," Bailey said.

Brown's shooting was part of a bloody week in the feud. Between that night and his funeral, bullets meant for someone else killed Teresa "Reese" Hunter in Huntersville. Then retaliation: Shooters opened fire randomly in Berkley, hitting four people on their way to a wedding on Craig Street.

The young men firing the guns grow up in a world apart from the one many people know, community activist Joe Johnson said.

"They've seen dead bodies all the time," he said. They've seen people get shot, and they've been shot themselves.

"A lot of boys wrapped up in something they do not want to be in," Bailey said. "And they don't know how to get out of it."

Brown's friend Sinclair, VilleBoy Ant, is one of them. Hours after Brown's death, he was fuming on Facebook, at times threatening revenge and at others just reminiscing.

White, or BerkeleyBoy Tay, is another. Following the Craig Street shooting, the day before Brown's funeral, he also took to Facebook and recorded live video. He paces on a balcony, smoking and cycling through rage, bravado, aggression and desperation.

He pleads for someone to help make the gun violence stop: "If you feel we should squash it, then why don't you just step in and help us squash it? Cause we all youngins. At the end of the day, all we know is shoot, all we know is kill, all we know is dis, all we know is beef."

Then the next day, a remarkable thing happened -- someone did step in.

Johnson and fellow activist Michael Muhammad reached out to White, Sinclair and other gang members to broker a meeting. They'd been trying for months to get the young men in a room, and the funeral provided an opening.

The two sides agreed to meet and work out a ceasefire.

Roughly 30 men from Huntersville and the Southside -- including Sinclair and White -- got together at the same church where Brown had been eulogized the day before. One feared the sit-down was a trap and agreed to come only after an organizer promised to sacrifice his own life to protect him if it came to violence.

"We had to let them know at Don Don's funeral: If ya'll don't stop this, none of you are gonna be here," Johnson said. "That'll be a bloody cycle -- everybody will be dead if you got to get even first."

They talked for hours, Muhammad said. They argued, cursed, cried and opened up.

At the end, every man in the church that night hugged one another. They agreed to a truce and relief from the violence they were at the center of but couldn't control, said Alton Drew, a church elder who was at the meeting.

"The love shown in that room amongst nearly 30 black men has to be what heaven looks like," Muhammad said in a Facebook post the next morning.

Norfolk homicide victims by race

The truce was a respite from the beef that added to 2016's spike in gun violence, but it didn't change the fundamental dynamics of murder in Norfolk. Black men were still shooting and killing other black men, usually in the poorest parts of the city and many times because of perceived disrespect.

There were 211 homicides in the city over the past six years. Nearly three-quarters of the victims -- 155 people -- were black men, who make up just a fifth of the population.

It's something Brown's cousin Wilson noted as he stood above his body at the funeral. "We givin' society what they want," he said. "They don't have to kill us or put us away; we killin' each other."

His words helped inspire the truce, but the sentiment didn't hold. Today, the ceasefire is crumbling.

Green, Brown's mother, pointed again to YouTube.

In November, Sinclair and two other rappers released "Like Don," a five-minute video about Brown that opens with them walking toward his gravesite. It's surrounded by his pictures, a teddy bear and graffiti: "Don Gotti."

They have what a disclaimer calls prop guns. Lots of them. They pretend to shoot at the camera over and over.

Sinclair says he and his crew will "slide in your block, and we shootin' and ruthless." They're going to "come out poppin', out cappin'... right there where your head sleep."

The video ends with the camera rolling through the cemetery past dozens of graves.

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Don Brown

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From the video for "Like Don"

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Don Brown

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From Don Brown's gravesite, shown in a rap video released in November

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Don Brown

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From Don Brown's gravesite, shown in a rap video released in November

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addasset json 116535c0-a2b2-5208-a99b-1ff28736f683 editorial true images Save

VilleBoy Ant

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Anthony Sinclair, aka VilleBoy Ant, points to the camera during "Like Don," part tribute to Don Brown and part threat to his enemies.

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addasset json 24ef4291-d45f-563a-a83e-d0bf6e202ef5 editorial true images Save

From the video for "Like Don"

Don Brown

* From YouTube

From the video for "Like Don"

Don Brown

* From YouTube

From Don Brown's gravesite, shown in a rap video released in November

Don Brown

* From YouTube

From Don Brown's gravesite, shown in a rap video released in November

VilleBoy Ant

* From YouTube

Anthony Sinclair, aka VilleBoy Ant, points to the camera during "Like Don," part tribute to Don Brown and part threat to his enemies.

More than 100 people have commented on the YouTube page, which has turned into a forum for the two sides to squabble and threaten each other.

Sinclair performed the song at Club Embassy in Virginia Beach earlier this month, Green said. Leading up to the show, he encouraged fellow gang members and friends to pack the place.

Southside gang members talked about shooting it up but didn't follow through, Green said.

Still, she added, one of them threatened to shoot Brown's grandmother. It's getting so bad that Green is applying for a permit to carry a concealed handgun and says she will train on how to shoot it.

"This ain't going away," she said.

Coming Thursday: Read the story of Resa Bond, a grandmother whose shooting death tears at the bonds of her family and neighborhood.

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(c)2017 The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, Va.)

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