The Trenton Times published the following article on April 7, 2013. To read the full article, click here.

Trenton police and officials look back at gang violence during the ‘longest year’

By Jenna Pizzi/The Times of Trenton 
on April 07, 2013 at 7:30 AM, updated April 07, 2013 at 7:32 AM

TRENTON – Enjoying the last few hours of a summer night, Sharee Voorhees lingered on the porch outside her apartment on the 600 block of Monmouth Street in Trenton, talking to a few neighbors.

But the quiet night of Aug. 30, 2005 was suddenly shattered by the sobering, familiar sound of gunshots. Just before 10 p.m., shooting broke out down the street.

The exchange of shots took place more than a block away, but one stray bullet from the spray of gunfire near Monmouth and Locust streets streaked across nearly two city blocks and through the busy Greenwood Avenue intersection to Voorhees’ porch, hitting the 22-year-old mother of three in the chest. She was taken to the hospital, where she died the next day.

“That was a one-in-a-million shot that hit her,” recalled Frank Clayton, who was a police detective at the time. “From her house you can’t even see where the shots were fired.”

Police soon learned that the young woman was an innocent victim caught in the midst of an ongoing gang war. The fluke killing was one of 31 homicides in Trenton that year, most of them gang-related, according to the police.

Investigators identified suspects quickly, but the wheels of justice turned slowly. Only in the last few weeks, more than seven years after Voorhees’ death, did the last gang members accused in a series of crimes from 2005 finally plead guilty. Three of them were sentenced to jail terms on Friday.

Two weeks ago, Bernard “Petey Black” Green, the “five-star general” of the Gangster Killer Bloods street gang, pleaded guilty to ordering the shooting that resulted in Voorhees’ death. Keith “Droop” Parker and Juan “Cherokee” Robinson also pleaded guilty to being involved.

It was just going to incident after incident. It is just going to crime scene after crime scene to pick up the pieces.

Clayton and others who worked in law enforcement in the summer of 2005, when shootings were a near daily occurrence in Trenton, said they have long known that it was Green literally calling the shots that night.

A law enforcement team comprised of the Attorney General’s Office, Trenton police, the Mercer County Prosecutor’s Office and New Jersey State Police, had tapped the phone of a number of street gang members, including Green, and listened to and recorded hundreds of calls made during that summer.

Clayton was listening to the tapped phone lines the night Voorhees was shot, when they intercepted a call to Green from other gang members notifying him that they had shot up a car believed to be driven by rival gangsters.

“You got these guys calling that ‘We just shot up a Durango,’” Clayton said. “And then the calls are coming in from the police.”

The investigation eventually led to the indictment of Green and 15 other gang members in 2010, linking them to the killings of Voorhees and rival gangsters Kareem Washington and Otis Jones.

The longest year

For city residents and officials, 2005 just seemed to drag on, with violence ping-ponging from neighborhood to neighborhood as gangs sought retaliation against each other.

Jim Dellaria, who was a sergeant serving in Trenton’s Criminal Investigations Bureau, recalled a busy time for police.

“It was just going to incident after incident,” said Dellaria, who has since retired. “It is just going to crime scene after crime scene to pick up the pieces.”

The growing tally of shootings ended up making it the deadliest year on record in the city.

“It was the longest year,” recalled Joseph Santiago, the police director at the time.

Santiago, a controversial figure who favored intelligence-based policing, said during an interview last week that he encouraged his officers and detectives to track the gangs, the places they each operated and their allegiances and rivalries — though that did not stop the shootings.

“Even with all that information, the frustrating thing was that we couldn’t prevent them,” he said. “They knew who they wanted to shoot and where they were.”

The vast majority of city residents who were not involved in gangs were left scared by the surge in violence around them.

“It was horrible,” Councilwoman Kathy McBride said. “The community was shaken, you know. A lot of the seniors were afraid to sit out on their porches.”

McBride knows the consequences of gang violence well. Her son was killed in a gang-related shooting in 2003, which led McBride to start an organization called Mothers Against Violence. In September 2005, the violence struck close to home again when her daughter Kiya McBride was robbed and beaten by three young gang members on Academy Street as she sat in a car in traffic.

“They were doing an initiation and she was at the light and they went to yank the chain around her neck,” the councilwoman said. “They pulled her out of the car and they robbed her and they beat her. It was a really traumatic experience.”

“That was the breaking point. They had begun to fully come out and start assaulting people in the community,” she said.

Gang Affiliations

Gang affiliations were apparent to many people in the community, as the members of each gang wore their group’s colors or displayed gang signs in public, civic activist Darren “Freedom” Green said.

“The murders were at such a rapid rate.” Green said. “There is gunfire and shooting almost every day and that craziness becomes the norm.”

Green said the gang presence then, and now, is a symptom of larger issues.

“It is an extension of dysfunctional family structures,” Green said. “They don’t value themselves because of their home lives. Our children are learning life and the values of life in the streets.”

Green was working in the county’s juvenile detention center in 2005. He said the guards had to start interviewing young detainees coming into the facility to see if they were affiliated with a particular gang, so they could head off fights among teens with rival affiliations. Douglas Palmer, Trenton’s mayor from 1990 to 2010, said the violence led him to reach out to county and state agencies for help — improving law enforcement and social and community service programs aimed at stopping the spread of gangs.

“2005 was the tipping point,” Palmer said. “We weren’t used to having people just murdered on the street like this.”

‘A presence, not a problem’

It had taken a while for public officials to understand and acknowledge the extent to which gangs had become pervasive in Trenton.

In the early 2000s, Palmer and officials had been told that there was a “gang presence” in the city, as there was in Newark, Camden and other cities. But police and many residents were aware of the depth of the problem long before the bloodshed made it impossible to ignore.

“The main thing was that the mayor and the administration were in denial of what was going on,” Darren Green said.

Dellaria said that, being out on the street, officers and detectives could see the gang problem beginning to develop. But city officials weren’t interested. They were too focused on trying to make grand new development projects, such as the Waterfront Park baseball stadium and Trenton Marriott, successful and profitable, he said.

“The powers that be didn’t want to hear it,” Dellaria said.

“We were not allowed to talk about it,” Clayton said. “If I uttered the word ‘gang’ I was in trouble.”

Santiago recalled that when he first came to Trenton and asked about gangs, Palmer gave him a report saying, “Trenton had a gang presence, but not a gang problem.”

“I remember telling him, if you have a presence, you have a problem,” Santiago said.

Former police director Santiago tasked Clayton with heading up the police department’s gang intelligence unit to improve investigators’ knowledge about gangs and build a database of their activities.

“In the first years I was there it didn’t manifest itself in violence,” Santiago said. “During the course of the year it started developing and in the next year or two we started to identify more and more violence related to gang behaviors.”

The problem of prosecution

In the first five months of 2005, there had already been 12 homicides in the city, several of them gang-related. Law enforcement officials knew that once the temperatures heated up and the days lengthened, the number of shootings would increase as well.

On Easter Sunday, Mercer County Prosecutor Joseph Bocchini got a call from Palmer.

“We were just getting ready to sit down to eat Easter dinner with the whole family,” Bocchini said. “He said ‘Joe, I need your help.’”

The next day, Bocchini, Palmer, Santiago and County Sheriff Kevin Larkin sat down together and formed the county’s Gang Intervention Task Force.

“Shortly thereafter we were cracking down on gangs really hard,” Bocchini said.

The task force helped arrange phone taps on Bernard Green and the Gangster Killer Bloods, which local and state law enforcement officials monitored through the summer.

Intercepting calls, however, turned out to be easier than arresting and charging gang members, Bocchini said. Without witnesses to testify about crimes, prosecutors have a tough time proving cases to juries.

“There are people who are witnesses who are afraid to come forward or they are afraid to cooperate,” Bocchini said.

Deputy Attorney General Daniel Bornstein, who was the head prosecutor in charge of the case against Bernard Green and the Gangster Killer Bloods, had a former member of the gang who would have testified against Green and the other gang members, but Green ended up pleading guilty and didn’t go to trial.

The former gang member was the one who allegedly was ordered by Green to shoot Otis Jones, 26, who was shot in the head at the corner of Brunswick Avenue and Sanford Street on June 20, 2005.

But once the police started arresting gang members and prosecutors started getting convictions — either through the long process of trials or by getting defendants to agree to plea deals — the violence on the street began to abate somewhat, Bocchini said.

“It was sort of a Wild West for a while and we were able to curtail it,” Bocchini said.

After the record 31 murders in 2005, there were 20 homicides the next year and 25 in 2007. And in the following three years the murder rate continued to decline steadily, with 15 in 2010.

Deterrence for some

Santiago said arrests and convictions of gang members were a deterrence for some gangs, and didn’t faze others.

“One gang — The Latin Kings — they are more rigid and disciplined,” Santiago said. “If you take out the leadership you can hurt them.”

But the Bloods sets, which make up the majority of the gangs, are different, he said.

“They were like little grains of sand,” Santiago said. “When you took somebody off the scene, another grain of sand took their place.”

Law enforcement officials said that since the gang wars in 2005, the violence between different sets has quieted down, but they note that there are still gangs operating.

“Things run in peaks and valleys,” Bocchini said.

He said the county’s gang unit still works closely with the Trenton Police Department because gang problems are still a concern. Last year there were 26 homicides in Trenton.

When giving out public information about crime in Trenton, law enforcement officials now rarely divulge whether they believe incidents are “gang related.”

But prosecutors recently noted a “gang war” along Stuyvesant Avenue, which recently flared when Fred Scott allegedly sprayed 20 shots during a drive-by on Christmas night.

The prosecutor said Scott was a “high ranking” Bloods gang member who was attempting to shoot a rival gang member but unintentionally shot a woman in the shoulder.

So far this year Trenton has seen seven homicides, the most recent on Home Avenue Friday night.

McBride said she is concerned that the level of violence seen in 2005 has returned.

“I think we have that same type of element that has sprung up again,” she said.