Juvenile Justice Information Exchange (https://jjie.org/author/darylkhan/)
The Jefferson Parish District Attorney’s Office in Louisiana plans to continue its criminal case against the 14-year-old shot in the back as he lay prone on his stomach. District Attorney Paul Connick Jr., filed charges against Tre’mall McGee for resisting arrest.
It is a question that has been posed to every level of law enforcement in Louisiana. From the city of Westwego, where the 14-year-old boy was shot in the back, to the Jefferson Parish Sheriff’s Office whose deputies initiated the chase that led to his shooting, to the Louisiana State Police who are responsible for investigating police shootings.
The last will and testament came in an email, one most likely monitored by the state. It came from a prisoner, incarcerated for decades at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, better known as Angola. He composed and sent it shortly after the Louisiana Sheriffs’ Association and the Louisiana Department of Public Safety and Corrections (DOC) opened a shuttered camp previously notorious for being a site of solitary confinement and violence.
They won’t give his name. They won’t give his age, either. Or any other identifying information other than that he is a male and was in custody at the East Baton Rouge Parish Prison in Louisiana. Sent to a hospital for a drug overdose, he was diagnosed with COVID-19.
At first glance, Saturday’s Remembrance Day for Nicholas Heyward Jr. seemed like the kind of late summer party that is so ubiquitous in Brooklyn’s housing projects, one last bash before the kids need supplies and clothes for the beginning of the new school year.
The children who gathered around the pictures of the dead were curious.
Right next to them a man was twisting balloons into funny shapes beneath the basketball hoop, and on their other side a woman set up a chair to do face paintings of rainbows and animals.
By the time she was posing for pictures on the stage of a Hyatt Regency Washington ballroom just blocks from the Capitol with two teenagers with oversized black hoodies that had the words “We Are Not Gang Members” emblazoned on them, the Trump appointee to the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention had done a lot of explaining.
Ninety-nine percent. The number sent an audible gasp throughout the City Council chamber. Chief of Detectives Dermot F. Shea had just read off the percentage of people of color on the NYPD’s controversial — and until now — largely secretive gang database.
The kids don’t have a name for the building at the corner of Gracie and Hurst streets. When they want to make the plans to hang out they just say, “let’s meet at that white house on the corner.”
The soon-to-be marchers, many of them teenagers, stood in the dark, shivering in the bitter cold, bracing against brutal winds howling off New York Harbor.