Growing Up to Be Stickup Kids

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NEW YORK --By the early 1990s, the crack era that devoured New York City in the 1980s was on the decline and crime rates were similarly falling. But Randol Contreras saw something different on the streets in the South Bronx neighborhood where he grew up. His drug dealer friends, no longer making the same money selling crack, were turning to robbing drug dealers for an increasingly dwindling share of the market. One vice traded for another, more violent one. His book "Stickup Kids: Race, Drugs, Violence and the American Dream," published by the University of California Press last month, chronicles the downfall of the drug trade and the young Dominican men from his childhood neighborhood that tried to make an often dangerous living in it.

Sandy Hook

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There’s a stretch of road in Newtown, Connecticut, 524 paces long. It leads from the official town Christmas tree at the corner of Riverside Drive and Washington Avenue up a hill and down again to a soft bend in the road at Dickinson Court where a sign hangs from a wooden post decorated with curling back wrought-ironwork that reads:
Sandy Hook School
1956
Visitors Welcome
There, next to a staging area for emergency workers and police investigators, sits a sprawling memorial to the 20 children shot and killed by a young man who was barely an adult himself. Law enforcement officials are still piecing together what happened that morning, but for now they say that Adam Lanza, 20, after killing his mother and armed with an assault rifle and some handguns shot and his way into the Sandy Hook School. He killed six staff, 20 children, and then himself. What used to be a nondescript road that connected the struggling heart of this small central Connecticut town to a municipal building has been transformed into an almost sacred path divided by a long line of orange emergency cones.

Exhibit Examines the Lives of Former Foster Children

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Richard Wilkerson needs two hands to count the number of families he had as a boy. On a recent, unusually temperate summer morning, Wilkerson, 28, sat at a picnic table in the courtyard of the Long Island Children’s Museum and counted them off. All around him children scampered and squealed, shepherded around by attentive parents and summer camp counselors. There were his grandparents and the long trips from Hollis, Queens to upstate New York when he would stare out the bus window, a city kid dazzled by all that space, on his way to visit his mother in prison. Years later, there was a stint with his mother after she was released that involved a trip to a crack house that ended abruptly when he tripped on an uneven plank in the floor and was sent home bleeding.