Killer Kids

On a recent weekday afternoon in Rod's old neighborhood, several people shrugged when asked if they had known the boy. Some said they were new to the area, or that they had only heard of Rod in the news. They didn't know what he looked like, where he had lived, what kind of kid he was. One teenage girl who declined to give her name said she had known Rod, but could say only, "He was a good kid." When a heavily tattooed teenage boy pulled up in a SUV with tinted windows, he ignored questions about Rod, turning up the volume on his stereo instead.

The two were tight. "J was always looking out for Rod because he was older," Williams said. She couldn't have imagined what Randle would someday be accused of doing to Rod.

"He thought he had a friend," Rod's father would later say of his son and Randle. "God is your only friend."

Auntie Jean wasn't home much, and I started hanging out with Johnny Randle. His place is at 77th Street and NW Fourth Avenue, around the corner. Me and J had been knowing each other since we went to the same school — Little River Elementary. We were always together. Even after I moved out of Auntie Jean's, I'd come back on weekends. Me and Monica and Latoya had to move out when Auntie Jean lost her job two years ago. She was on drugs, got taken in, a felony.

I lived with my stepbrother, Anthony, up in Pembroke Pines for a while. That's when Latoya got shot in the head around Auntie Jean's place. Wrong place at the wrong time, they said, but she was okay because the bullet went straight through, didn't hit anything real important, I guess.

Last summer I went back to live with my dad, but I was kind of splitting the time between his place and Latoya's place — or actually her boyfriend's place — a few blocks away. I guess I don't really have what you'd call a home.

Easy access to guns, especially in the wake of the 2004 expiration of a federal assault weapons ban, is widely blamed for the double-digit percentage increase in violent crime in cities across the country over the last two years. AK-47 machine guns, known as "choppers" or "sticks," have been showing up with more frequency in Miami-area killings.

Access to guns may not be the reason for the killings, but it makes tense situations combustible. "It's like putting more salt in the soup," said Delrish Moss, Miami City Police spokesman and former homicide detective. The factors that drive a teenager to shoot someone — family breakdowns, gang rivalries (especially in the Haitian community), lack of community support systems and role models, a prevailing culture of violence, lack of opportunity, housing instability — are not necessarily unique to poor neighborhoods, Moss said. The main difference is that guns are not as easy to find, not such ready options in more affluent neighborhoods — yet.

While West Coast gangs such as the Bloods and Crips have been making inroads in Miami, many of the recent gang-related killings in areas such as Miami Gardens and Little River have been traced to Haitian gangs. With names like Zoe Pound, One Way, Uptown, Sesame Street, E-Unit, and Zombie Boys, they are ubiquitous in some neighborhoods. Their signs are subtle but clear — tattoos and gang colors on bandanas, headbands, and wristbands.

Since emerging in the mid-Nineties, Haitian gangs in Miami have steadily grown in influence. But suggestions that the recent killings here are somehow linked to rising violence in Haiti are ill-founded, according to John Bryan Page, a University of Miami anthropologist and expert on Haitian gangs in Miami. In fact, Page argues, violence here feeds violence in Haiti by way of deported youth who bring American-style "quick, retributional violence" and violent popular culture back to their home country. "We've been exporting it," Page said.

The phenomenon is similar to one that swept Puerto Rico in the Sixties and Seventies, according to Page. As expatriates returned from drug-infested New York neighborhoods (especially the South Bronx), Puerto Rico's capital, San Juan, went from being a relatively safe city to a hotbed of heroin-fueled violence. In both the case of Puerto Rico then and Haiti now, "practically all of (the violence) is learned and enacted here," Page said.