Killer Kids

Now, he said, Zoe Pound is back in Little Haiti. Like other gangs, they run their drug-peddling business as efficiently as possible, using teenagers like Rod and J as street-level dealers, because they are more likely to receive light sentences if caught. "They target the young guys," Nairn said.

Much of the recent bloodshed on Miami's streets is likely a matter of tit for tat between gangs and other factions, he said. "We're very good at deploring the fact that kids get caught in the crossfire," Page said, "but we haven't gotten very good at going out to the kinfolk of the departed and saying, öDon't hit back'."

"It will get worse before it gets better," he added.

The recent killings go beyond gangs, drugs, family, race, or ethnicity, said Father Jean Ricot Gay, one of the few pastors at a North Miami antiviolence forum this past February. Inner city schools are "breeding grounds for all kinds of social ills," where kids graduate as "nonfunctional people," Gay inveighed. Without an education, there are no decent jobs to be had, he said. "If you are poor, you will get poorer, and that is sickening." Feeling powerless and "subhuman" can be enough to make some pick up a gun. "They can't express their frustration to those making decisions," he said. "That is a way to make themselves heard. It's a desperate way."

After a Liberty City march to deplore the murder wave this past February, Renita Holmes, Rod's godmother, wondered where it would all lead. "Nobody's speaking their language," she said of kids like Rod, J, and their friends. That's where the pushers push their way in, she said, giving a teenager like Rod a sense of identity and self-worth, however misdirected.

"Here go a gun," Holmes said, imitating a dealer recruiting a young charge. "Here's the dope. You're my man. I'm your daddy."

At my dad's place, a few times lately he asked me, "Do you do drugs?" And I'm like, "No. Why you asking me that?" He says, "I found this in your jeans." And he shows me one of my lighters. I say, "That's just a lighter. I mess around with it. I don't do drugs."

I got taken in last month, January 9. I wish it didn't go down like that. Got caught slingin' rock, some weed too. I was up on Miami Avenue near 76th Street, not too far from J's place. These two undercovers come up behind me as I'm waiting for the next deal. They say they saw me put a bag under the old house nearby. First time that ever happened to me. I don't want a problem, so I tell them what they want to know. I pull out the one blue bag from under the house. It's got 22 dime bags inside. Then they pat me down, pull the other bag out of my front pocket. That's got, like, 33 rocks. Crack cocaine, the cops write on their pad.

I don't know, maybe it was a mistake to tell them everything I did. Maybe I should have been smarter about it.

Anyway, I've been on probation since then, about a month. I'm not going to think about it today. It's Friday. My dad gave me $22 to go to the barber shop on Seventh Avenue up by 79th Street, the one by the liquor store, and to get some food later. But I'm headed to J's first.

On the way to J's house that day in early February, Rod probably walked past the Harvest House Outreach Center. It's just up the block from J's. On the side of the building, a run-down, little white house, there's a hand-painted sign. Two manacled hands with the word "Sin" written on them reach up to a cross that has "Jesus" written on it. A red lightning bolt from above breaks the chains. The outreach center's windows are broken, there's all kinds of trash strewn around, and little sign of life. Next door is the Outreach Mission Church of God in Christ. A sign on its fence proclaims, "He delivers from Homosexualty [sic], Prostitution, Lesbianism."

On both sides of J's house are boarded-up houses. Chickens poke along the side of the road and plastic bags hang like leaves in the trees. J's house looks empty too. Metal awnings cover its windows. There are a couple of old tires on the lawn.

What happened after Rod made his way into Randle's house is still under investigation. Randle, Quintin Barnett, and Aspen Thermilus, all age sixteen, and Keon Williams (no relation to Rod), age fourteen, told police differing stories. What does seem clear based on the investigation is that Barnett shot Rod point blank, although Barnett has claimed it was an accident. Leaving blood splotches along the way, the boys then dragged Rod's body to the back yard, where they covered it with a wood plank, according to police. They burned T-shirts they had used to try to clean up the blood and then, at nightfall, moved the body. Wheeling it in a residential trash bin, the boys made their way four blocks south to a Little Haiti furniture factory among several auto body shops. They heaved Rod's body, wrapped in plastic bags, into an industrial dumpster.