Gangland
A deadly encounter at a shopping mall has police and public clamoring to stamp out gang violence.
On November 22, 2008, a young man named Daiquan Jones went to the Westfield Southcenter Mall with his friends. Jones, aka “Lil Soup,” was just 16 years old, but he already had a long rap sheet. In the two years following his 14th birthday he’d been arrested a dozen times for theft, burglary, trespass, assault, harassment, and robbery, or some combination thereof. He’d also been a suspect in multiple shootings, says one police consultant, but was never charged with any.
Several times Lil Soup and two or three others fell upon a solitary youth, took his stuff, and beat him up. This streak culminated last February 4, when a young man named Abdi Abdi told police that Jones and four others whom he had earlier refused to join in a robbery cornered him in the Columbia City Library and proceeded to rob, kick, and strip him. Outside, they beat Abdi with a tree limb and a urine-filled condom. Jones pressed a semiautomatic pistol first to Abdi’s ribs, later his head, and threatened to shoot him and his family if he snitched.
Arrested soon afterward, Jones pled guilty to robbery and served seven months at the state’s Green Hill juvenile corrections facility in Chehalis. “I think it changed him,” says a young man called, for purposes of this story, Tyler, who grew up with Daiquan in Southeast Seattle. “When he came out, he didn’t gangbang. He was going to the mall to shop for school.”
But if Daiquan was trying to turn his life around, he had a hard time shedding old habits and acquaintances. Eight days after he was released, he went to Southcenter with three of his comrades in the 74 Hoovers, an offshoot of the notorious Crips and the predominant black street gang in Southeast Seattle.
That same November day, Barry Saunders went to Southcenter with his girlfriend, his younger brother, and his brother’s friend. Saunders is 21 but, short and slight, looks younger. He had tangled with Daiquan Jones before: About two years ago, says Tyler, Daiquan beat up Barry for talking to his girlfriend. At Southcenter, Saunders was elsewhere with his girlfriend when his brother and his friend ran into Daiquan outside the Escape Outdoors store.
It’s not clear whether Jones’s group or the two smaller boys threw the first gang sign; each seems to blame the other for flashing a challenge. Barry Saunders’s brother called his cellphone for help. Saunders came running and found Jones and another 16-year-old atop his brother and his friend. Police, citing the evidence of Escape Outdoor’s security camera, say Saunders raised a gun, wounded the other youth, and shot Daiquan Jones dead.
Published: February 2009
