Haven't bothered to read up on the BGF in Baltimore, but I'm guessing they are a quasi-knock off of the politically inspired group/gang that was founded in California during the politically charged 1960s. I would be surprised if there was a tangible connection between the two, but I could be wrong.
As I recall, in high school Wes lived away from his community with a surrogate family to avoid exactly this type of incident, and he appears to have avoided trouble in high school while living away from Baltimore.
His case reminded me of how close I came unwittingly to getting into serious kaka on more than one occasion. Growing up as I did you didn't have to look for trouble or even be a trouble maker to have trouble find you even when you called yourself making reasonable choices. This is true pretty much everywhere, but the likelihood increases exponentially in economically depressed areas. Again, though, as another Cane said, it's not exclusive to those areas.
These incidents have a happy ending, and they might not have anything to do with Wes Brown's case, but as we have a lot of college kids and parents or youngsters who post here, I thought they might be instructive. I'll say upfront the moral of these stories is that you should know well the people you get into a car with or who you hang out with. Don't assume that because someone is with a friend of yours that that person is cool. Some times that sort of misplaced trust can lead to all sorts of trouble. Here are a couple of examples that I pull from my days in college.
Long ago while in college in the ATL, I was with some friends who I knew from school and some I knew from home. Some of the guys I knew from school had friends from home come visit them at school. I didn't think anything of it because looking at them, they were our peers in age, and in every sense looked pretty much like college kids like the rest of us. We were headed to catch up with some girls, so initially my thoughts weren't on how getting into a car with a bunch of guys - many of them I knew - might change my life. Well, we all hung out a couple of times over a long weekend at an apartment and at a local bar, beer, wings, and babes - the usual college social scene. Well one of the cats kept a leather brief case/satchel with him all the time. Initially, I didn't think much of it because book bags or brief cases are commonplace. But the bag became peculiar to me because over two or three day weekend they guy had his shoulder bag wherever we went. So I asked someone who knew him - I only knew him by name - to ask what was in the bag. You know what turned out to be in the bag?
An Uzi.
I had been hanging out with a guy with a machine gun in a briefcase. If the police had stopped us and found an Uzi, I'm pretty sure, initially at least, we would have all been charged. Moreover, who was after him that he felt the need to carry an Uzi? I'm guessing if whoever it was who was after him had caught up to him it would not have mattered to them who we were.
Here's another example from college. This is my Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde story. My best friend and I were with another classmate we had known for about a semester. We had played basketball together a few times, hung out with some girls together, gone out for wings and beer, and even traveled to Mardi Gras together. He was from Oakland and fun to be around because he told a lot of funny jokes. So on the way back home from a party, the three of us stop at IHOP; we were in the city of Atlanta at the time. We had been drinking, but we were no where near drunk. When we pull up to our parking space and before we even get out of the car the guy in the backseat starts saying really disrespectful stuff toward a fellow student who was walking with his girl toward the entrance of the diner. I knew the guy from school because we had worked out together on a couple of occasions. I didn't really know him, but he was cool, a kind of quiet guy who rarely said much to anyone. I'm in the passenger sit up front. I'm agitated so I turn to the cat in the back seat and ask him what's up and tell him if he has an issue with that guy walking with his girl he should get out of the car and confront him. Turns out, he didn't even really know that guy and was just mouthing off. Huh?!!! Whiskey Tango Foxtrot over? Early morning hours in the ATL and he is disrespecting a guys girl just to be playing??????? This is the 1980s mind you. Nothing even close to this had happened with this guy before. He was trying to make an impression and show off. Before I could jerk his *** out of the back seat myself my best friend taps me to turn around. We are being rushed by several guys, one of which (the one that came to my side of the car) was waving a handgun. The guy who had been walking with his girl was with them and he remembered me. Turns out he was with some of his people from home who were not in school and who were visiting him. At least one of them had a handgun.
I could tell many similar stories from my youth. Growing up I called myself making good decisions and so too did many of my friends. For example, my college friends and I never hung around either of the aforementioned knuckle heads again, and I certainly attempted to learn from the decisions I made, but truth be told I was lucky. Many of my friends and other cats weren't as lucky as I was. My best friend who I was with at IHOP wasn't as lucky. He would later be gunned down in his hometown and not in the "hood" but in the suburbs, shot by a would be robber. He was a college graduate and attending an Ivy League graduate school. When he was murdered, he wasn't doing anything illegal or even dangerous. He was just a target of opportunity.
"according to court documents in a wide-ranging prosecution of Black Guerrilla Family gang members in Baltimore"
Read more:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/ma...md-bgf-20140310,0,5650932.story#ixzz2vm3UihIL
Wow I didn't know the BGF was still around. That's some old school stuff right there.
