SNARED BY THE STREET

Bad Breaks, Worse Choices, Few Regrets And A Relentless Undertow

They all remember their first guns.

Anthony Chisholm was 9 when he secretly played with his stepfather's pistol.

Jamil Thomas was 10 when an older boy let him hold a 9mm.

Raymond Ferguson was 11, his brother, 12, when they spotted a plastic
shopping bag at a playground, with distinctive outlines.

Both boys knew what was inside.

Luis Cheverez at 13 burglarized a house, scoring a Glock.

At 14, Tyson Montgomery stole a .357-caliber snub-nosed revolver.

Antwian Melvin was 15 when a friend gave him a Ruger.

As Philadelphia reels from mounting gun deaths and shootings,
especially among black males in their teens and 20s, the question at
the heart of the problem is: Why?

Offering insights are the stories of these six young men, all sent to
Pine Grove State Correctional Institution, a prison in Western
Pennsylvania for juveniles convicted of adult crimes.

Three are in state prison for armed robbery, another for shooting and
paralyzing a 19-year-old. Two are serving life sentences for murder.

In interviews with The Inquirer, the six young men all talked about
the lure of "the Street," where the need and desire for cash
inexorably led them to "the Game" of drug dealing. And where a gun,
easily obtained, is critical to enforcing this world's own codes.

One aspect is the struggle for respect, which has become an obsession
for youths who see a dim future in their impoverished neighborhoods.
In Philadelphia, young people are literally dying for respect.

Another is the "Stop Snitchin' " ethos, which authorities blame for
creating fear among crime victims and witnesses, but which also
reflects a deep distrust of the criminal justice system.

Raymond Ferguson, locked up for attempted murder when he was 15, sees
it this way: "If it has nothing to do with you, you shouldn't be
putting yourself in it. If it did happen to you, you're your own man.
You can handle the situation."

Jamil Thomas, arrested for murder at 15 and sentenced to life, echoed
his fellow inmate in a separate interview: "If somebody do something
to you, you don't go to the cops. You can handle it on the street."

Handling it on the Street got them all behind bars.

Some had parents who tried to be strict. Some had homes that were
broken or out of control. It didn't seem to matter.

The Street took them all.

Middle school meltdown

Seated in a tiny, brightly lit room reserved for lawyers meeting
their clients at Pine Grove prison, Jamil -- an 18-year-old with a
hardened demeanor -- recalls that he was a good student, "then in
middle school, I started messing up."

Jaana Juvonen, chair of developmental psychology at UCLA and coauthor
of a Rand Corp. study of middle school issues, said children face
major challenges when they move from elementary school to the much
larger and anonymous world of middle school.

"Lack of close relationships to adults -- parents or teachers -- at
this ransitional phase is a major risk factor," Juvonen said. "This
is where many of our urban middle schools fail us: They could serve
as buffers, but instead they appear to increase the risks for some youth."

All six inmates described their middle school years generally as the
time they strayed.

Jamil's school records show that, although he wasn't a perfect child
in elementary school, he experienced a dramatic change as he entered
adolescence.

Jamil "has beautiful manners and a positive attitude about learning,"
his first grade teacher at Thomas Holme Elementary School in
Northeast Philadelphia wrote. His "biggest problem now is his
aggression toward other children in school."

A "daydreamer," as one early teacher wrote, he got B's and C's until
fifth grade, when another teacher wrote, "There has been a drastic
change in the personal and social growth area."

Still, she ended Jamil's report card on the upbeat: "I wish him much
success in his new school."

What Jamil achieved at Austin Meehan Middle School in Northeast
Philadelphia was the complete opposite of success.

Suspended once in elementary school, he was suspended 13 times in
middle school. The last time was for assaulting and robbing another student.

"I just like to be free and have fun," Jamil said in his prison
interview, looking back on that time. "I just run the halls."

As he was failing in school -- and school was failing him -- he
became a student of the Street.

He got involved with drugs around age 11, smoking marijuana. By 13,
he was smoking every day.

That's about when he was transferred to a disciplinary school, where
he found it "easy to just do what you want to do."

Even a "boot camp" for 30 days made little difference. At 14, he was
selling crack, and by 15 he got a gun, a .40-caliber pistol.

"You don't want to be a victim, so you try to protect yourself the
best you can," he explained. "Wherever you at, somebody try to take
[something] from you."

Jamil made it to Frankford High.

Then he was arrested for murder.

He recalled a girl who tried to set him straight, but he didn't
listen. "The only thing I was thinking about was how much money I was
going to make the next day and how I was going to have fun."

His mother, Geraldine Thomas, 43, tried to keep him out of trouble,
he said. "She knows how the streets was," he said. But it was a
losing effort, she acknowledged.

"I don't know what they do," she said, "when they leave my door."

McJobs are for squares

The main job on the Street is drug dealer.

"By selling drugs," wrote University of Pennsylvania professor Elijah
Anderson, an authority on urban street life, young inner-city males
"have a chance to put more money into their pockets than they could
get by legal means, and they present themselves to peers as hip, in
sharp contrast to the square image of those who work in places like
McDonald's and wear silly uniforms."

Anthony Chisholm, 18, once a successful businessman of the Street,
now reads Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations in his cell, where he's
doing time for armed robbery.

He was 14 when he got his introduction to market forces -- selling
crack on "the Avenue," Lancaster Avenue.

His father was out of work and his parents could barely pay the bills.

"Somebody I knew gave me some drugs and it was history," said
Anthony, a crafty West Philadelphian with an easy laugh.

"I had it mapped out," he explained. "The first, the third and the
15th -- those are the paydays" for government checks.

Bored at a summer job in a car-stereo shop, he quit.

"There was nothing better than selling drugs," he said with a dreamy
grin. "It was fun. It was easy. There was no labor involved. What
better way is there to make money?"

He bought jewelry, Rocawear outfits, Marc Buchanan leather jackets
and Timberland boots. He rented cars from addicts.

"Everybody wants that glorification. Everybody wants to shine," he
said. "And how do you shine? Cars and jewelry."

He joked about how excessive it got: "I used to carry three cell
phones. For what? And two pagers. I had a Batman belt on."

All the inmates interviewed sold drugs at some point, but only one
expressed regret.

Luis Cheverez, now 19, was selling crack and heroin at age 12 for a
drug organization that ran the corners at Coral and Rush Streets in Kensington.

His family was poor. "My mom used to struggle," he said of his
biological mother, "so I took it upon myself to take care of myself."

He did well enough to buy a car for $2,000 and spend $1,400 more
under the hood. He gave his mother money for food.

But he saw what drugs did to addicts, including an uncle.

"When you're out there selling, you don't think of the consequences
of what it does," Luis said. "I just come to realize I'm affecting
other lives."

At 16, needing rent money, he turned to armed robbery. He says he got
caught his first time out.

Guns change the equation

In the poorest urban neighborhoods, many youths use violence to
establish and maintain their identities and win respect, said Deanna
L. Wilkinson, an expert on juvenile violence, formerly at Temple
University and now at Ohio State.

"Over time, it's how they define themselves," she said. "Those who do
not conform are highly likely to be victimized."

In a way, it's not much different from the school yard. You have
bullies. You have children who get picked on. And you have those
caught in between.

Guns change the equation.

After Tyson Montgomery, at 14, was "rolled" by a group of young black
teens and suffered a cut lip, he decided he needed a gun. His
girlfriend's older brother "had beaucoup guns."

In his bedroom, "he had an AK, 'deuce deuce' [22], two shotguns ..."
and a .357 revolver, which Tyson took when the brother wasn't around.

The next time the teens confronted him, Tyson said, he pulled out the
revolver and fired twice at one of the guys "to scare him."

As they fled in their Buick, Tyson said, he stepped into the street
and fired four more rounds, shattering the car's rear window.

"Since that day forward, the word got out," Tyson recalled. "When I
went to school, everybody looked at me different."

He liked it.

"He was so easily persuaded, persuaded to do wrong because he wanted
to impress," his mother, Vernetta Burger, 39, said in her Frankford home.

Today, Tyson, serving life for murder, is 19 -- a muscular
6-feet-1-inch, 222 pounds with an air of confidence. He walks and
talks the Street.

"Look at a block on a summer day," he said. "There's not much
laughter going on. There's eyes everywhere and ears always open."

'If I wanted to ... I just did it'

Antwian Melvin lived in two worlds. He was a drug dealer, but he
didn't care for it. He tried to make it working in various regular
jobs. But eventually he became a lost youth whose sole focus was to smoke weed.

As with Jamil, records show Antwian did well in school until sixth
grade. That's when he started getting suspended -- nine times over
the next four years -- for offenses such as indecent assault and fighting.

Still, shortly before he dropped out of high school, some of his
teachers spoke of him fondly and described him as having a difficult
life dealing with some "major issues."

In prison for armed robbery, Antwian comes across as a mild-mannered
19-year-old who doesn't talk hard-core street lingo. He said his home
life was rough, with harsh physical discipline.

Antwian didn't fully embrace the Street. But when problems arose,
guns were easy to get.

A friend whose father had a gun collection got him a chrome 9mm Ruger
to deal with some guys in his Northeast Philadelphia neighborhood who
"kept trying to roll me."

Challenged to fight one day, Antwian pulled out his Ruger from his
waistband and placed it on the ground for all to see.

"Nobody wanted to roll on me then," Antwian said.

He was emboldened. Following an altercation with some guys at a park,
he returned with the Ruger and started firing to scare them.

"After that, everybody at the school whispered about it," he
recalled. "A couple girls wanted to associate with me."

He now had a reputation.

He did a little drug dealing in Germantown before moving to the
Northeast, but "it wasn't really me. I just did it to get a quick
couple dollars."

He did try to work. He cut grass in his neighborhood. He sold
knickknacks out of a catalog. He stocked shelves at a Rite Aid,
served as a cashier at a women's clothing store, cooked and waited
tables at a rib joint in Manayunk. He worked at McDonald's for a
month and got fired for showing up late.

His last and best-paying job was in construction: $250 a week under the table.

"But I was smoking so much weed I'd be broke every day," he said.

He decided, "I need something right now, something I could do tonight."

Antwian, then 17, had given the Ruger to a friend who'd sold it. So,
he paid $100 to a construction coworker who was a crack addict for a
sawed-off shotgun. Then, with a friend, Antwian said, he committed
three robberies that night.

Wearing a black flight jacket with five shells in an upper-arm
pocket, Antwian approached his first victim, an older man, and pulled
out the 12-gauge.

"You know what this is!" he announced. His friend patted the victim
down and found $200. They told him to turn around and they ran off.

"We was like, 'Damn, it was that easy?' " Antwian recalled.

For the next six weeks, Antwian committed five more stickups before
his arrest and conviction on the last one.

"It was like my mind-frame shut down," he said. "If I wanted to do
something, I just did it."

Regrets are few

Popular in prison is Teri Woods' novel True to the Game, about a
Philadelphia drug dealer.

Some of the six inmates say they want to write their own books about
life on the Street. When they reflect on their short careers, it
seems that their biggest regret is getting caught.

Jamil said he'd "change everything" to stay out of trouble, but might
deal drugs if only to raise money to launch a legitimate business.

Anthony, who is taking business classes in prison, said he has
learned that money is used to build wealth. "Money isn't wealth," he
said. "Money depreciates annually." But if his future business dreams
failed, he might revert to his old ways.

"If my back against the wall, who know what I'd do?" he said.

Tyson, who denies the killing that put him in prison, thinks "any
juvenile who committed a crime should spend a week upstate at one of
the hardest jails, to see what it's like to have your freedom totally
snatched from you."

He expresses some regrets in rap:

But my life being gone for what?

A fast "G," nice watch, and a rose gold chain!

Luis seems to be the only one shamed by his situation.

Shortly before his arrest, his mother told him he'd had a sister --
one year older -- who died in a fire when Luis was a baby.

Luis wonders how things would have turned out had she been around to
teach him about life.

"Now," he said, "I'm the older sibling teaching my siblings, and they
say, 'Damn, he's in jail.' "