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By Joe Anuta, Howard Koplowitz and Ivan Pereira
August 31, 2011
Tyquan Jackson was stabbed to death in a November 2003 fight involving some 200 teens in Jamaica. He was 15 years old.
A few days later at the funeral, a 16-year-old named Ronald Merritt watched Tyquan vanish into the ground.
Before Tyquan’s death, Merritt was a South Jamaica teen on the streets who wanted to impress his friends.
“I was selling drugs, running around robbing with guns on me,” Merritt said.
But when a southeast Queens activist named Erica Ford spoke at the service, he had an epiphany.
“There was probably over 100 people in there, but I felt like it was coming straight to me. She said, ‘If you want to change your life, come to me,'” Merritt said.
Ford stayed true to her word.
This second part of an investigative series by TimesLedger Newspapers explores how Ford and other community activists have used violence as galvanizing points to change lives in neighborhoods like Jamaica, St. Albans, Cambria Heights, Queens Village, Laurelton, Brookville, Springfield Gardens, Hollis, New Hyde Park, Bellerose and Rosedale.
Culture of violence
A TimesLedger analysis of 2010 police statistics from southeast Queens found there were 43 murders spanning three police precincts: the 103rd, the 105th and the 113th. The murders constituted nearly half of the 100 homicides in Queens. There still had been no arrests in 25 of those murders by last week, police said.
Ford attributes the death toll to a culture of violence that pervades the area. She believes that there are many contributing factors, including hip-hop and rap culture, the repercussions of the crack epidemic of the 1980s and the lack of community facilities in southeast Queens.
Ford hopes that her mentorship of young people like Merritt will save them from the violence.
“He put his gun down and now he shoots video,” Ford said of her young protege.
Merritt is now 24. He runs his own film company called “Du U TV” and is serious about it — he has the logo tattooed on his hand.
He has shot video for former Gov. David Paterson, hip-hop mogul Russell Simmons and Queens-born rapper Ja Rule. He speaks to fathers in prisons — his own was incarcerated for most of Merritt’s childhood growing up in the South Jamaica Houses — and provides a role model for other teens who want to get off the streets.
But Merritt admits that it wasn’t easy.
“If it wasn’t for Erica Ford, I’d still be on that street corner,” he said.
Details were scarce, but Tyquan was stabbed after a group of about 200 teens from two high schools — neither of which Tyquan attended — got into a confrontation on Archer Avenue in Jamaica. By the time the fighting was over, Tyquan was dead.
After the funeral, Merritt thought about death on a daily basis..
Ford’s LIFE Camp seemed like it could help Merritt escape the mayhem that had claimed his friend, but his life in South Jamaica seemed like a world away.
“I couldn’t go, because I was from the hood,” Merritt said. “I didn’t want my friends to laugh.”
When Merritt finally made the trip to York College in Jamaica, he set his cell phone alarm for 10 minutes.
“I’ll give her 10 minutes of my time and see how good this program is or I’ll see how whack this program is,” he said.
He walked in to find a room full of teens working on video projects, interviewing each other.
When his alarm went off, Merritt pretended it was a phone call and left. But his brief time there was enough to entice him back.
“They got the cameras and everything, I was like, ‘I can do this,'” he said.
Nearly 10 years later, Merritt now tries to give young people the same opportunities that were offered to him. And he is not the only one taking a stand against violence in southeast Queens.
A family fights back
The family of Tony McFadden Jr. II, who was killed Oct. 11, said they have been working to help others handle the pain that they continue to endure.
McFadden, who was known as Tone Macc and Junior to his family and friends, was 26 years old when he was murdered. According to the Queens district attorney, Luis Cherry has been charged with shooting McFadden in the head outside the home where McFadden was living with his girlfriend and her family. Cherry was arrested in January.
Cherry, who the police say has ties to the Crips gang, has also been accused of another murder three days after McFadden’s death in Suffolk County, according to the Suffolk County district attorney’s office.
He is currently awaiting trial in both Queens and Suffolk.
Talia McFadden, McFadden’s older sister, said she has been establishing the Tony McFadden Jr. II Foundation as a way not only to cope with her loss but to help other victims’ families.
The nonprofit aims to create a venue where the community, businesses and elected officials can come together in their efforts to curtail violence.
“I’ve got a lot of moms who are going through the same process as my mom,” said Talia, the eldest of the McFadden’s five siblings. “The foundation is helping me heal.”
In June, the foundation held a march from McFadden’s childhood residence to the spot where he was shot, then continued to Roy Wilkins Park, where other crime victims’ families — including relatives of Kedrick Ali Morrow — vowed to work together.
“When someone’s loved one dies, we have to be there,” Morrow’s father, Imam Shaheed Morrow, said during the march.
Morrow, 17, was shot on May 15, 2010, and his mother Shenee Johnson has since started Life Support, a group formed to help families of victims of violence grieve.
Johnson created a CD and music video titled “Life Support” that starts with sounds from an emergency room and was inspired by her son’s death.
Johnson has formed a network of Queens families shattered by violence, including Donna Hood, whose 13-year-old son Kevin Miller was caught in the crossfire of suspected gang rivals two blocks from Campus Magnet HS in 2009.
Last year the Kevin Lamont Miller Foundation gave out three scholarships, including two to students from Miller’s alma mater – Humanities Arts at Campus Magnet.
During a news conference in July to launch Life Support, Johnson was joined by Hood and McFadden’s mother Sherian as they spoke out against gun violence.
“We’re here to say we are taking back our community. We are taking back our streets,” Johnson said.
Stepping into the void
Erica Ford’s program filled an ever-expanding void left by the closing of community centers in southeast Queens, according to Au Hogan, president of Baisley Park Houses.
In 2009, a brand new community center was built at the houses and then subsequently closed due to mayoral budget cuts. Then 19 more centers were shuttered later that year, Hogan said.
“The big organizations don’t want to come into public housing because of the crime,” he said, pointing out that private organizations have not taken over the reins of centers shut down by the city.
The community centers provided after-school programs, physical fitness programs and summer camps for children, and a place to congregate for senior citizens.
“The old philosophers and the old scientists knew that you had to have recreation for you to have quality of life and a stable mind,” Hogan said.
In Merritt’s case, a space where teens could gather for constructive activities was all that was needed to spark a change for him. His work with LIFE Camp was also very different from what was going on in his neighborhood.
“The community around me was just a drug-infested community. There wasn’t no basketball players around me, no lawyers, no doctors,” he said. “Everybody around me sold drugs.”
When Merritt skipped LIFE Camp sessions, Ford coerced him to return, sometimes physically. Once while driving around South Jamaica, she saw Merritt on a corner and dragged him into her car, which he said was packed with other youths on their way to an event in New Jersey.
“It made me feel important,” he said. “Like, wow, I can be somebody.”
Ford’s up-front approach was not limited to Merritt.
She often dispatches “emergency response teams” soon after a murder to try to prevent violent retaliation. She urges rivals to stop the cyclical nature of violence with her “Bury da Beef” campaign to end escalating confrontations among inner city teenagers.
Ford preaches against the “no-snitch” culture in southeast Queens. Many residents, she said, fear being portrayed as traitors if they speak to police, but Ford disagrees with that characterization.
An example of a snitch would be if two people commit a crime together and one rats out the other to save himself, Ford explained, while a concerned citizen would give information to police or the Queens district attorney to help catch the culprits.
“Nobody wants to talk,” she said. “There is no real justice in our community.”
Rescued from the street
For Merritt, his own history helps to inspire others to change, he said.
“Every time we do something I’m going back to the projects, so I know the life that they are living. I know what they are going through. I know their struggles. I know how hard it is to get out of that environment.” he said.
Merritt credits Ford with saving his life – two more of his friends were killed in a double homicide at the South Jamaica Houses in 2009 after he had begun spending time with LIFE Camp.
“If it wasn’t for Erica Ford, nine nights out of ten I would have been on the same corner with them,” Merritt said. “And every time I think about that it scares me.”
