Two accomplices arrested in drive by, police searching for gunman “Heido”

By George P. Hassett

A drive-by shooting that injured a 16-year-old Somerville boy June 12 could have been retaliation for a stabbing at Foss Park weeks earlier, according to two police sources. Both incidents, according to the sources, involve members of the MS-13 and Bloods street gangs.

Officers arrested two alleged MS-13 members in connection with the drive by June 18. Santos Pleitez, 21, was the driver of the car and Salvador Yanez, 22, was a passenger, police said. But the gunman Jairo Ulises Miguel, 19, remained free as of Tuesday, police said.

Miguel, 19, an alleged MS-13 gang member – is the brother of the victim in a May 28 stabbing at Foss Park, the sources said. Miguel’s brother was stabbed after an argument with five juveniles between the ages of 12 and 15 turned physical, the sources said. Four of the suspects were arrested in the neighborhood a short time later and the fifth boy was arrested the next day.

In what may have been an act of revenge, Miguel, known on the street as Heido, reached outside the passenger window of a car with a 9mm handgun and discharged three rounds at the 16-year-old victim standing at the corner of Cross and Pearl streets on June 12, the sources said.

The boy was hit by one bullet in his left shoulder and ran into a nearby deli where he dropped to the ground and yelled, “I got shot.” Police said the boy’s injuries were not life threatening. In court documents, police said the boy was a member of the Bloods street gang.

Miguel was seen peering out a second floor window at his home at 9 Tufts St. after the shooting on Friday June 14, but when police arrived at the apartment building later in the day with an arrest warrant he was gone.

In the wake of the shooting, neighborhood residents said two groups of teenagers claiming affiliation with the MS-13 and Bloods street gangs were feuding. “It’s like a little turf thing,” said a man who would not give his name.

Violence in Somerville, history in L.A.

The gang affiliations that have allegedly led Somerville teens to shoot and stab each other
have their origins decades ago on the other side of the country. The Bloods and MS-13 both formed in Los Angeles as reactions to bigger, more powerful gangs in the 1970s and 80s.

The Bloods formed in the summer of 1972 as a reaction to the Crips gang growing numbers and brutality. Salvadoran immigrants organized as MS-13 in the early 1980s as a way to protect recent Central American immigrants from the more powerful black and Mexican gangs in the area.

Gang expert Alex Alonso said that in Los Angeles the two gangs do not feud and have no contact at all. “None whatsoever,” he said.

It was 15-year-old Raymond Washington who organized his friends on 78th Street in Los Angeles into a street gang known as the Crips in 1969, according to gang historians. Washington’s original intent was to protect his neighborhood from outside gangs but the Crips soon consolidated other neighborhoods into their clique and became a roving band of brutes themselves – with violence, and murder, as a status symbol.

While most gangs jumped on the Crips bandwagon in the early 1970s some neighborhood crews declined to give up their individual identities. But after the Crips showed they were capable of murder with the 1972 stomping death of 16-year-old Robert Ballou, who was attacked outside a theater for his leather jacket, the early dissenters soon formed an alliance.

That alliance included the Brims, Black P. Stones, Bishops, Athens Park Boys and Bounty Hunters. They would eventually become known as the Bloods.

In an era when Los Angeles lost many of its industrial manufacturing jobs, street gangs exploded. In 1978 there were 15 Blood gangs and 45 Crip gangs throughout Los Angeles. By 1982, Bloods had expanded to 46 sets and Crips to 109, according to Alonso.

Since then, Bloods have been reported in over 200 cities and the US Department of Justice found they were proliferating faster than Crips.

The forerunner to Bloods in Somerville and on the entire east coast, Alonso said, was Rikers Island inmate Omar “O.G. Mack” Portee.

“Prior to 1993, there were no Blood or Crip gangs on the east coast. In ’93 O.G. Mack formed the first Blood set in New York. From there, the New York City Bloods grew and other east coast cities adapted and took on the Blood culture,” he said.

 
Alonso said young people in cities that had never seen Bloods appropriated the gang’s name and customs to cash in on the currency the Bloods name, mythologized in movies and music videos, instantly brings. “There is no connection between the Bloods in Los Angeles and the indigenous youth in other cities who adopt the name.”

Like the Bloods, MS-13 gang culture also came to Somerville from Los Angeles. But the Salvadoran gang has more local history. MS-13 was first identified as operating in Somerville in 1997, police said.

Since then federal agents have swooped into the city to arrest its leaders, gang graffiti has been scrawled across homes in East Somerville and MS-13 members committed one of the most horrific crimes in the city’s history.

Three MS-13 members allegedly raped two deaf girls in wheelchairs in October 2002 in Foss Park, slamming the girls out of their chairs and onto the ground before assaulting them. The police department formed its first dedicated gang unit in response to the attack.

The man credited with (or blamed for) bringing Los Angeles gang culture east, O.G. Mack, struck a positive note in an interview with F.E.D.S. Magazine earlier in the decade. Speaking directly to the young Bloods of the world he said: “Stand strong. We are more than just criminals, so keep your head up and reach for the stars.”

Today O.G. Mack sits in prison in the midst of a 50 year sentence, convicted in 2003 of racketeering, conspiracy to commit murder, illegal possession of an AK-47 military rifle and conspiracy to distribute crack cocaine.