In high school, a frustrated Loco discovered the one thing he excelled at, football. At six-one and 190 pounds, he was a good fit. Scooby encouraged him. As they got older the pair joined up with a whole band of school friends. Juan Flythe was “Woo.” Jasiah Carroll was “Scrappie.”
The boys found the Parrish place ideal for hanging out. Where the Hollises’ small Bengal Road house—white with black shutters—was crowded in amongst other houses, the Parrish’s place was in Gwynn Oaks Landing, a vast rental project of two-story tan brick townhomes. The homes came in eight- or ten-unit blocks arranged in simple patterns on short dead-end streets off a stretch of Essex Lane. The streets had cute names like Strawbridge Court and Cedar Park Court and Mountbatten Court. The Parrishes lived at 21 Thornhurst Court. Though all rental, the complex looked like a well-maintained condo project. A parklike barrier of woods and artful boulders separated Essex Road from the townhomes and parking lots. Unseen, vigilant neighbors were everywhere.
But what made it such a good place for hanging out was that all those dead-end “Courts” and townhomes backed up against a dense patch of woods, heaven for kids to play in, to explore, to make out in, to get drunk or high in. 21 Thornhurst Court was all the way at the back where, right next to a garbage bin, a path opened into the woods.
The forest has a name only a mapmaker would know (Villa Nova Park), but it is just called “the woods.” If you walk in past the garbage bin at the end of Thornhurst Court, you can go straight through brush down a steep ravine to Gwynns Falls Creek. Crossing the stream in a couple of hops, you can climb the even steeper far side of the ravine. Up there, trees and brush are suddenly replaced by lawns and gravestones, the more recent ones forlornly decorated with plastic flowers and burnt-out tea lights holding puddles of old rainwater like lachrymal vases. This is Woodlawn Cemetery, also a terrific place for a kid to play. Just the right mix of eeriness, emptiness, cranky groundskeepers, and a pond (a dammed stretch of the creek) almost too small for a huge, nearly tame flock of mallards. Idlers are always feeding them with crumbled bread.
If you turn sharply right from the garbage bin, you’ll follow a path along the crest of the ravine’s near side. This shortcut behind the townhomes of Gwynn Oaks Landing pops back out onto Essex Road where you can make a left on Windsor Mill Road. Down a hill is the area’s main drag with a Royal Farms store (a local chain of gas stations/quickie marts) and the police station.
Idyll though all this appears for a boy whose family doesn’t have a lot of money, when adolescence hits, and the shadow of Baltimore seems to inch closer, a boy’s thoughts can turn to gangs, even in Randallstown. Even good kids give it some thought. The universal alarm that gang life inspires in places like Randallstown looks like power to a kid who’s worried about disrespect. The all-diminishing mockery of high school can’t touch gang members.
Still, compared to criminal Baltimore City types, these particular boys from surrounding Baltimore County might as well have been country bumpkins. How serious can a gang get in a suburb? Maybe it was more like a fraternity, an in-your-face version of the “Greek Life” some African Americans embrace in college. These guys, Loco, Woo, were on the football team, after all. What does this have to do with crime? Their interest in a gang had to be juvenile swagger, play. Unfortunately, the nature of play is always to mimic the real thing.
About to graduate from high school, the boys found part-time jobs. They had to. A storage center. A day labor agency. They were getting a glimpse of the life ahead of them. Scooby found work at a pharmacy on Liberty Road, one of the big streets radiating from downtown Baltimore. A gay guy named Jimmie worked there too. He was older, in his thirties, perhaps. Though Scooby wasn’t bothered by a gay guy, the work was boring. Loco took a job as a cashier at a McDonald’s. It wasn’t exactly football and his permanent frown may have started to represent real surliness.
They all revered a slightly older guy with the street name “Murk” (Benjamin Wureh). And when they talked to him about forming a gang, he advised them, “You wanna make it real, you gotta go to Hood.”
“Hood” was Timothy Rawlings Jr. He was four years older than the two Stevens. He was much smaller as well, only five-nine and 157 pounds. He looked like a kid, an extremely grave kid. His hair was cropped short, no fancy dreads or cornrows or the gumball-sized twists Loco wore. His humorless charisma was just the kind to win young men over. Small as he was, he’d been the quarterback of the Parkville High School football team. He had a still, wild form of leadership, self-conscious of his power, forever poised, permanently insecure.
Real morality was probably invisible to a guy as focused as Hood. What took its place was ritual, rules, signs, the arcana of groups and obscure subgroups like FOE: “If you rep that FOE, you about Family Over Everything.”
Hood’s father was a career criminal with other things than family on his mind. Hood lived just inside the Baltimore city limits with his mother, Tereia Hawkins, who’d raised him alone. She was a long-time state employee, a corrections officer, ironically. A huge, slow woman, she had an air of long-suffering endurance. Under a smattering of unprofessional tattoos, her upper arms swung like wattles when she moved.
Once the boys hooked up with Hood, things changed quickly. They would be Bloods—that is, they’d side with the American archipelago of gangs who favor red and, along with the Crips, are one half of a modern underground version of the ancient Blues and Greens, the quasipolitical hippodrome fanatics who terrorized Constantinople. (Most old pictures of Scooby show him wearing a pregang blue bandanna, not the red one that became part of his gang wear and his last outfit.)
You couldn’t just be a Blood. You kouldn’t just start religiously avoiding the Crips’ letter C when you texted your boyz. History and heraldry were involved. Most gang names hark back to an address, street, or neighborhood in Los Angeles where the Crips and Bloods got their start. That’s where “Swans” came from, apparently. Under Hood the Randallstown boys would become “Family Swans 92” or the “92 Family Swans.” Each gang member had a swan or the name tattooed on their shoulder or arm.
When Michelle and Steven Sr. saw the tattoos Scooby had gotten on his forearms, they were furious. Scooby’s father, a large man with the weary manners of millions of American husbands, grumbled with repulsion and let his wife rail at their son. She was a sharp-tongued woman. But even she ran out of words eventually, and she threw up her hands and shook her head in bitter disappointment, a pot boiling dry though still on the flame.
Scooby was a charmer and tried explaining to his parents that, yes, it was a gang, but it didn’t mean he was going to have to do anything bad or illegal. It was just group friendship. Like the one between him and Loco. Nothing different. His parents challenged him: how would it look when he went for a job? He promised, he swore, it was nothing bad, not the big deal they thought it was.
Other parents had the same reaction. But how do you confront an ever-more-remote and indifferent kid? Woo’s (Juan Flythe’s) father didn’t even know what his son was up to until he found out from a cousin. She told him Juan was hanging out with a bad crowd. So Juan’s father went to his own mother, Bercille, a tough, almost mannish woman with whom Juan was living at that point. Father and grandmother discussed it. Yet they couldn’t do more than discuss and worry. They certainly weren’t going to talk to the police about the boy they loved, though a judge later wished aloud, idly, that parents would do just that in gang cases.
The Parrishes, at any rate, regained a little hope after the initial shock. Scooby really was an endearing kid. He was about to graduate. He went off to driving school every day around four thirty, taking that shortcut through the woods. He’d applied for a UPS job. And he was thinking about Baltimore Community College.
May 25, 2008 was Scooby’s eighteenth birthday. He was a senior, school was almost over, the weather was getting warmer, he was tight with the 92 Family Swans—things must have felt good.
He had friends over to 21 Thornhurst Cour
t for a birthday party for himself. The inner circle came: Loco, of course, and Woo and some girls—the high school crowd. Murk came, but not Hood. This party may have seemed too suburban or kidlike to him. Or maybe he thought his absence would add to the mystique of leadership. Soon enough Scooby disappeared upstairs with his girlfriend. It was his birthday after all.
Downstairs the party continued. Why someone picked up Scooby’s cell phone, which he’d left downstairs, isn’t clear, but the lead detective on the case wonders whether the kids weren’t searching for naked pictures of the girlfriend so they could razz the pair about it later.
Anyway, they clicked their way through Scooby’s cell phone, and they did find a picture. It was a shot of Scooby’s penis. That might have been good—funny and embarrassing enough—but the photo was part of a text exchange between Steven Parrish and Jimmie, the older gay guy who worked at the Liberty Road pharmacy. The exchange was humorous, if anything. As recalled by the same detective, it went something along the lines of:
Jimmie, u see wat I got here? U wishin huh?
I don see nuthin much. Dat all u got me fo ur bday?
U see it good enuf.
Nobody told Scooby what they’d seen on his phone; he was still busy upstairs. Apparently the bedroom tryst didn’t seem significant compared to the queer texts. Loco and Woo became confused and angry. They left soon afterward. Maybe a faint, moblike outrage filled the air, because someone also stole the girlfriend’s iPod before leaving.
“Gayness” in this story is all but ungraspable. Everyone says Scooby was straight. A lot of them insist on it more than seems decent (as if his murder would make sense otherwise). He did have girlfriends. And it’s not uncommon for a straight boy to get a kick out of the attentions of a gay man.
Regardless, Loco and Woo were suddenly as angry about Scooby’s sexual identity as Michelle had been about his gang identity. Why they reacted this way is hard to understand. In Loco’s case I imagine he felt compromised himself. Young people think their reputations echo across the world. This could have been too great a blot. The whole world knew Scooby and he were best friends. The world knew about the sleepovers, knew they’d grown up together and shared an intimate loyalty to one another.
An additional driving issue may have had to do with football and the 92 Family Swans, not so much sudden discomfort about the gray area of male bonding as the idea that any team has to have a unified purpose, and certain kinds of individuality ruin that. Destruction of a weak link isn’t destruction at all. It’s fortifying, honorable, sanctioned.
Loco and Woo stewed through the 26th and most of the 27th before Woo finally said, “We gotta take it to Hood.”
As Hood saw it, too many people had been at the party, too many people knew. And “gay,” because of its aura of submission, meant weak. Hood felt in the abstract—on behalf of the 92 Family Swans—exactly as Loco felt for himself. How would it look? Family Over Everything. The F in FOE didn’t mean family, of course, except in the Mafia sense. Only brutal, gangsta irony would make a sweet-sounding slogan into an acronym like FOE.
* * *
Scholars have written about scorn in ancient times for the bow as a combat weapon. It was used, but a feeling existed from at least as far back as Homer that there was something ignoble about the arrow’s power to kill at a distance compared to hand-to-hand combat, which measured man against man. (“Archery is no test of a man’s bravery. A man stands fast in his rank and faces without flinch the gashing of the quick spear.” Euripides, Heracles.) The same unease recurs throughout the developmental history of weapons. Six-shooters got the moniker “equalizers” because they made size and strength nonissues. And the problem is with us right now in its most dramatic form ever, when joysticks in Florida control drones on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
This is relevant, because Hood was about to murder at a distance. The testimony from Florida is that killing at a distance isn’t like a video game at all. It feels real. So Hood, this small, serious twenty-two-year-old, was probably going to feel the reality of it too, no matter how he played it. On May 28 he called a meeting.
His gang met him at the Mondawmin Mall. The mall is a huge, cheap bilevel structure with a gleaming all-white interior. You’d never guess it was actually the oldest enclosed mall in Baltimore, dating from 1956. 8 It’s located on the rapid transit line halfway between Randallstown and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and has the usual complement of national chains, plus a check-cashing place, a wig store. A Pakistani-run jewelry shop sells stereotypical bling while outside guys hawk African-style tribal items. But the mall has a dangerous reputation. In some quarters it’s spoken of as the kind of place white people might not want to go. And despite the security guards, I saw people buying dope in the men’s room.
At the center of the mall is a huge skylit atrium. A glitzy spiral staircase swoops down from a second-level balcony over a circular reflecting pool. Shops line the upper level except right at the balcony, which serves as a sort of lounge. Against a sunny wall of plate-glass windows, overstuffed neo-Deco chairs have been arranged around square fake-leather-upholstered tables or footstools. When I was there, I watched what looked like idling gang members flounce en masse onto the lounge chairs. This is likely where the meeting took place. Besides Hood, at least Loco, Woo, Scrappie, Justin Inman, and Marc Miller were present. Others may have escaped mention.
At the meeting, it was made clear that Scooby, based on what was now “known” about him, was going to make the 92 Family Swans look weak or vulnerable. There had already been a few fights with Crips. Scooby himself had been involved in one or two, though they were more like schoolyard tussles than a gang war. Ultimately, the opinion of fellow Bloods may have been just as important.
Hood took all this seriously. It was his nature. Maybe he was really hoping to build a criminal enterprise someday. Maybe he was simply drinking down the experience of his own leadership in breathless gulps. Or running as fast as he could in his thoughts to remain out in front of the rest of them.
Loco was speaking about his closest friend, but he was looking at Hood, a boy quarterback wearing an expression as somber and unreadable as a lizard’s. Hood was saying that they had to do something about this. These boys had been studying rules and rituals from the moment their gang was founded. Probably few of them dared offer more than grunts of assent when Hood gravely invoked some heartless rule. A law. He chose who would take care of it. He told them to get it done quickly.
On the 29th, the next day, a couple of people were warned to stay away from the Parrish place. Murk texted Justin Inman and told him not to go to Thornhurst Court that afternoon, even though Inman had been picked as one of the killers. “It is going to be hot over there. They are going to do that thing.” Murk, who was older, may still have felt a glimmer of choice. For everyone else, choice had vanished.
It was Loco—Steven Hollis—and Woo—Juan Flythe—who went to Thornhust Court at around four thirty in the afternoon. Loco was seen approaching the Parrish place, where he’d spent so much of his childhood. He lingered by the black-painted metal door, set back like all the others in an arched recess. This was the time Scooby usually went to driving school, and he soon came out. He and Loco walked around the corner of the building toward the garbage bin and woods. Maybe Woo was in the woods already or joined them as they entered.
Woo and Loco later told a friend that they confronted Scooby about the picture and that he said he didn’t want to talk about it. They dwelled on the fact that Scooby never denied the picture’s implication. Loco supposedly grumbled, “We did what we had to do.”
What Scooby said to them in the woods isn’t known apart from the screamed half-sentence or two overheard by witnesses. The three boys got about halfway down the path, the shortcut that veers right. Whether they were arguing or sullen, whether Scooby was furious or embarrassed, he couldn’t have been expecting what happened. Woo grabbed his friend and started cutting. Echoing Steve Mullins, the Alabama killer, Woo say
s he didn’t feel quite present during the attack. Scooby was heard screaming, “Hey! Stop! Why you doing this to me . . . ? I didn’t do nothing!” The pleading went on for a short while. Badly cut, Scooby broke away from Woo and hurtled toward Loco, who shoved his own knife into Scooby’s chest, cutting the side of his heart.
Scooby fell. Loco and Woo now beat and kicked him. Woo says Loco was in a frenzy. He stomped on his best friend’s neck, crushing the boy’s windpipe. Either the cut to the heart or the crushed neck would have been fatal. But Scooby had over fifty cuts on his hands and head and body. It was about 4:50. The killers took their victim’s cell phone, camera, and pocketknife. Woo says Loco also took Scooby’s pants off—as if in ritual humiliation. The pants were never found, though Murk swears he later saw them and the phone at Woo’s house. As a last gesture, either Loco or Woo laid a red bandanna over Scooby’s face.
The killers made cell phone calls to fellow gang members at 4:55 and 4:56, probably before they left the woods. “It’s done.” At 5:02, Scrappie (Jasiah Carroll) texted: “So is he gone or wat?” Murk answered: “Shut da fuk up.”
Fifteen or twenty minutes later, a neighborhood guy named Blaze came up the path from the opposite direction. He stopped. He ran the rest of the way to Gwynn Oaks Landing. He spotted a couple of girls he knew: “You wanna see Scooby’s body? He’s up in the woods!” A 911 call had been put in as soon as the screaming was heard. Not long after Blaze found the body, police arrived.
During those fifteen or twenty minutes, Loco and Woo must have walked the length of the shortcut and come out on Essex Road without running into Blaze. They later said they’d chucked their knives in one of the garbage bins. Loco and Woo kept walking to Windsor Mill Road, turned left, and strolled down the steep hill alongside busy traffic. They were probably bloodied, probably carrying a bloody pair of pants. They walked right past the police station to the parking lot of that Royal Farms store.
American Honor Killings Page 16