News: Teen Released from Rikers
(Long Island, N.Y.) A seventeen-year-old girl and local prize-winning poet who grew up on 138th street in Harlem was released from Rikers for conspiracy and gun charges. The former valedictorian of her eighth grade class at KIPP STAR College Prep Charter School, located in Harlem, was involved with a fourteen-member Harlem street gang. The teen was a member of her church’s choir group and once attended an elite $44k/year tuition school on full scholarship.
The institution is called Deerfield Academy, located in Massachusetts, and is known for only accepting a mere fourteen percent of its applicants. The Harlem teen, once a member of the school’s student council, was placed on probation after getting caught cheating. She got into further trouble with the institution’s officials after skipping class without a valid and honest excuse.
The teen withdrew from the academy and enrolled in the prestigious Millennium High School, located in Manhattan’s Financial District, where she was a member of the school’s basketball team. She worked at McDonalad’s part-time and had dreams of studying law at highly competitive institutions like New York University, Colombia, Harvard, Yale, Barnard, and University of Pennsylvania.
Her dreams were put on hold when she got caught up with the Lenox Avenue and 137th Street crew, which is comprised of mostly teenagers and has been terrorizing the area for years. The gang allegedly prefers to recruit young girls to hide and carry their guns and weapons. According to law enforcement, the gang is one of the most violent groups in the entire 32nd Precinct.
Her bail was set at twenty-five-thousand dollars cash for second-degree conspiracy and weapons possession. She allegedly studied for her SATs during her stay at Rikers and was later bailed out by leaders of her church. She pleaded guilty at the State Supreme Court in Manhattan and accepted a deal which has made her a youthful offender; she will not have an official criminal record.
As part of her deal, she will not have to testify against anyone and will attend her senior year of high school under the conditions that she adheres to a nine thirty curfew. If convicted, she could have faced up to twenty-five years and had a fate similar to that of her twenty-year-old boyfriend and gang leader. He was in Rikers for armed robbery where he allegedly gave her orders to carry out via a series of phone calls.
