STORIES ABOUT GANGS AND GANG PREVENTION MAKING THE NEWS |
As part of our commitment to keeping you informed, below is the reprint of articles featured in local newspapers and magazines about gangs and gang related stories. We hope you will take a few minutes to read this important information and learn more about how gangs are affecting our community and what is being done to combat their activities and keep our residents safe. |
Warlocks member guilty, going to prison for life
The following article was published in the Orlando Sentinel on February 12, 2011 and written by Anthony Colarossi, Staff Writer. He can be reached at: acolarossi@orlandosentinel.com or 407-420-5447.
Chad Brickey's family members sat in court all week to hear what they heard late Friday: James Madison Bedsole, guilty of first-degree murder.
After deliberating for several hours, a 12-member Orange County jury found Bedsole responsible for Brickey's September, 2009 shooting death in Apopka. Judge Roger McDonald promptly sentenced Bedsole to the mandatory penalty of life in prison.
The convicted man sat stone-faced, as he did for much of the trial.
The case gained attention because Bedsole, 40, was a probate member of the Warlocks motorcycle club at the time of Brickey's death. The prosecution attributed his role in Brickey's shooting to Bedsole's job as a probate member assigned to proect other Warlocks' motorcycles.
On Friday, Bedsole was forced to listen to another constituency; the victim's mother, his grandmother and the mother of Brickey's daughter: "I just hope she can fight the devil later on in life, the same devil that you allowed to control you," said Nicole La Rosa, who had a child with Brickey, 29. "You are the reason my once happy child can be so angry. No one can fix her sadness. All (she) has is Chad looking down from heaven, and she can't look back."
Asked later if she saw any response when she looked across the courtroom at Bedsole, La Rosa said, "He just looked at me. He really didn't have any type of emotion."
The verdict came hours after defense attorney Jeff Dowdy tried to raise doubts about the state's case against Bedsole.
He focused on the inability of the state's key witness, Holguy Louissaint, to identify Bedsole in court as the man who jumped into the back of his truck during an early-morning chase in September 2009.
That chase from Sharky's Bar in Lockhart to a Mobil Station in Apopka ended with Bedsole firing a shot from a 9-mm handgun and striking Brickey in the back of his head as he tried to elude Louissant's truck.
Kissimmee minister urges response to gang violence
The following article was published in the Orlando Sentinel on June 21, 2011 and written by Henry Pierson Curtis, Orlando Sentinel Staff with a contribution by leslie Postal. Henry can be reached at Hcurtis@tribune.com or 407-420-5257.
KISSIMMEE - The Rev. Remer Baker Jr. lives in Osceola County, where authorities rountinely say noththing about the role of gang violence in deaths, shootings and other crimes.
I'ts time for change, says the pastor of Shiloh Missionary Baptist Church in the wake of this month's shooting that left one dead and three wounded.
"I've seen so many changes," said 59-year-old Baker, who grew up in Kissimmee in the 1950s and 1960s. "This is the worst thing I've ever seen, because gangs have touched all of our families."
The Sheriff's Office reports 14 gangs with about 620 members living in the unincorporated county outside the cities of Kissimee and St. Cloud. Kissimmee reports eight gangs with 74 members. St. Cloud has no documented street gangs.
Earlier this month, Baker spoke out at the funeral of Rashan Hasaun Ortiz, 22. he challenged parents, churches and Kissimmee police to confront gang violence by first acknowledging it exists.
A minister for years, Baker chose his sermon for the more than 800 mourners after hearing that some of the teens and young adults attending the service had been talking about retaliation.
"My reading of the spirit was that it needed to be addressed and this was the time to address it," he said.
Police disagree with Baker's assertion that an inner-city rivalry that began a few years ago at Osceola High School grew into oppoising gangs from the west side and north side responsible for Ortiz's death.
Their murder investigation shows an as-yet-undisclosed person dispute prompted 17-year-old Joshua Harris to open fire June 5th at an Osceola High graduation party hosted by Ortiz's family, according to police.
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Dowdy said that even when the proscecutor in the case pointed at Bedsole and asked Louissaint if he was the man in his truck that night, Louissaint couldn't identify him.
"I don't see him in the courtroom," Dowdy said, quoting Louissaint. "You are being asked to make so many leaps of faith here, it's incredible. There's a verdict here. It's not guilty."
Dowdy also pointed out that 11 video cameras at the Mobil station captured the two trucks, but none showed Bedsole.
Dowdy then called Louissaint the "luckiest man in the world" because he was initially charged in the case and is thought to be witholding some details about that night's events.
But Assistant State Attorney Les hess, in his rebuttal closing, said Louissant "is lucky that the cameras prove he is not the shooter."
"I suggest the luckiest man in the world is the shooter, if you let him go" Hess told the jurors.
He noted that cell-phone records place Bedsole at the scene, and he asked jurors to consider whether the defense was that someone else used his phone that night.
He said Bedsole also was untruthful with police and had motive to harm Brickey because Brickey had run over a bike outside Sharkey's, although it turned out not to belong to a Warlock.
"This is not an innocent man," Hess said of Bedsole. "This man is guilty." 
Although Sheriff Bob Hansell's staff rarely provides information about gang-related crimes on grounds that publicity glamorizes gangs, Kissimee Police chief Fran Iwanski takes a different approach. She said she will talk about gang activity but that there was none in this case.
Baker counters that the police are out of touch with Kissimee's black community. "I hate to put it this way, but we get less consideration because much of what happens is black against black," he said.
Iwanski responded that her department investigates all crimes with the same attention and professionalism without regard to gender, race, religion or other personal characteristics. "Continuing cooperation between the community and their Police Department is absolutely essential," she wrote.
Court records show Harris, the suspect in Ortiz's slaying, received an order of protection in 2009 because of violence at Osceola High.
A resident of Mabbette Street on the west side, Harris was threatened and beaten on and off campus at least 10 times by a teenage girl and five to seven boys from the north side, records show.
"The youths continually repeated that this was not over and that they will come back to shoot up my house and family," Julie Harris wrote after an incident on August 31, 2009, in which six teens followed her son home. "My husband and I take sleep shifts every night to ensure our children's safety...I fear for my sons when they go to school. I need the court's help."
Five months before Ortiz died, he was charged with aiming a pistol and threatening to shoot Harris' older brother outside the family's Mabbette Street home. The charge was dropped.
Violence cited by Baker includes the December 2009 shooting of Elijah Daise, then 21, who was wounded in an unsolved crime involving two carloads of young men who opened fire on a group of men of the city's west side.
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How to start a Neighborhood Watch
You can play a vital role in keeping your family and neighborhood safe by starting a Neighborhood Watch Program in your community!
Gangs look for neighborhoods that are in decline, residents that are unaware, don't care or easily intimidated, homes that are easy targets for burglary, vandalism, or deserted and can be used as drug houses.
They AVOID neighborhoods where homes are well maintained and occupied, law enforcement has a regular presence and residents are paying attention.
Neighborhood Watch is a proven, effective crime prevention program that focuses on communication amongst neighbors and law enforcement.
To learn more about Neighborhood Watch in your community, click on the links below to get connected with a law enforcement officer who will assist you in getting started.
Make a difference in our communities and "break the chain" of gangs. 
"It's an ongoing thing," Baker said. "Besides these two incidents where people got hit, there are some others where nobody got struck."
Much of the pastor's information about Ortiz's death comes from local families with sons and daughters caught up in gang life, he said. He also acknowledged that his own family has been torn apart by the lure of crime that landed two of his sons in prison.
"It happens in the best of families," Baker said. "Now it's at a point where we're going to start losing more young people...I want to reassure these children, and we as parents need to do it."
Photos posted on the Internet show Ortiz making gang-style hand signs, including one profanely mocking west-side residents. But Baker declined to talk about Ortiz, who is the grandson of one of the minster's high-school classmates.
"Hasaun is not the focus now. All of us have things in our past that we want to leave in our past," said Baker, who was called to Osceola Regional Medical Center shortly after Ortiz died. "The bottom line is that he was gunned down and that should never have happened. I want to focus on where we go from here."
The killing of Ortiz was the thrid shooting in three months at parties attended by 200 or more teens and young adults. Last week, the Sheriff's Office accused a Lake Wales teenager of a retaliation shooting at a party May 21 in the Osceola County portion of Poinciana.
The victim, who survived, had been questioned and cleared as a possible suspect in a gang shooting that killed one teen and wounded another April 17 at a party in Lake Wales.
Ministers representing some of the county's black congregations and Baker are gathering information on local gangs to present to Kissimmee officials. No date has been set for that meeting. |
