Knives on the Streets
ON March 26, as students poured out the front doors of the High School for Arts and Business in Corona, Queens, one 16-year-old boy frantically headed in the other direction, trying to reach the safety of the school lobby.
The teenager, who had been seriously wounded, collapsed inside the entrance of the school, five minutes after the last bell rang. A knife had been plunged into his body four times, damaging his gallbladder so badly it would later be removed.
He lay bleeding for 22 minutes, with teachers applying pressure to his wounds, until an ambulance came to take him to Elmhurst Hospital Center, where he remained for eight days.
The city’s Department of Education says the student was stabbed as he was leaving the school, which sits at the end of the block where the Horace Harding Expressway meets Granger Street, and then raced back toward the building. The police say they have identified a suspect, who, according to Dina Paul Parks, an Education Department spokeswoman, is a student at the school and is currently listed as truant.
Dramatic as that stabbing was, it is just another in an apparent surge in Latino gang-related violence in recent months that has traumatized the Queens neighborhoods of Corona, Elmhurst and Jackson Heights.
A list of some of the assaults, provided by the police, reads like a gruesome game of tit for tat between a little-known gang called the Always Banging Kings, or A.B.K., and the Latin Kings, a larger gang that was started by a group of Puerto Rican inmates in a Chicago jail in the 1940s.
Feb. 28 was a particularly grisly day: A 14-year-old and a 16-year-old were confronted and then chased by four young men near 85th Street and 30th Avenue in East Elmhurst. One of the teenagers was stabbed in the abdomen; the other had a finger cut off. About 40 minutes later, two 20-year-olds were stabbed in a Laundromat on 108th Street in Corona. The police arrested two men in that attack.
In nearly every one of the seven or more attacks in the area over the last three months, the police said, the victims and the attackers were young Latino men, ranging in age from 15 to 20, and gang membership among them was widely suspected. (In the school stabbing case, the police said the victim hung out with gang members but was not himself a gang member.)
Chief Michael Collins, a police spokesman, said in an e-mail message that officers in two precincts, the 110th and 115th, had beefed up their patrols in response to what he described as the “Queens situation.”
“Patrol and detectives in the affected precincts have also been advised to be alert for any unusual activity,” Chief Collins wrote, adding that the department’s gang unit and its vice and warrants divisions were aiding the two precincts.
With the violence making local residents anxious, political leaders are also taking action. One Thursday evening early last month, the local assemblyman, José Peralta, discussed the problem at a meeting of nearly two dozen concerned Spanish-speaking residents.
In Mr. Peralta’s campaign office, a compact, wood-paneled room on Roosevelt Avenue near 104th Street, the assemblyman fielded questions about how to identify gang members, and he described a bill he is sponsoring that would make gang recruiting in New York schools a crime.
“Gangs are a silent epidemic that not too many people are aware of,” Mr. Peralta said a few days later. “You hear about it in spurts, but it’s always been going on and it’s growing.”
Arnaldo Salinas, the senior director of the Guardian Angels, who since late 2003 have been patrolling the streets of Corona and Elmhurst in their trademark cherry red berets and jackets, said members of his group had also noticed the recent spike.
“It was getting better for a while; now all of a sudden there’s this onslaught of gang activity, and they’re getting bolder,” said Mr. Salinas, adding that he did not know the reason behind the surge beyond the fact that there had been a lot of infighting among the Latin Kings in recent years.
Mr. Salinas said the major gangs in this part of Queens included not only the Latin Kings but also the Bloods, the Crips and Mara Salvatrucha, or MS-13. All the groups have a dress code of sorts: For the Latin Kings, the trademark colors are black and gold; MS-13 favors baby blue; the Bloods, red and pink; and the Crips, blue.
But gang members have become subtler in how they display their colors. When Mr. Salinas was young, he said, members might wear their gang name on the back of a jacket. Now, gang affiliation can be signaled by beads of a certain color, or a cap, or even the way a shirt is creased. “They’ve learned how to become chameleons,” he said.
Whatever the variations in gang fashion, fear is still the common thread for local residents. Priscilla Carrow, a manager at Elmhurst Hospital Center and the mother of two, keeps her 16-year-old daughter close to home after dark. “She’s with me, or we have to communicate where she is by cellphone,” said Ms. Carrow, who lives with her daughter in the LeFrak City housing complex in Corona. Gang members hang out on street corners and in buildings around the complex, she said, adding that on a recent evening she was awakened by a brawl outside involving 20 to 30 young men.
Another Corona resident, Shawn Williams, a community activist who has two daughters, ages 16 and 10, says she is scared every time they go outside. In the elementary school her younger daughter attends, Ms. Williams said, some children have taken to flashing gang signs.
In the upper grades, gangs cast a long shadow over school life. “We see the fear in our students’ eyes,” said Manuel Guerra, who for the past decade has taught English as a second language at the High School for Arts and Business. Mr. Guerra was one of the teachers who kept pressure on the wounds of the teenager who was stabbed there in late March until the paramedics arrived.
IT’S a school that used to have a minor gang problem, but now it’s serious and growing,” Mr. Guerra added. There are some “very aggressive, hard-core cases” at the school, he said, and he described the overall situation as “demoralizing.”
Maria Bolanos, the mother of the boy who was stabbed at the school, has sent her son to live out of state. In addition to losing his gallbladder, the teenager has trouble moving the fingers of his right hand because of a severed tendon in his arm. Ms. Bolanos, an Ecuadorean immigrant and mother of four, said she feared that the person who attacked her son would go after her daughter.
“He told her she was next,” Ms. Bolanos said.