Related Story: A glib tongue can win you gang informants — and gang secrets
By Michael A. Fuoco
The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
PITTSBURGH — As police arrested one suspect and sought another in the shooting death Monday of a 12-year-old Perry South girl, authorities announced an intensified effort to combat a sharp upswing in gang violence.
District Attorney Stephen A. Zappala Jr. said local, state and federal officials will use whatever is necessary to break up gangs and the accompanying violence that resulted in two shooting deaths this week.
Gang retaliation seems to have been the motive in the killing Tuesday night of 15-year-old Ernest Tolliver as he sat in a car in a Homewood fast-food restaurant drive-through lane. Police say he may have been targeted because he may have been present when another juvenile was wounded about a week earlier in Homewood.
“This is not the end. This matter will not stop with the death of this child,” Mr. Zappala said at a news conference called by Pittsburgh police officials to announce the issuance of arrest warrants in Jolesa Barber’s killing. “That child was innocent in every sense of the word.”
Pittsburgh Police Chief Nate Harper yesterday identified two suspects -- a man and a male juvenile -- in the slaying of Jolesa and the wounding of her mother, Kimberly Wade, 42.
Anthony “Tone Bone” Wilson, 30, was taken into custody without incident at his North Side home yesterday at 12:30 a.m. The other suspect, Michael “Meese” Gist, 15, of the North Side, remained at large. Detectives had hoped to take him into custody at McNaugher Middle School, where he is a student, but he didn’t show for classes.
Mr. Zappala vowed to use an investigating grand jury, wiretaps, the gun task force and federal agencies as “a matter of priority.”
“We’re pledged to use all the assets we can,” he said. “Whatever assets we need will be brought to bear.”
Chief Harper said his officers would be joined by state police, Allegheny County sheriff’s deputies, county police and federal agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives in flooding the North Side as an anti-gang blitz.
“The community has said enough is enough,” Chief Harper said at the news conference. “Witnesses came forward which is why we’re making arrests quickly.
“Without the public’s help we’d still be doing interviews.”
The suspects are charged with using an assault-type rifle and a 9 mm handgun to fire into a rowhouse at 845 Brightridge St., killing Jolesa and wounding her mother. The two, who live within walking distance, were visiting Jolesa’s sister, Rayneisa Wade, 22, who resides in the rowhouse.
Chief Harper said the suspects are members of the North Charles Street Crips, a gang violently feuding with the Tre 8’s gang from Perrysville. The house was shot at, Chief Harper said, in retaliation for some unnamed offense. A male relative of the victims who also was inside is believed to have been the target, he said.
Drugs are fueling the violence, Chief Harper said, noting that since the beginning of the year police had confiscated 700 bags of heroin in that police zone. By contrast, other zones each had, at most, confiscated 100 bags.
“You can see the tremendous amount of activity. We have a lot of work to do,” he said.
According to an affidavit supporting charges against Mr. Wilson, the following occurred:
A witness told detectives that there has been an ongoing feud within the neighborhood that involved some of the family members who reside in the house where the victims were shot.
Police said that on the day before Monday’s shooting, shots had been fired at another townhome on Brightridge.
The witness said about a half-hour before the shooting was reported, a woman who lives where the shots were fired earlier was spotted in the street in front of 845 Brightridge yelling for its occupants to come out and fight.
Also spotted there, the witness said, was Mr. Wilson and three other men who walked behind the rowhouses.
Marked police cars arrived on the scene in response to the commotion and remained on the scene for about eight minutes. A short time later, the shootings occurred about 7:15 p.m. The witness said Mr. Wilson, holding an assault-style rifle, a second man with a handgun and a third man all ran from the scene.
Police later found an assault-type rifle and a 9 mm Glock handgun behind the rowhouses.
Police said Rayneisa Wade moved to Brightridge in July from another North Side neighborhood, and police believe she may have been a target because of that. Police do not believe she had any involvement with gangs, although they said it was possible that a family member might.
Samantha Barber, Kimberly’s sister and Jolesa’s aunt, doesn’t know what started the feud on Brightridge Street, or who the true target was the night Jolesa was killed.
All she knows is what she and her family have lost a little girl they called “G” who never said a bad thing about anybody, who loved to run track and play Jeopardy and tickle her sisters to make them laugh.
“They took a child that’s just full of life it leaves such a hole,” Ms. Barber said. “This is just not right. G wasn’t a child out in the street that nobody cared about. This was a child that everybody loved. This child was going to make a difference because she was already making a difference.”
Kimberly, her sister said, came through surgery well today; the bullet “hit all muscle, by the grace of God,” and surgeons were able to close the wound. Kimberly Wade is still in the hospital recovering but should be able to attend her daughter’s funeral, which is still being arranged.
Her sister isn’t angry at the people who killed Jolesa, said Ms. Barber. She’s too deeply wounded to feel merely angry.
“Anger, I don’t even know that’s had a chance to come to play,” Ms. Barber said. “There’s too much hurt and too much loss for that.”
Police already were working to curb problems in the neighborhood prior to Monday’s shooting, said Cmdr. Catherine McNeilly, who supervises the North Side station.
"[The area] is one of our hot spots, our sore spots for a year or longer,” Cmdr. McNeilly said. “There have been ongoing [police operations] planned for that community. We’ve been deploying every tool we have.”
Cmdr. McNeilly would not discuss timing or other specifics of those operations, but said officers from the North Side station, narcotics and vice and street response units have worked on and around Brightridge Street for months to stem drug sales and violence. Uniformed police have been deployed in saturation patrols and plainclothes officers have roamed in unmarked cars whenever possible, she said.
“You attack and pull out ... randomly, like a blitz,” she said, adding that police must continually reassess and shift resources when trouble pops up elsewhere. “We do this with several areas on the North Side. We’ve been successful in many areas, but you know you can’t get them all.”
“How sorry I am that it has come to this. I know how frustrated, how rueful I am that it has come to this,” she said of the girl’s death. “The community has been fervently working with us. I think they realize, as much as we do, that we need them to help us.”
Chief Harper said police are worried about retaliation in Jolesa’s killing.
“Emotions are running very high,” he said. “She was an innocent victim, an honor roll student. We’re trying to get ahead of retaliating.”
Unlike the gangs of the 1990s, today’s versions are “not organized in the sense there is a hierarchy, of somebody in charge,” said Assistant Police Chief Maurita Bryant. Instead, they are neighborhood groups who hang together and, in many cases, deal drugs together.
As for the violence, anything can cause it, she said.
“All it takes is for somebody to look at somebody the wrong way to ignite this kind of activity,” Assistant Chief Bryant said. “If you’re from Charles Street area you don’t come up to the Perrysville Area.”
And if you do “something like this happens.”
In Homewood, the gangs are known as the Dallas Boyz, Hilltop Boyz, Kelly O’s and Race Street Crips, among others.
Copyright 2008 The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette