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A 13-year-old boy shot to death in the District's Trinidad section in July was killed by a crew of young men from another part of the city who were roaming Trinidad in a car, firing indiscriminately at people in "an attack on the neighborhood," police said yesterday.
In what detectives said was an unusual incident even in a city where retaliatory street violence is common, five men from the Kenilworth-Parkside area who were feuding with a group in Trinidad allegedly vented their anger by randomly shooting people in the early morning darkness of July 19.
The gunfire wounded four adults and killed young Alonzo Robinson, who lived in Alabama and had come to Washington to visit his cancer-stricken great-grandmother in Trinidad. The boy's mother and an uncle were among the wounded.
"Just a tragic, tragic death on a tragic, tragic night,"Mayor Adrian M. Fenty (D) said at a news conference yesterday at which police announced arrests in the case.
"All indications at this point are this was a retaliation from one neighborhood on another," Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier said. She said "there are no indications" that any of the victims was a party to the dispute between the rival Northeast Washington groups. "It was an assault against the Trinidad neighborhood," Lanier said.
It was all pretty depressing in DC during the summer these shootings seemed much too common.......... the police set up roadblocks to protect the Trinidad area..... civil liberties activists questioned the legality of such road blocks......... but the Chief of police was determined to break the cycle of violence........ I went out one day with the Police Chief Cathy Lanier for the Times of London....... I was with her in her office when she learned another child had been murdered....... we rolled immediately to the scene of the murder here she is pictured above giving a press conference at the crime scene in July minutes after the discovery of the body.
Today still many of the shootings remain unexplained but the Chief and her team must feel some satisfaction that arrests have been made in the case of the murder of this child Alfonzo Robinson.
Cheers Jez XX
PS.......http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/12/03/AR2008120301751.html This is the link to the Washington Post Article that I nicked the todays news reporting from...... Im trying to be a little ethical here as I sat next to the publisher of the Washington post the other day at a fab dinner party....... she was fab too ...... and if by some strange aberration you are reading this Katharine Im sorry to have just nicked your content..... I am just too tired to make any attempt to rewrite it....... hehehe...... :-) Jez XX
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.... The photography and slightly mad life of reportage artist Jez Coulson ....