Ms. Zalika Jamella Patterson, age 26, of Brooklyn NY and Mr. Shawn Christopher McClean, age 26, of Watertown NY were arrested and charged with Grand Larceny 4th after Macy’s Loss Prevention Officers (in Victor) stopped them for shoplifting and found them to have $1253.50 worth of stolen property from Macy’s in their possession. The defendants were transported to the O
Ontario County Jail for prearraignment detention.

Duo allegedly shoplifted from Eastview Mall

3/5/2012 5:53:37 AM
Ms.Zalika Jamella Patterson and Mr.Christopher Sean McClean were arrested, and charged with Grand Larceny 4th after Macy’s Loss Prevention Officers stopped them for shoplifting and found them to have $1253.50 worth of stolen property from Macy’s in their possession. The defendants were transported to the Ontario County Jail for prearraignment detention.

Well Met Zalika is locked up again and she friends dem have it on the downlow Brenton need to come talk the tings them.She send she son Tobago and take up thiefing fulltime.Hope Immigration is GOOD to her!

I was hired to kill Omar Davies
Former killer tells how gangs recruit teen boys
BY COREY ROBINSON Sunday Observer staff reporter [email protected]
Sunday, March 18, 2012

A young, reformed gangster who said he committed his first murder when he was 14 years old confessed that during his days as a member of the Fatherless Crew he was contracted to kill Parliamentarian Dr Omar Davies.
But his refusal to carry out the order earned the wrath of the man who ordered the hit and who, in turn, tried to have the former gangster killed.

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“Somehow I didn’t feel it was right, so I questioned it and he decided to get rid of me. He tried; he used family members, he has used my own, and even the female who I was with,” the former gangster said, adding that he has since fled the area, leaving behind all his ill-gotten gains.
The young man, who is now a Christian, made the revelation in an interview with the Sunday Observer in which he told how young boys in some of Jamaica’s toughest communities are being recruited into gangs by socalled dons.
“The recruiting process is simple,” he said. “There is nothing much to offer any young man who grows up in the community but the gun. Once you have the gun, you have power; and once you have power you can do certain things.”
The absence of a father, he reasoned, was probably the main factor in the decision taken by him and his young friends to get involved with the Fatherless Crew, whose original members have either been arrested or killed by the police or other gangsters.
“We didn’t have any father figure around us, and the don of that particular community saw that and used it to his advantage. He fed us, clothed us, we got money, jewellery, and any female that we chose,” he said.
According to the ex-gangster, he was among 27 teenagers recruited from Arnett Gardens and its environs into the Fatherless Crew — one of the deadliest criminal syndicates ever formed in West Kingston.
The former gangster’s hypothesis was supported by anthropologist and University of the West Indies researcher Dr Herbert Gayle.
“More than half of all gang members, I have found, have no father figure and have a very bad relationship with their mother,” he said. “Meaning that the bond between mother and son is just weak or non-existent, and it is caused from the mother being in prostitution or if she has more than one man in her life. It normally fractures a boy’s love, reliance on their mothers. Boys don’t like to see their mothers have more than one man.”
Gayle pointed to a 2008 study titled ‘Young Birds That Know Storm’, that looked at how teenage boys have navigated hardships in the inner-city communities.
“We have a bit of work now that we are focusing on multiple murderers, young men who have killed more than one person, and that is what we are finding,” he said.
Gayle also said that a 2007 study conducted by himself and Horace Levy from the Peace Management Initiative, as well as the late Professor Barry Chevannes’ 2001 study, called ‘Learning to be a Man’, spoke to the issue of the recruitment of teenage boys into Jamaica’s deadliest criminal gangs.
“The history of recruiting boys has been around for a long time. We first covered it in 1994 in Central Kingston where gangs were trying to recruit boys who were in prominent high schools, because they said that they don’t want just the regular foot soldiers, they also want intelligent youngsters within the gangs,” he said.
“All the gangs that we have studied do very direct and deliberate recruiting. The most vulnerable — the ones they recruit the most — are the ones who have lost their fathers, and have a mother who is not in control,” he added.
“They target these boys because these boys find somebody that they can trust and they will give their lives for their new ‘fathers’. Because the don now fills a void and there is no way to stop the dons from having complete control,” Dr Gayle said.
Deputy Commissioner of Police Glenmore Hinds agreed, saying that the recruitment of young boys into gangs is not new.
“I don’t know if you know the history of the Fatherless Crew, but these were persons in the Rema area whose fathers were killed either by criminals or by the security forces, hence the name fatherless,” he said.
Hinds said that the gang, which is reputed to have committed a number of murders and shootings in the 1990s, still comes up on the police radar, but it is not as prominent as before.
Last week, in his interview with the Sunday Observer, the former gangster said he couldn’t speak for others, but his engagement in crime had its genesis in a need to take care of his late mother, a breast cancer patient, who struggled by herself to take care of him and his younger sister.
“I got involved in crime at the age of 13, and I made my first ‘duppy’ (murder victim) when I was 14 years of age. From there it went on,” said the youth, who is now 29 years old.
According to the reformed gangster, there were only a few rules to which the group had to adhere: “You do not rape; you do not rob if you do not have to; and you never talk about your crimes.”
Added to that, he said, they had to remain humble during ‘training’ — the early years in which the youngsters learnt “how to use a gun, rob, kill, how to con your way out of any situation, and how to lie”.
His training, he said, lasted seven years, and during that time he and the others were contracted to commit numerous murders.
He declined to reveal the number of persons he had killed before giving his life to God last November.
“If I gave you a small number, that would not be correct, and if I gave you a large number, I would only be telling a lie on myself,” he said.
“I can state for the record, though, that I have never killed anybody who never deserved it. I have never taken an innocent man’s life,” said the young man, his gaze steady as he nodded in agreement with himself. “Persons who I have killed were persons who tried to kill me, or it was a case of gang war and it was just a matter of who draw first.”
The dramatic turnaround in his life, he said, was made after a gun battle between members of his gang who were returning from a robbery, and police who had mounted a curfew in a section of Wilton Gardens.
“I ended up losing four friends that day. It wasn’t a pretty sight. I also ended up getting shot in it,” he said, looking away as he noted that the four were among 31 friends he had lost to gun violence in West Kingston.
“I think the thing that really separated me [from crime], was just the love of God and the love that I had. I still had a heart, but I was in it (crime), and it wasn’t easy,” he said.
The reformed gangster said that he has attempted to apologise to some of his victims’ relatives, but noted that his attempts have been met with mixed responses. However, he is undeterred in his efforts. He said, too, that he has been offering counselling and prayer to some of his friends, many of whom have, on occasions, called him asking for guidance.
Maybe one day when he is a minister he will be able to go back into the community to preach, he said. For now, however, he is working to say out of trouble.
“I left with a lot of secrets and those secrets are forgotten, much like my sins are forgotten,” he said. “Certain things I just don’t talk about. I decided the day I got baptised that when I came up (from the pool) everything that is down, stays down. That life is done.”

Read more: http://www.jamaicaobserver.com/news/I-was-hired-to-kill-Omar-Davies#ixzz1pXar58IM

by Ron Carlson
I never pondered all the implications of living in a shrinking global community until I read Mark Leibovich’s hilarious column in the Washington Post exposing the recent explosion of superficial sub-communities springing up in chat rooms near you.

His unmeasured response to social organizational overload invites other beleaguered world citizens to join “the ‘tired-of-the-word-community’ community.”

I never pondered all the implications of living in a shrinking global community until I read Mark Leibovich’s hilarious column in the Washington Post exposing the recent explosion of superficial sub-communities springing up in chat rooms near you. His unmeasured response to social organizational overload invites other beleaguered world citizens to join “the ‘tired-of-the-word-community’ community.”

Sign me up, Mark, and please send my official club card! I love being in on the ground floor of something really big.

I laugh at folks who belong to the “rat terrier community,” the “refrigerator magnet community,” the “red-haired, stumpy-stepchild recovery community,” and the “I’ve been done wrong by the cowboy’s love-song community.” But then I consider my own community involvement, and I recognize I’m just as goofy.

I belong to the “baseball glove collector’s community” (hey, we got our own newsletter!), the “virtual Still’s Disease community” (everybody needs somebody who gots what you got!), the “I can never find my handy pocket-pal organizer community,” the “I cook without a recipe community,” and the ever-expanding “we think the Yankees stink community” – important, all of them.

Human nature is such that we like to congregate with folks who like what we like. Birds of a feather flock together. We’re inclined to hang out with people whose interests and perspectives resemble our own. We bond with fellow pilgrims who march to our beat. We tend to commune with people who share our common beliefs.

Community is clearly a big deal. It often defines us. It’s hard to shake the nerd image if all your running buddies are nerds. The same goes for geeks, jocks, and preppies. We’re wired to believe there is strength in numbers and security in attachments.

Community rules.

Recognizing the central role that community plays in our socialization, we agonize over the trivialization processes at work. It pains us to see community made artificial and token by cheap imitations of the genuine article. There has to be more to community than sharing a favorite ice cream flavor or favoring one brand of pot-licking mutt over another. How low can we go?

Leibovich shares the same concerns, though his parody disguises it well. He quotes sociologist Amitai Etzioni (a charter member of the “no wonder no one can pronounce my name correctly community”) who muses that “community [now] evokes a sense of warm fuzziness on a group of people who have only the most superficial bonds.”

“Sadly,” I might add to the George Washington University scholar’s comments.

He continues by noting “authentic community must include both genuine bonds of affection and shared moral values.”

Now, we’re talking common sense (a community on the obvious decline). Better yet, we’re moving closer to the heart and soul of common-unity.

Genuine community unites, inspires, empowers, and generally brings meaning to the life experience. In many ways, it represents the essence of human relationships.

We need community so badly that we often compromise genuine, authentic community for a cheap, synthetic substitute. In popular terms, we might call many of our contemporary attachments, “knock-offs.”

Sometime in the next few months, America will surpass the three hundred million mark. We’re getting bigger without question. The real question regards our ability and willingness to get smaller at the same time. In other words, can genuine community develop and mature in a highly secularized, pluralistic culture?

Sociologists are having a virtual field day calculating the many factors that fragment and isolate one human being from another. The consensus states we are a fractured populace void of traditional moorings and shared values. We are far more divided than red and blue and black and white.

The traditional “ties that bind” have been left behind. “All for one and one for all” appears to be little more than a historical footnote. We have evolved into a giant country of little special interest groups competing for a shrinking slice of turf. Community has been replaced by special interests and both civility and brotherhood have suffered.
We lack a shared vision.

Since we can’t agree in principle or mission or purpose, we fight and bicker and jockey for position. Such behavior undermines our pursuit of meaningful community.

America displays many of the symptoms of a culture in decline. How long can we sustain an attitude of “every man and woman for themselves?” If we keep cloning Shallow Hal and Phoney Mary Baloney, how can we foster renewal? What will be the consequences of greater self-consumption and decreased concern for our neighbor’s best interests? What is going to happen if we totally abandon our commitment to the common good? A “me first” mentality insures a last place finish.

Why is “Desperate Housewives” the most popular television show in prime time? Is it because life in their cul-de-sac accurately represents fallen community? I’m afraid these desperate and sick creatures are closer to truth than fiction or fantasy. Has hell on earth moved closer to reality?

The booming trend of superficial communities ought to be a wake-up call to the church. We need to look honestly and candidly at ourselves and consider the health of our own faith communities. Are we what we need to be and doing what we ought to be doing? Are we living in contrast and conflict with mainstream insanity? Are we offering a viable alternative to mainline, self-centered culture? Are we providing community for victims of a fragmented and divisive society? Does our common-unity attract hurting, lonesome, anxious folks?

Church is the ultimate community because it links broken people to a healing God. Church is the grace place, a hotbed for reconciliation and redeemed relationships. God says church is about serving others and caring about the common good. Jesus wants His church to be a model of true and genuine community – in His name.

We need to get busy.