Out on bail, man jailed in second gang related shooting.
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posted by Bob at Tuesday, July 10, 2007
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Out on bail, man jailed in 2nd gang shooting
St. Paul 19-year-old suspected in weekend violence that left two people wounded
BY MARA H. GOTTFRIED
Pioneer Press
Article Last Updated: 07/10/2007 08:44:56 AM CDT
Kong Meng Thao was charged with shooting two people in February at his father's funeral. He bailed himself out of jail in April. Then, police say, he went out and did it again.
The 19-year-old man is back in jail, accused of shooting two others this weekend in St. Paul.
Both shootings were gang-related, and all four victims were expected to recover, according to police and court records. One of the victims in the earlier shooting was a passing motorist struck by a stray bullet.
After the first shooting, prosecutors requested bail be set at $50,000, which Ramsey County District Judge John Van de North granted.
The bail was a "substantial amount" because of the seriousness of the alleged crime, Ramsey County Attorney Susan Gaertner said Monday.
One factor prosecutors weigh in deciding how much bail to ask for is the defendant's potential danger to the community, which is "one of the many reasons this is a difficult job," Gaertner said.
"If prosecutors and judges and bail evaluators had a crystal ball and could predict something like this, our job would be a whole lot easier," she said.
Without reviewing the information prosecutors used in requesting bail in the Kong Meng Thao case, Gaertner said, she couldn't speculate about whether $50,000 was an appropriate amount.
"Obviously, it wasn't enough to keep him in jail so he didn't pull out his gun again," she said.
If defendants use a bail bondsman, the industry standard requires the defendant to post 10 percent of the bail amount, said Adam Godes, bail bond agent for Absolute Bail Bonds in St. Paul. Kong Meng Thao used a bondsman, according to the Ramsey County Jail, but the details of the arrangement were not available.
Kong Meng Thao, of St. Paul, was charged April 12 with two counts of second-degree assault. He was arrested the same day and released from jail April 19.
Bail's primary purpose is to ensure a defendant returns to court for hearings and trial, Gaertner said. Prosecutors consider the defendant's ties to the community, prior criminal record and instances of failing to appear in court, she said.
"One thing that's important to remember is we don't have preventative detention," Gaertner said. "You can't set bail extraordinarily high on every person in order to prevent any possibility of further crime occurring."
Kong Meng Thao didn't have a criminal record as an adult before he was charged in April. When he was 17, he pleaded guilty to motor vehicle theft in Ramsey County.
Prosecutors will consider charges today in the most recent shooting, Gaertner said. Kong Meng Thao has been locked up in the Ramsey County Jail since St. Paul police arrested him on suspicion of assault shortly after 12:30 a.m. Saturday. A decision on setting bail would follow the filing of any new charges.
During a gathering outside a home in the 600 block of Wells Street, Kong Meng Thao allegedly shot a 17-year-old boy and a 37-year-old man about 12:15 a.m. Saturday, said Tom Walsh, a police spokesman.
Both victims were taken to Regions Hospital. Police arrested three other people in connection with the shooting, Walsh said.
In the Feb. 17 shooting, Kong Meng Thao had been attending his father's funeral at Metro Funeral Home, 1310 Frost Ave. in Maplewood, according to a criminal complaint.
Kong Meng Thao is an admitted Asian Crips gang member, and several of his gang associates were at the funeral, the complaint said.
His cousin arrived to pay his respects, along with members of his gang, the Purple Brothers, the complaint said.
Kong Meng Thao approached his cousin and a 20-year-old man and asked why they were showing him disrespect, the complaint said. One of Kong Meng Thao's friends struck the cousin's younger brother and a fight started, the complaint said.
Pulling out a semiautomatic handgun, Kong Meng Thao started shooting, the complaint said. He shot the 20-year-old in the chest, the complaint said.
A 40-year-old man who had been driving nearby at Frost Avenue and English Street was shot in the arm when a stray bullet went through his car's door.
Mara H. Gottfried covers St. Paul public safety. She can be reached at mgottfried@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5262.
$50,000 bail for a violent offender is low regardless of whether there is a past criminal history or not. A known gang member shooting a semi-automatic gun at his fathers funeral hitting two people one innocent person driving by should of been warning enough that this individual is at high risk re-offending. What ever happened to deporting these people when they are not law abidding in our country?
Now if he were to be your tenant and had behavior of that type on your property the odds are the homeowner would end up paying more then the offenders bail by the city declaring the home a propblem property then ordering a complete code compliance. The courts couldn't realize that this guy was a problem but a landlord better be able to predict the future behavior of people!
Not only that, but with all the power money and guns the city and police have, they have not been able to bring the underclass under control to the satisfaction of the neighbors with respect to crime and behasvior issues, but they expect the landlord to do it in no time flat!
9:54 What country would you like to deport these American citizens to? He's a criminal, he needs to go to jail and stay.
There's another post with a guy who is finally convicted of murder. His last name is Dutch (or Belgium). Should we assume that he needs to go back to Holland or Belgium?
Idiot.
(the following does not include individual criminals of any group)
If there are any immigrants that have earned the right to come here and live, its the Hmong. If you don't know why, then maybe we should ship you back to where ever you came from since you don't know your 20th century American Histoy.
Again, idiot.
No you just sit back and enjoy watching these people that have no respect for life kill, they come here and collect whatever they can get while mulitplying faster then rats, then they don't spend their money here they send it back to their own country! Yes I am sick of feeling as though I am in a foreign country everytime I walk out my door! The generations have changed these gang bangers get more rights then a person that has paid taxes here in St.Paul all their life, try to enforce a code compliance on their home or take their home and they will cry discrimination and win.
It could get worse the behavior of gangs continues in all states;
Mother, son victims of gang rape in Miami
Associated Press
Last update: July 10, 2007 – 2:44 PM
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. -- Mother and son huddled together, battered and beaten, in the bathroom — sobbing, wondering why no one came to help.
Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are thin, the screen doors flimsy in this violence-plagued housing project on the edge of downtown.
For three hours, the pair say, they endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son was beaten in another room.
Then, mother and son were reunited to endure the unspeakable: At gunpoint, the woman was forced to perform oral sex on the boy, she later told a TV station.
Afterward, they were doused with household cleansers, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to scrub the crime scene, or maybe simply to torture the victims even more. The solutions burned the boy's eyes.
The thugs then fled, taking with them a couple of hundred dollars' worth of cash, jewelry and cell phones.
In the interview with WPTV, the mother described how she and her son sobbed in the bathroom, too shocked to move. Then, in the dark of night, they walked a mile to the hospital because they had no phone to call for help.
Two teenagers — a 14-year-old and a 16-year-old — have been arrested. Eight others are being sought.
Welcome to Dunbar Village, a place residents call hell.
———
"So a lady was raped. Big deal," resident Paticiea Matlock said with disgust. "There's too much other crime happening here."
Built in 1940 to house poor blacks in then-segregated West Palm Beach, Dunbar Village's 226 units sit just blocks from million-dollar condos on the Intracoastal Waterway. Billionaires lounge on beachfront property just a few miles away on Palm Beach.
The public housing project's one- and two-story barracks-style buildings are spread across 17 grassy, tree-lined acres surrounded by an 8-foot iron fence. The average rent is about $150 a month.
Almost 60 percent of the households in the area that includes Dunbar Village were below the poverty level in 2000, according to Census figures. Only 19 percent of the area's residents had high school degrees. About 9 percent of the adults were unemployed, nearly triple the state average.
Teenagers with gold-plated teeth wander the streets. Drug dealers hang out on nearby sidewalks. Trash bin lids are open. Flies hover over dirty diapers. Clothes dry on sagging lines.
Since the June 18 attack, police have increased patrols in the area, blocked off one entrance and will soon install surveillance cameras.
"It took this to make that happen?" Matlock, a 32-year-old single mother of three, snarled.
As in other blighted neighborhoods across the country where criminals seem to have free rein, residents here live in fear. Snitches get stitches, they say. Or worse.
"I try to be in my house no later than 7, and I don't come out," said Citoya Greenwood, 33, who lives in Dunbar with her 4-year-old daughter. "I don't even answer my door anymore." On the Fourth of July, "we didn't know if we was hearing gunshots or fireworks."
———
Avion Lawson, 14, and Nathan Walker, 16, will be charged as adults in the assault and gang rape, prosecutors said. They are jailed without bail.
Lawson's DNA was found in a condom at the crime scene, and he admitted involvement, authorities say. Police say Walker's palm print was discovered inside the home. He denies being there. His attorney says he will plead not guilty. Lawson's public defender did not return telephone messages.
Walker and Lawson did not live at Dunbar but visited often. Lawson stayed with his grandmother there. Walker came to hang out and play basketball. Dunbar has become the place to be for wayward black teens, residents and neighborhood kids say.
Walker and Lawson both grew up mostly fatherless, bouncing between homes. Walker's family sometimes lived in old cars or abandoned houses, said his mother, Ruby Nell Walker.
"We've never really had a real home," said Naporcha Walker, Nathan's 15-year-old sister.
Continued: Mother, son victims of gang rape in Miami
He dropped out of school after spending three years in seventh grade. The family lives on food stamps and recently had to pawn their television and radio, Ruby Walker said.
"I just feel like he was at the wrong place at the wrong time. ... My son is not a rapist," she said.
Ruby Walker said she herself was raped twice, at ages 7 and 12. She said that just days before the Dunbar attack, someone tried to rape her again, and "my son came to me crying and said he wouldn't ever do that to anyone."
She has had her own problems with the law — at least nine arrests on charges such as disorderly conduct, aggravated assault and battery, according to state records.
Avion Lawson was a headstrong kid, never listening to his mother, said his cousin, Cassandra Ellis.
"I knew he was bad, but I never pictured him to be that type of bad," Ellis said. She said one traumatic experience may have scarred him — watching his older sister fatally stab a boyfriend.
"It was an accident. She killed her boyfriend. They was fighting, there was a knife," Ellis said. "He was there when it happened."
———
City officials are quick to note that neither Lawson nor Walker lived at Dunbar, and say they are doing their best to make the place safe.
As quickly as overhead lights can be replaced, they are shot out, so officials are now considering bulletproof lighting.
"Isn't that quite a commentary on what the situation is there?" said City Commissioner Molly Douglas, whose district includes part of Dunbar. "Dunbar Village is a hell hole. They shouldn't have to live in fear."
More officers are hitting the streets, but "I just bow my head sometimes and think we just couldn't possibly have enough officers ever to take care of all of this," Douglas said.
Laurel Robinson, head of the city's housing authority, said that up until about four years ago, the federal government provided the city with $160,000 a year for security in public housing projects, but Congress did away with the money.
"Every family housing project in the country has suffered because of it," she said.
————
The rape victim and her son have not returned to their apartment since the attack.
The woman fled Port-au-Prince, Haiti, with her son seven years ago in search of a better life. With no money, they landed in Dunbar. The two almost instantly became targets for crime, standing out as Haitians among the mostly American-born blacks in the housing project. Her car and the boy's bicycle were stolen. Their house was ransacked.
On the night of the attack, she was lured outside by a teenager who knocked on the door and said her car had a flat. Nine more teens, their faces shrouded with T-shirts, barged in, she told authorities. They brandished guns and demanded money, then went beyond the imaginable.
"I was so scared," the woman told WPTV. "Some of them had sex with me twice, some of them had sex with me three times. They're beating me up. They make me do those things over and over. The man with the big gun, he put the gun inside of me."
She said that when she was forced to perform oral sex on her own son, she told the boy: "I know you love me, and I love you, too."
Investigators say it is not clear exactly why the thugs picked her house.
The boy's sight has returned. Both mother and son are seeking counseling.
"I have to try and talk to him every day. He's so angry," the woman said. "He said we never should have moved to Dunbar Village."
———
AP researchers Judith Ausuebel and Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
"...they are the lowest of humanity, unable to present themselves in civilized society. They come here due to the fact they have destroyed their own country due to their breeding like rodents and intellectual shortcomings."
That comment was made by a German resident living on the bluffs about the Irish moving into the Phalen Creek area in 1884.
Back then it was the Irish and Italians 'stealing' from us by homesteading and taking jobs. The were Catholic and poor so big families were the norm.
I say it again, you guys are idiots. The Hmong are some of the greatest anti-Communist Freedom Fighters we had, and saved thousands of lives (our American soldiers)during Vietnam. Showing patriotism for a country they never been to and a concept that was completely foreign.
The Hmong people are good people.
They came to our City and purchased property in neighborhoods others didn't want to live or do business in.
The Hmong people brought life back to the decaying business community of University Ave.
In all honesty, the Hmong people have far better work ethics than most Americans.
Having been in business and managing several businesses. I would hire a Hmong or Mexican worker before I'd hire an American who has lived here a life time.
I guess that I am blessed I don't live in a bubble. As I type this post there is 3 races of people represented here in my home. All of them family.
All races have their bad apples. Troubled people come in all colors.
In our hearts and minds we are all the same.
I am not being judgemental of anyone here. It took me many years to understand my own prejudices.
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