Next, we discoursed of Men and Mockingbirds. It may seem that there's a world of difference between Mockingbirds and carloads of gangsters circulating around Montgomery County, but a little contrast and compare leads to advice to police, not that they would either want or need advice from me.
Montgomery County, Maryland, is of long standing a generally peaceful place, so much so that we have a shortage of home-grown murderers. Thus, we've had to import them; illegally, if necessary.
According to Montgomery County police, the (alleged) murderers of 15-year-old Dennys Guzman-Saenz stabbed him 72 times and then headed home for a hearty meal, using the murder weapons in food preparation.
(Back when I used to live in the District, I'd hear people talk about relatives who were so mean that "that mother so mean, he drive by and shoot a mother eleven times and say "that remind me" and pull in at the next hot dog stand, order a chili cheese with extra ketchup". People would usually respond, "Yeah, damn, he cold alright...")
Inexplicably, the Washington Post coverage manages to both mention the escape from prison in El Salvador by one of the (alleged) murderers, and also to not mention anything about the immigration status of those charged in this heinous crime. Well, either they are citizen criminals or they are inadmissible alien criminal if they aren't citizens. Participation in crimes of violence -- or moral turpitude -- disqualify aliens from being present in the USA, unless of course they are locked up nice and tight like these piece of shit thug-ass gangstas.
Also locked up nice and tight, Jose Garcia-Perlera, 34, was convicted of murder and other charges related to at least four home invasions. The homes invaded were those of elderly women ranging in age from 63 to 92 who all lived alone.
Yet another predator taken off of the street. Specializing in the most defenseless people he could find who weren't actually in wheelchairs or on crutches, Perlera was unfortunately typical of a certain type of nasty illegal alien criminal. Astute readers will recall our coverage of the heinous Arson-Murder last Thanksgiving. Illegal aliens, also. And then before that was the infamous Hallowe'en murder of 15-year-old Tai Lam. Are we starting to notice a pattern here? Oh, wait, there was that stabbing murder in Aspen Hill, even more foreign gang violence. I do believe that the pattern-detector system is starting to work.
And then there are the Homegrown "Hosers", as a Canadian might say: Take off, eh, you hosers?
To digress: I was living in Denver, Colorado, back in 1994 or so, when their gang problem really started to take off. There was one particularly sad case when some fool was "sagging" at the Capital Hill King Soopers grocery store, and someone remarked on how stupid he looked, and the sagger shot him dead.
At least at this time, "sagging" wasn't a fashion statement, but a challenge. The economy had taken a pretty severe downturn, and a lot of out-of-work Californians had migrated to Denver to look for work; Denver was growing rapidly at the time and had one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation. Part of that migration was both Crips and Bloods as well as other national-scope gangs, and "sagging" was part of the process of battling over turf. If someone could "sag" in their colors and not get shot, they could claim it as their own turf. Capital Hill in Denver was on one side of the infamous Colfax Avenue, and on the other side were the seriously infested Five Points and Skyland neighborhoods, which were mostly local crews who stayed out of Capital Hill due to long histories with the local police. The newcomers just didn't care, or more likely, didn't know where they were, or what balance they were upsetting.
Of course, the largest and most entrenched gangs here in the DC area are college fraternal organizations. University of Maryland, College Park, is nationally notorious for their willingness to riot at the drop of a hat.
About graduation time every year, Aspen Hill gets infested with, well, people who are probably too damned old to be sporting their frat hats, but there you go, some people never get forced to grow up.
Frequently, we get such things as "Dust Wars" on a fairly widespread scale. Basically, imagine that some guy comes home from college out of state, and as soon as he gets here, his homeboys tell him all sorts of stuff, some true, some not, and probably with most of it exaggerated for purposes of excitement in story-telling. Next thing you know, he's out with the posse patrolling "da hood", much to the discomfiture of people who actually live here and are sick to death of this bullshit.
To make matters worse, generally when they do this sort of thing, they piss off the immigrant gangstas and they retaliate in kind, and the next thing you know, everyone's escalating as best they can. Most of the locals have enough sense to go inside and stay out of the way of something conceptually comparable to the scenes from old Western Movies where a bunch of cowboys have just come in from the trail with pockets full of pay and proceed to get blind drunk and then shoot up the town when the saloons kick 'em out. Where's a decent sheriff when you need one?
Some 22 years ago, this annoyed me enough to write a work of fiction, though readers are strongly advised to keep in mind while reading that truth can be far stranger than fiction, and that this is a story about deception, and a slow descent into madness under the onslaught of asymmetric non-lethal weapons being used in a low-intensity conflict in urban terrain.
Please enjoy (or be terrified by) Strangers in Town.
More to come?
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