Mayor blames nigger music; says niggerfuxated city is in a civil war
Chandell Wiley, and her niglet Tavares Carter
RIVIERA BEACH -- Two days into the new year, and this is the poster child for murder: 8-month-old Tavares Carter, who was gunned down in his car seat, shot in the back.
His mother and four others were also injured in the shooting, when a maroon Lincoln Navigator drove by, and gunmen sprayed the Avenue H home with assault rifles on Tuesday, news partner NewsChannel 5 reporter Jamie Holmes reported on Friday.
"They called 9-1-1, started doing CPR. I imagine it was total chaos," says Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office Segeant Scott Smith. "The mother herself is a child. She's 18 years of age."
Investigators have few leads, reporter Holmes says.
It could have been drugs, or gangs, or some past grievance which prompted the shooting. What they've done is plastered Tavaras' face on bus stops, hoping his death won't be in vain.
"This is the face of innocence. If it doesn't break your heart, nothing will," says Mike Wallace with the Violent Crimes Task Force.
But at a press conference Wednesday with investigators, there was also plenty of finger pointing.
This drive-by, says Riviera Beach Mayor Michael Brown, was motivated in-part by rap music. Blame Sony records, he says, claiming its fuel for the fire in a city in a civil war.
"They've been indoctrinated with this notion (that) this is how it's supposed to be; this is how you settle your differences. They don't see any difference shooting up a car as they would going to the park and hitting a baseball," says Brown.
But blaming rap music and preaching about the problem won't solve this murder. Detectives need someone out there to do that.
Someone who realizes their own fear, should pale in comparison to what happened to Tavares Carter.
"We need help. We need help. Someone out there knows something, and they need to call us," says Wallace. If you have any information in this case, call CrimeStoppers at 1-800-458-NIGS.
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The Palm Beach Post Hints At The Relevance Of TNB
January 05, 2007
On a slab, not on a music video
To discourage young
black teens from a life of gangs and violence, Gwen Tucker took seven boys last week for a reality tour of the Palm Beach County morgue. This week, she could take them to 1630 Avenue H West.
That's the address of the Riviera Beach home where the county's first homicide of the year was committed. Outside that home, where Riviera Beach police say drugs have been found and sold,
Tavares Carter Jr. died, eight months to the day after his birth, buckled into a car seat in the back of a 1998 Oldsmobile.
At the morgue, the 14- and 15-year-old black males escorted by Ms. Tucker learned how a coroner performs an autopsy, stores dead bodies in a locked cooler, weighs them on a floor scale and photographs their bruises and bullet holes for evidence. Visiting the crime scene, the boys could learn how those bodies end up there.
Outside the home, all of the wrong ingredients mixed on New Year's Day:
guns, drugs and wounded pride.
Some previous act took place, police believe, that prompted Monday night's claim-anyone drive-by shooting as retaliation.
Witnesses told police that two men began shooting at the house from a maroon Lincoln Navigator around 11:30 p.m. At least 37 shots later, little Tavares was dead, his mother and four others wounded.
Some questions seem trite in the face of such a tragedy, the answers meaningless after the fact, even irrelevant. But my mind asked, anyway: Why was an 8-month-old out at midnight? As all of the adults went "running for their lives," as a sheriff's spokesman said, did anyone try to protect the baby? In a hail of three dozen bullets, could anyone have saved the baby?
And Tavares' father may have been sincere in his remorse, from a Martin County jail cell, over not getting "a chance to enjoy my son," but how I wish such sentiment would have kept him out of
jail and on daddy duty from the start.
Little Tavares' parents, Tavares Carter Sr. and Chandell Wiley, both have December birthdays, hers on the 7th and his on the 12th. But though their birthdays are just five days apart,
Tavares Sr. is nine years older than Chandell. So what was he doing at 25 getting a 16-year-old pregnant? And why wasn't that crime - because it is illegal in Florida for a grown man to impregnate such a young teenager - prosecuted?
It perhaps does no good to voice such thoughts after an innocent baby has been shot dead. None of the answers revives the wide-eyed, chubby-cheeked Tavares or relieves the pain of wounds from neck to leg that his mother, her friend, her friend's boyfriend and two other men suffered.
And, yes, the focus now should be on finding the shooters and preventing more violence. Even without the publicized, self-destructive
"no snitching" campaign among gang members and some wannabes, the fact that police believe that the shooting might have been retaliation could be enough to scare witnesses from coming forward. So, what are police and the sheriff's office doing to help the community feel safe enough to speak up? And what are local clergy and community leaders doing to encourage - even demand - that response?
None of the questions diminishes the outrage, but the circumstances that preceded the shooting add their own level of outrage.
Men preying on young girls is a part of the gangsta life glorified from music video screens to urban and suburban streets. Preventing teen pregnancy - too often by grown men - has a role in preventing crime. In Palm Beach County, according to a study last year by the county's Criminal Justice Commission, high crime and high teen pregnancy rates go hand in hand. Prevent teen pregnancy and stop a whole spiral of despair from a lack of education to poverty to violence.
Shipping niggers back would do wonders!
Ms. Tucker's Boca Raton-based nonprofit, PROPEL - People Reaching Out to Provide Education and Leadership - aims to show that thug life usually leads to death or jail, not wealth and women. In death and in jail, Tavares Carter Jr. and Tavares Carter Sr. are proof.
