Police say latino gangs responsible for park shooting

BY DENNIS GEISINGER

A bullet that wounded a baby in Powderhorn Park on the evening of Aug. 7, a bullet that was fired into a family group celebrating a birthday, has been solidly connected by Minneapolis Police to local members of a Latino street gang.
“The information that we have is that this was the result of a confrontation between Surenos 13 and Vatos Locos,” said Minneapolis Park Police Lt. Robert Goodfell.

According to Lt. Goodfell, the shooter and the people attending the birthday party knew one another, the shooter allegedly was at the party before the shooting occurred. Police say that an argument that started during the gathering escalated into threats of reprisal and culminated in shots fired from 35th Street into the park grounds by an alleged gang member who had first sped away and then returned.
“We all know that the Latino gangs are here in the neighborhoods,” said Lt. Goodfell, who attended a public informational meeting at the Powderhorn Park building on the Wednesday evening following the incident. “We don’t think that these individuals [the shooting suspect and victims] were unrelated,” Goodfell said.

“One arrest has been made,” said Sgt. David Voss, the officer in charge of the investigation, in a phone interview with Southside Pride on Aug. 27. “I don’t believe it’s the shooter, but someone else who was involved,” Voss said. At the Aug. 13 public meeting, Lt. Goodfell told the some 20 neighborhood residents who had assembled that police had already identified the probable shooter.
The baby, 5-month-old Kaleah Morrow, who was accompanied by her father, mother and older brother to the same meeting, had been struck by the bullet in her left leg while in the arms of her grandmother. While answering questions at the meeting, her mother, Kelli, ran her finger from her daughter’s hip to her thigh to illustrate the path of the bullet. From all indications, the wound did not cause any permanent damage to the child, and she appeared happy and healthy during her appearance at the park building.

“There are more than a thousand Latino gang members in the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area,” said Metro Gang Task Force investigator Francisco Porras. “Surenos 13 is the largest group. They have a very violent history in California. They’re ruthless. There’s also the Vatos Locos and the Latin Kings and a number of smaller groups and sub-groups,” Porras said. “They break into cliques according to who they associate with,” he said.

A computer search of both “Surenos” and “Vatos Locas” serves up literally hundreds of gang images stored on youth-oriented file sharing sites like MySpace and YouTube, and myriad references to videos, blogs and a wide selection of available gang merchandise.

“One thing about Latino gangs is they are extremely proud of their gang affiliations, like it’s part of their family or history,” said Porras. “And they’re very up front about it. I ran into some guys wearing colors I’d never seen before when I was walking around a recent street festival on Lake Street. When I asked them who they were, they told me they belonged to a street gang and gave me the name of the gang and everything,” Porras said.

“This makes the Latino gangs very different form other street gangs,” said Porras. “For instance with the black gangs, you could pull out their toenails and they’re still not going to give you any information,” he said.
“One thing for sure you can say about these gang people,” said Lt. Goodfell, “if you see them around, they have one thing on their minds and that’s committing crime.”