News

Stop Snitchin’

The gang responsible for Shawrica Lester's murder made one thing clear: You talk, you die.

By Denise Grollmus 

It's past noon and Sandra Lester is still in her pajamas, a hot pink robe wound around her boundless curves, her eyes glassy from a year of sleeplessness.

The crock-pot fills her dimly lit apartment with the smell of turkey as Lauryn Hill croons from a boombox. Nothing really matters at all, Sandra sings along.

The 31-year-old mother of four clutches a portrait of her daughters, rubbing her finger over the smiling face in the center. "2007 was a horrible, horrible year," she says.

Before Sandra can talk about the worst night of her life, she needs to hold back her tears with good memories. When her daughter Shawrica was a child, she couldn't dance. Instead, she would wiggle around like a trout flopping on a bank. "We called her Tuna," Lester says. "My dad named her that."

Though she raised Shawrica in some of Akron's toughest neighborhoods, where drug dealers rule the playgrounds and prostitutes dot the streets, her daughter never strayed. "I ran a dictatorship," says Mom.

Even at 18, Shawrica wasn't into boys. She was a good student and had a job at McDonald's in Merriman Valley. She was a churchgoing girl, thanks to her grandfather, a minister at Akron Bible Church. And though Shawrica was a beanstalk, her dream was to open a clothing store for plus-size women after graduating from Akron Digital Academy. "She knew how hard it was for me to find clothes," Sandra says. "And she just wanted a place where big women could go to feel good. That's how she was, always thinking of other people."

Sandra shakes her head before lighting a cigarette. "But now I'm left here to see how people don't care."

She was introduced to this notion on January 26, 2007. Sandra had just gotten out of night classes at the University of Akron, where she was studying sociology. Too tired to make dinner, she decided to pick up food at The Wing House. As she stood in line, her cell phone rang.

"Tuna's been ran over," said the caller before they were cut off.

Then came another call: "Tuna's been shot!" the caller screamed. "You gotta get to the hospital!"

Doctors delivered the horrible news as soon as she walked into the emergency room: Shawrica had been shot twice outside The Cage, a dance club for teens on Akron's east side. She was dead.

"I just fell to the floor," Sandra says. "I didn't even ask who did it. I didn't care. I just lost it. I was like a zombie."

A week later, more than 1,000 people attended Shawrica's funeral at Macedonia Baptist Church, three blocks from where she was killed. Many of them had never met Shawrica, only hearing of the tragedy through the news.

Young men sported fresh "R.I.P Shawrica" tattoos, while others wore T-shirts emblazoned with her image. They laid teddy bears and flowers at her coffin, offering Sandra their grief and condolences. "Tuna's death really opened a door for people," she says. "People realized we need to change. People went to counseling. They were getting tattoos. There were all these angry young men I had to speak to."

But that's when the sympathy ended.

More than 200 people were there the night Shawrica was murdered. Police are certain they know who did it. But thanks to threats from the gang responsible, nearly every witness has refused to testify.

It's called the no-snitching rule. And in the Manchester-Thornton neighborhood of Akron, it is the highest rule of law.

Sandra had never heard of The Cage before that night she crumpled in the hospital hallway. Neither had Akron police.

The club, housed on East Market Street, opened just three weeks earlier, thanks to James "Cage" Smith, who hoped to cash in on the city's lack of underage venues by offering a place for kids to mingle and dance, a place where they could feel like grown-ups.

Smith charged $10 a head and pulled in over 300 people on Friday nights, drawing bored teens from as far away as Bath. A sign on the now-shuttered door still reads, "If you leave The Cage, you must pay to re-enter."

Since he didn't serve alcohol, Smith didn't need any special permits or licenses. Nor was he required to hire security or even notify the city of the club's existence. It was, in effect, the ideal hangout for teenage gangbangers.

"There is no place where kids 14 or 15 can get in," says Akron Police Sergeant Mike Zimmerman, who runs the department's Gang Unit. "So places like this draw huge numbers, and it's the perfect gangster hangout, where they can mix in, meet up, and build a rep."

Sixteen-year-old Tyree Feaster was at The Cage with his crew that night. A high-school dropout who goes by the name Baby Chewz, Feaster had followed his brother Garrick's footsteps into the V-Not gang, which laid claim to Manchester-Thornton.

Thirty years before, the neighborhood had been home to a sturdy population of rubber workers. But over subsequent years, its once tidy homes were rendered a ghetto ruled by slumlords, who'll rent to anyone who can make the monthly payment.

For over a decade, V-Not — "Valley Niggas on Top" — had slung dope on its corners, taken over vacant homes as hangouts, and handed down beatings to those who spoke against them. To make sure residents remained in line, they'd make frequent visits to bus stops, intimidating the elderly into coughing up a "hood tax."

Like most gangs in the Rust Belt's smaller cities, Akron's aren't the kind of highly organized consortiums that have dominant leaders and complex drug networks. Instead, they're little more than loose-knit crews of knuckleheads — high-school dropouts beating defenseless drunks on their way home from the bar.

Still, their bullets hurt just as much as those in Philly or D.C. "A lot of people here think, 'This is Akron — we don't have a gang problem here,'" Zimmerman says. "Oh yes, we do. I deal with it."

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