On a winter night almost three years ago, joe jones dialed a popular party line where young thugs trade insults and try to pick up girls. The year-old gangbanger seemed to have struck gold. A sweet-sounding teenager was coming on to him. She wanted to hook up. So Joe did something the party line managers adamantly warn against--he gave her his address.
Shortly after 9 p. This is gonna be my night, Joe thought. He opened the door and a scowling young Crip shot him between the eyes. Drew Medical Center. Luckily, the assassin was packing light. It did leave Joe Jones blind in his left eye, deaf in his left ear and determined to change his life. Separating his eyebrows is a small, puckered scar, the chilling souvenir from that February night.
So just four months after he was left for dead, the street beckoned again, and Joe Jones went back to the Bloods. Joe started banging again with renewed dedication -- fighting and getting revenge. His reputation grew. Then, on the night after Christmas in , he walked out of an alley off 35th Street.
Simmons died in in Folsom Prison after balloons of heroin he swallowed to hide from guards erupted in his stomach. Simmons, 43, shakes his head when reminded that he was a Crip and his nephew is a Blood. His family moved to Compton, where he attended Centennial High School. He ended up doing nearly five years in state prison for drug offenses and hijacking trucks. They were there as part of a program called New Beginnings, which helped adults with drug problems.
Carla says she has been drug- and alcohol-free for 10 years. Even with his gang-rooted family tree, even on the dead- end street where he hung out with the Brims, even on the emergency room operating table with blood oozing from his skull, Joe Jones was never a hard and hopeless case. Not very tallfoot-8 --but very wide pounds. I been Fruit Town Brim ever since then. You feel me? Jones talks as if his youth is ancient history. But every year in South-Central is a long time.
