Gangs of Princeton: trouble in paradise

Updated May 10

On Halloween night 2004, a group of about 50 teenagers traveled along Bayard Lane and Hodge Road in Princeton Borough, beating up children who were trick-or-treating and flashing gang signs to police officers, the Town Topics reported.

This episode was only one of a series of gang-related incidents that have plagued the Borough and Township in recent years. The incidents, which have ranged from lethally violent to seemingly innocuous, have increased in number over the last decade.

Just last month, three individuals “known by law enforcement to be affiliated with street gangs” were involved in a fight at the Wilson College BlackBox, Borough Police Lt. David Dudeck said.

A University student familiar with the incident who spoke with Borough Police said the police claimed the alleged attackers — Vonzell Kelley, John Hayes and Bernadino Guervil — were members of the Bloods gang.

A history of violence

Princeton’s most notorious incident of gang violence was the 2004 murder of Jean Mario Israel, a Princeton High School (PHS) student and Bloods gang member. His death in Trenton at the hands of Arturo McKnight, a member of the Crips gang, immediately thrust local gangs into the spotlight.

The Princeton Packet reported that “100 mourners wearing gang colors attended the burial, draping the coffin with gang colors and performing gang salutes.”

In addition to raising gangs’ profile, as a result of the killings, “a lot of kids have become enamored — and I mean enamored — with that whole funeral and gang activity,” Borough Police Lt. Dennis McManimon told the Packet shortly after the funeral.

Andrew Bergman ’11, a PHS sophomore at the time, said in a recent interview that the community viewed Israel in a positive light.

“It was well known that he was in the Bloods and that that’s why he was killed in Trenton,” Bergman said. “But generally it was conveyed that he was a great guy.”

A month after Israel’s murder, Princeton was hit with several incidents of gang violence.

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On the same night as the Halloween incident, two black males, Adrian McPherson and James Kornegay, attacked two Hispanic men with pit bulls while yelling gang-related phrases, the Town Topics reported. The next day PHS was put under lockdown due to threats the administration had received against students.

Anna Bialek ’09, who was the co-editor-in-chief of PHS’ student newspaper, said the paper was provided with “very little information” about the circumstances surrounding the lockdown.

Bialek said that “the threat was taken very seriously” but that she thought “the reaction was realistic given what we knew about the threat.”

That December, Bergman said, another PHS student, Richard Wilson, was shot in Trenton and became paralyzed from the waist down.

While the shootings of Israel and Wilson were perhaps the most prominent examples of gang violence, a number of other gang-related incidents have injected tension into Princeton’s normally tranquil atmosphere since 2004.

In 2006, Kelley and Channin Gardner, a Trenton resident, were charged with assaulting three Hispanic men. According to The Times of Trenton, Kelley knocked one of the men off a bike and beat him repeatedly as he lay on the ground. Though Borough Police originally asked the prosecutor to consider the assault a “bias crime,” meaning that race was a motivating factor, the prosecutor declined.

In May 2007, a gun battle erupted on John Street that possibly involved members of the Crips gang. This past October, a burglary spree that police say was linked to the Hispanic gang Mara Salvatrucha 13 (MS-13) resulted in valuables being stolen from several University dorms.

Local gangs, national connection?

In the eyes of Princeton residents, local gangs may not be as intimidating as they try to be.

Bergman said that he doubted any of the men involved in the violence were actually affiliated with larger gangs. “They were the type of kids who were hoodlums; they were the type of kids who wanted to be in gangs,” Bergman said. “But my thought ... is that they were not actually in a gang but just spent a lot of time with people in gangs.”

But Rachael Ferguson GS, a sociology student who has previously focused her research on gangs, said that starting a local gang with a prominent name can be rather simple.

“A group of teenagers who want to start a gang can choose the name ‘Bloods’ because it confers a status upon them that they would not otherwise have,” Ferguson said.

Graffiti from Hispanic gangs has been appearing around Princeton over the past 10 years. The Packet reported that in 2005, graffiti from the gang “La Mugre” was sprayed on Witherspoon Street. Graffiti is “used to mark territory — the more you put your name out there, the more powerful you appear,” Ferguson explained.