The Island Packet:
MONTGOMERY COUNTY, N.C. – Tammy Dunn was vacationing on the Grand Strand on June 18 when a mass shooting erupted on Ocean Boulevard. She didn’t know it then, but the shooting that rocked Myrtle Beach was about to shake her hometown, too.
“When they called and told me they were from Mount Gilead, I said, ‘Oh, good God,’ ” said Dunn, who serves as president of the North Carolina Press Association and publisher of the Montgomery Herald.
Seven people were injured in the shooting. Six were sent to the hospital. More than 4 million people saw it all happen on a Facebook Live video that went viral.
And weeks later, Dunn learned that all five of the young men accused in the shooting hailed from Mount Gilead and Troy in her home territory of Montgomery County, North Carolina.
Seventeen-year-old Derias J’Shawn Little was named as the shooter.
Six minutes after the shooting, he was detained and transported to a local hospital where he was treated for injuries sustained when a security guard returned fire. Little was kept under guard at the hospital for three weeks until he faced a bond hearing and was jailed at J. Reuben Long Detention Center.
“He’s had multiple interactions with law enforcement … (but) he’s not been a suspect for us in any violent crimes to this point,” said Jason Hensley, assistant chief of the Mount Gilead Police Department. “I was shocked when I found out that (Little) was their primary suspect. … We know him … but he’s a young kid. We haven’t known him that long.”
He was shocked. Shocked! He had multiple interactions with law enforcement, but the police are shocked that he was a shooter.
Little has been in and out of jail since 16 when he was first arrested for stealing two pit bull puppies. But most of his charges have stemmed from property crimes. He was never accused of firing a weapon until June 18.
Police say Little worked “in concert” with 19-year-olds Tyron Elijah Daquan Steele and Raekwon Tariq Graham and 18-year-olds Jarvez Datwan Graham and Keshawn Datavis Steele to ambush a Stanly County, North Carolina, man.
Dunn reported that the feud between the groups started at least two years ago when a Mount Gilead man was killed in a 2015 shooting in Albemarle, the county seat of Stanly County.
The man convicted in that killing, 18-year-old Jimmy Jaquavis Parker, is incarcerated in the Foothills Correctional Institution, a minimum security prison in Morganton, North Carolina.
This just gets better and better. Theft, and perhaps larceny. A gang, killings, and a gang feud. But the cops are shocked!
Parker was 16 at the time of the shooting. His projected release date is Dec. 13, 2019, according to the N.C. Department of Public Safety.
But aside from ongoing “unpleasantries” between people from both areas, Hensley said, he didn’t think Parker and the primary victim in the Myrtle Beach shooting were related.
“There’s a contingent of young gentlemen in Mount Gilead and there’s a contingent of young people in Albemarle and neither one of them get along with each other,” he said.
Police say there is a known chapter of the United Blood Nation (the East Coast Bloods gang) in Albemarle. Suspects in the Ocean Boulevard shooting are considered to be a part of the Money Chasin Gang.
“I can say that we have had problems in town with that crowd coming over, starting fights; our crowd going to Albemarle starting fights with them,” Hensley said. “There’s not like this ongoing, ‘we’re going to kill everybody’ feud. (But) there is a rivalry.”
Oh good. It’s just unpleasantries. For a moment it sounded more serious than that, like a gang war. At least it’s just a rivalry, sort of like High School football.
Albemarle Police Department’s Assistant Chief Jesse Huneycutt said the shooting in 2015 erupted in a “turf battle.”
“I know there were some concerns with the school system after that about some of the ballgames and security at the ballgames and whether or not to play Stanly County in football and things like that,” Dunn said. “But, it’s sad that, you know, teenagers are involved in that.”
[ … ]
Keshawn is accused in warrants of delivering Xanax, a prescription drug used to treat anxiety, to two teen boys on Jan. 24. He was charged with two counts of selling/delivering Xanax and simple possession of a controlled substance after officers say they found three Xanax pills in his possession. He is still facing those charges in Montgomery County.
Tyron is accused of shooting a high-powered rifle into a Troy, N.C., home occupied by two men, a woman and a 7-year-old boy on April 7, according to an indictment. Later that night, the Steele family’s home also reportedly was riddled with seven bullet holes by a suspect named in a police report as Roshun Dumas, a family member of the victims listed in Tyron’s indictment.
Keshawn and Tyron were both charged with fighting, communicating threats and disorderly conduct after a street brawl on June 8, 2015, according to a police report. Then, in August of that year, Tyron was accused of possessing a cellphone stolen from a locker room at West Montgomery High School, where he was a student, according to a separate incident report. That charge later was dismissed.
Most recently, Tyron and Keshawn have each been charged with trafficking heroin, possession with intent to distribute Oxycodone and maintaining a dwelling for controlled substances in Montgomery County, according to court records.
The title of the article includes ‘guns,’ but of course, that has nothing whatsoever to do with any of this. Lot’s of people have guns, but not lots of people commit crimes like this. The problem begins long before something like this happens. My own daughter was in college studying Nursing, and was later to become a Nurse Practitioner. Her time in undergraduate studies was marked by incurring student debt and driving a “beater” Volvo 240 that required a quart of oil every time the tank was filled up with gas. I had to work hard to keep that thing running during her tenure in college.
Her roommates were black girls, both of whom went to college for free (free for them, costing you a lot of money), smoked dope the entire time, both of whom drove Cadillac Escalades, and both of whom flunked out of college. The apostle tells us that if a man doesn’t work, he shouldn’t eat (2 Thess 3:10). This is righteous and morally upright teaching, but it has been violated in America for far too long, creating a class of entitled criminals who perpetrate acts like what you saw above.
It isn’t limited to blacks, and rich people commit crimes too, but the black community in America has a special cultural and moral problem. These boys should never have been in that situation to begin with. They have no parents to speak of, or if they do, their parents don’t care. They don’t care because they don’t have to care. The first time one of those boys committed the crime of theft, he should have become an indentured servant of the one he had offended until the debt was paid threefold. As I’ve said before, I don’t believe in prisons or the concept of a “debt to society.”
If he didn’t do it, his parents should have shouldered the financial burden, and if they couldn’t, they should have become indentured servants until the debt was paid threefold. Only such circumstances engenders responsibility and accountability, where the parents tired of being indentured servants because of crimes their child committed. The first time attempted murder occurred, someone should have become enslaved to the one he offended, and if he refused, he should have been executed.
As for Myrtle Beach, as long as they have “senior week” where underage riff raff, ne’er-do-wells and criminals are invited in to terrorize a city, they deserve what they get. If they want to hold someone accountable in Myrtle Beach, then hold the proprietor who gave them accommodations accountable. Run them out of business, and then run them out of town.
As long as you have fights, shootings, naked girls running around the beach, hollering and partying all night and public drunkenness, it won’t be a place amenable for families. So continue to cater to the criminals and gangsters rather than the families, and see what happens. Who has the real money to spend?
Prior: South Carolina LEOs, Open Carry And Myrtle Beach Follies
