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Hit the nail on the head! There isn't much info. Not since the very beginning when some of the more gruesome details were given...lighter fluid squirted, last words, walking on fire...I think some of these bits of info were really given to the family because of their close ties to local LE. What I think happened from there was that the info then got to the media and then the clamp was put down to where even the family is getting no more info than the general public.
And now, we have speculation and people digging into the gas station, making threats and all. Do I think there is a gang presence in this community? Most definitely. LE admits as much, I will find the link, but MSM has an article from 2012 and another more recent one quoting LE as saying gangs have taken root there. Was this a gang-related killing? I'm inclined to believe so. We have a 19 year old girl that felt she had experienced enough at her young age to write a book. That tells me she had been through a great deal. I'm from an area that has quite a bit of gang activity. Lost a cop several years back to an ambush. Our sheriff has had tons of charges against him, including terroristic threats, out local PD just fired 3 officers(long-standing) with no explanation. Staties investigating several of our local precincts. There is so much racism here it makes me sick. And I live in Pennsylvania. Not much surprises or shocks me anymore when I cannot even go to work without watching drug deals and prostitutes on every corner. But this JC case SHOCKED me. I was literally ill. I could not sleep for two days after hearing about this case.
Gangs and drugs are destroying MY hometown. And the silence is deadly. People are afraid to speak because drugs are a huge business. So, yeah. I can lean towards gangs and drugs. My once beautiful, thriving town built off of the backs of steelworkers has turned to crap. And it is spreading to the point where most of my county is under siege.
I hate drugs and resent these gangs. I've lost too many friends and even family members to drugs in one way or another. And I will never understand why this lifestyle seems so appealing. Money isn't everything. Not when you bury too many of your own to get it.
I moved my family to a very small town, after a daylight break-in of my home, in a not much bigger town. Drugs, and the people who use and sell them were getting out of hand there. Much of what was going on was invisible to adults in the community, but the stories my kids were telling me were so sensational, sadistic and violent, I doubted their validity.
Within two years of moving to a sleepy little rural town, I knew everything illicit going on here. Again, my kids were my eyes and ears. The drug/gang problem is everywhere, even in sleepy little towns.
I spoke with a friend, a LEO from the area where I worked. He started telling me a story about gangs in the area, when he told me "The Bloods" have a pretty thick presence here, at first I laughed. I'm on the East coast and that's a metropolitan California gang. He said don't laugh Flatfoot, I'm being serious. I truly thought he was joking, he wasn't. He explained these big gangs come in, set up shop and go to work. They take over these little rural areas, set up unopposed by other gangs, with LE who aren't equipped tactically, or procedurally to deal with them.
For some kids, it's just a place to belong, for others financial opportunity. To me I've seen a paradigm shift in young people, children become adults way too soon now, sexually, behaviorally, violently. You can't dismiss young people as a threat when you're assessing a situation now, some are as hardened and sociopathic as any adult criminal.
The people in these gangs usually don't have any respect for human life, unless they're connected, family, comrades, or love interests. Death is just one of the every day possibilities for them.
This whole case bothered me right off the bat. Certain types of people use fire as an execution method, organized crime, gangs, and finally spurned lovers. That isn't to say there aren't random deaths that don't fit that typical mode, it's just the norm for those types of execution.
