By:JOSEPH KELLARD
Speaking at a gang-awareness meeting at Oceanside High School last Thursday, the mother said the incident occurred near School 8 on Fulton Avenue on the night of June 11, while, just a few blocks away, St. Anthony's Church's annual feast was in full swing. There were more gasps when she revealed that days before the suspects were to face trial, a student came up behind her son at OHS and warned, "Drop the charges."
Ten days before her son was menaced, seven Baldwin residents - reputed members of the Salvadoran MS-13 gang - were arrested for rioting after allegedly starting a fight with three students at the high school.
Concerned about these and other incidents, some 80 Oceansiders attended the Oct. 28 meeting, which was headed by Detective Debi Barshad and Sgt. Gregory Quinn of the Nassau County Police Department's special investigation squad for gangs.
Barshad gave an hour-long presentation on street gangs, ranging from their common mentality to dress codes to their recruiting methods to their rituals and behavior, criminal or otherwise. She focused on the ways in which gang members recruit children, some of whom are as young as 10, and said their breeding grounds are schools and shopping malls, from Roosevelt Field to any local strip mall.
Barshad used a fictional 14-year-old boy to explain the subtle, gradual ways a child becomes a gangster, from simply being invited to go out to lunch with the "cool" kids - the gang members - to months or years later, when he's carrying and possibly using a gun.
Many of the parents who asked the police questions were more concerned with how police and school administrators would protect their children from gangs. That gangs were hitting closer to home became clear to Oceanside residents after a man was fatally shot and stabbed in Lynbrook and a husband and wife were robbed at gunpoint in Rockville Centre during the summer of 2003, and an Oceanside man was beaten and robbed on Bayside Avenue that September. Four reputed members of the Latin Kings were arrested and charged with those crimes last February. That same month, six suspected Latin Kings were arrested in Oceanside for assaulting three youths with a bat at a party in Island Park.
"If it starts in the elementary and middle schools, are the principals being educated?" asked one parent.
Quinn said that many gang-related crimes go unreported, and that people must report any gang activity to police - from intimidation and criminal incidents to the appearance of graffiti. "If you tell us, we act on it," Quinn said. "The more information we have, the better it is. ... If we don't know about a gang fight that takes place at a school, for example, I can tell you that within 48 hours there's going to be another incident that is worse."
Christine Fugarozzo, of the Fourth Precinct's Problem-Oriented Policing Unit, said that police record all gang-related incidents, including taking photographs of graffiti, to look for patterns and track gang activity. "This is an excellent school," Fugarozzo said. "There has been MS-13 graffiti etched in desks or on walls, but there's been nothing really overt here."
After talking about the low self-esteem that is a common characteristic of gang members, Barshad stressed that one of the main ways to divert a child's attention from gangs is to channel his energies to positive activities.
Superintendent Dr. Herb Brown was called from the audience to discuss the measures the school district has taken to secure its children and divert them from nefarious activities. Among the things he listed were the district's 65 sports teams, hundreds of clubs, and the community-activities department. "You happen to be in a community that has so many activities," Brown said.
Following the Baldwin gangsters' rioting at OHS in June, Brown vowed to make gang-related training at the school more organized and to train as many key staff members as possible. A gang task force gave a workshop to OHS security guards, deans, guidance counselors, administrators, social workers, psychologists and others, which focused in part on how to recognize gangs and their activities.
Brown said that other workshops are planned for this year, and pointed out to parents that the meeting was sponsored by the district.
"We came here and talked to the staff after the incident here in June," Quinn said. "Any time they want us here, we'll come."
Regarding security, Brown claimed that there are more guards in the school district than ever before, and that higher-caliber guards - including former police officers - have been hired.
Quinn said that all high schools have gang members, including OHS, and that students know more than police and staff about who they are.
One parent accused Brown of once proclaiming that there were no gangs in Oceanside, to which Brown replied, "I don't know if we have gang members. But we don't have gang activity."
Another parent pressed the superintendent, charging that as the top administrator, he should know who the gang members are. Brown essentially said that it is not possible to know, at all times, who all the individual gang members may be.
During his talk, Quinn noted that there were few laws pertaining to gangs on the books, and urged parents to write state legislators to request that they establish more such laws.
At the end of the meeting, Sandy Schoell, president of the PTA at OHS, told parents that police are overworked because of the Nassau County and state budget cuts, and urged them to go to their legislators and County Executive Tom Suozzi and tell them, "We need more police."
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