“Did anyone hear about the Bloods’ initiation that’s supposed to take place today? They are supposed to kill 31 women. Is it real or a hoax?”
This question was posted at Brooklynian.com on Halloween. The consensus was that the story was a hoax, and not surprisingly, that turned out to be the case. Many of those that commented on the site all seemed to have heard a version of it when they were kids.
Nevertheless, the fake story inspired real fear. A couple teachers wrote in to say that there were very few girls in their classes on Halloween. That says a lot about the power of urban myth, but it also raises an important question: What should we be afraid of? This, after all, is Brooklyn, and while it’s not Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, there are very real dangers here.
Take, for example, the Trinitarios gang. According to an article in the Nov. 2 edition of the Times, this Dominican gang has been terrorizing south Williamsburg since last summer. The Trinitarios are responsible for four machete attacks in less than two months, and in late October a young man was spotted with one during a shootout in which a 5-year-old girl was hit by a stray bullet.
An incident that for most of our readers occurred closer to home was a robbery at gunpoint in which the victom was accosted in the lobby of his own building, reports The Brooklyn paper. In Clinton Hill and Fort Greene, the police department reports that robberies have spiked from 7.6 percent last year to 18.6 so far in 2008, also in the paper.
Most shockingly, a cardboard box of bloody human remains was found in Washington Park last month. One man told the paper that the discovery reminded him of Brooklyn in the 1970s, when one morning he walked out his front door to find a dead body hanging from a nearby lamppost.
That last one actually sounds a bit like a hoax.
To partcipate in the discussion, visit Brooklynian.com.