All is forgiven.
So-called “Preppy Gun Moll” Afrika Owes yesterday was released in tears on a controversial $25,000 cash bail bond posted by the Abyssinian Baptist Church — the very house of worship that had crusaded against the drug gang with which Owes allegedly conspired.
“Young people make mistakes,” Ted Shaw, a lawyer for the church, told reporters after the sobbing 17-year-old was released from Manhattan Criminal Court.
“We are more than the worst thing we’ve ever done. We believe in redemption.”
The noted church had ironically been among the Harlem institutions that had been begging Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance Jr. to do something about a particularly violent and prolific drug gang that for years had held hostage a nearby block along 137th Street.
Prosecutors say they caught Owes on a Rikers Island pay-phone tape taking a phone call from her jailed boyfriend — the 137th Street gang’s accused kingpin Jaquan Layne — in which Layne instructed her to carry three firearms to his brother, Malik.
In the call, Layne allegedly gives the then-16-year-old prep-schooler advice on surviving the dangers of carrying three firearms to Malik, who is also charged: “Make sure, head shots only; head shots only.”
But church leaders saw Owes — a congregant who was once a full-scholarship student at Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts — as only a promising teenager gone awry.
They had been trying for more than a month to bail her out, with the judge refusing to sign off until the church’s bailout plan was approved by a majority of its board.
Manhattan Supreme Court Justice Edward McLaughlin yesterday signed the bail bond backed by church money and released the teen into the embrace of her mother, family and scores of members of the church, to which Owes and her mother Karen have belonged for years.
“This is redemption for Afrika,” said church deacon Gerald Barbour. “We do not throw young people away. Afrika is symbolic of our church. You saw her face! I saw joy in that face. It was prophetic.”
Owes, who more recently attended Manhattan’s selective Millennium HS, is charged with gang conspiracy.