SECRET WEAPON: Afrika Owes, who received Rikers visit from mom Karen, is charged with delivering guns for jailed beau Jaquan Layne. (Steven Hirsch)
Jaquan Layne
Karen Owes
A prep-school girl arrested this week in a Harlem drug-and-weapons gang takedown says she’s no gun moll — she’s an honors student determined to get into an Ivy League college, and she’s even studying in jail for her SATs.
“My life is over,” Afrika Nora Owes, 17, told The Post during an emotional reunion with her mom at Rikers Island yesterday.
Until this week, Owes was known as a popular, poised, sweet “A” student at Manhattan’s super-competitive Millennium HS in the Financial District. She worked part-time at McDonald’s, made the school basketball team and was looking forward to visiting the campuses of Barnard and the University of Pennsylvania.
She recently visited Harvard and Yale, and wants to become a lawyer.
But Owes’ charmed life came crashing down Wednesday when she was rounded up with 13 pals from her Harlem neighborhood and accused by the Manhattan DA’s Office of ferrying firearms to the members of a West 137th Street crack and gun gang.
Prosecutors said Owes’ boyfriend, Jaquan Layne, 20, was running the gang from Rikers while jailed for armed robbery, and gave Owes her orders in phone calls recorded by the jail.
Afrika was hit with conspiracy and gun charges.
“I’m not guilty of these things,” she said yesterday.
Yesterday, Afrika’s mother, Karen, visited her daughter in jail to drop off an SAT prep manual.
The concerned mom said that while those arrested with Afrika did not hang out at their West 138th Street home, it’s possible that without her knowledge her daughter communicated with them via Facebook and text messages.
Karen said it’s so hard to stay on top of even good kids — and that she and other parents need to better monitor their children’s social lives.
“This could happen to anyone’s daughter,” said the woman, who is also a mother to twin 6-year-old girls and an 11-year-old son. “Parents need to be more savvy.”
Owes had previously strayed off course last May, when she withdrew from the elite, $44,000-a-year Deerfield Academy in Massachusetts, where she’d had a full scholarship and was on the student council.
School spokesman David Thiel said Afrika left Deerfield “while facing a disciplinary investigation based on issues of academic and personal integrity that merited expulsion.”
Thiel said the investigation was “in no way” related to any of the criminal charges Owes currently faces.
A former classmate told The Post that Owes got caught cheating on a Spanish essay in the fall of 2009, and was on probation when, the next spring, she skipped school and claimed she was going to a doctor’s appointment. The school checked, and learned there was no appointment, Owes’ schoolmate said.
“She was well-liked by students and teachers,” the friend recalled. “She was a bright student and she obviously went down a wrong path.”
Karen Owes said her daughter since childhood had known several members of the group with whom she was arrested, and Afrika and Layne played together.
“No mother wants her daughter in this situation . . . I don’t know how it will unfold,” she said.
“My daughter said, ‘My life is over.’ I told her it’s not.”
Additional reporting by Andrew Bruss in Deerfield, Mass., and Amber Sutherland in NY