In so many ways, she’s your average American 12-year-old girl: She’s obsessed with the “Twilight” series of books and is a voracious reader in general. She loves going to dances and has been taking classes since she was little. She loves hip-hop and R&B, playing basketball and videogames on Xbox with the boys in her neighborhood, and jumping rope, double-dutch especially. She’s good with little kids, used to walk them across the street to the community center each day after school. Her mom is known as caring and strict.
On Wednesday, the day before she turned 13, she was arrested for selling crack to an undercover cop, on a street corner outside her housing project.
It’s typical, in unusual circumstances such as this, to hear that everyone who knows her is shocked. But everyone who knows her — and even those who don’t, veteran cops and law enforcement officials — is visibly and truly shocked.
“It’s very unusual for a 12-year-old to be carrying drugs,” one veteran narcotics officer told The Post. “Usually the kids are lookouts or steerers” — intermediaries who direct buyers to a dealer’s hidden location. “I don’t remember someone that young ever selling. It’s doubly unusual that it’s a girl.”
“Shocked” is also the way her 15-year-old sister described the family’s reaction. “She goes to school every day. She gets good grades.” The sister had just woken up; it was a little after 10 a.m. on Friday morning. She was roaming the hallway, asking around for spare change to buy a loose cigarette from someone on the 2nd floor; she and her mother, stepfather, and 4-year-old half-sibling live on the first. Her younger sister’s name is scrawled on the outside frame of their apartment door. Just as her younger sister does, she, too, looks much older than her age, hair in a bob, little make-up, dressed in a snug T-shirt and denim mini-skirt.
“This is not the girl I knew,” she says. The girl she knew kept her curfew, which alternated between 10 and 11 p.m. She loves the R&B singer Drake, who started out on the hit tween show “Degrassi: The Next Generation,” and hip-hop star Nicki Minaj, who has spoken about her troubled home life and her desire to be a good role model for teenagers. “I want people — especially young girls — to know that in life, nothing is going to be based on sex appeal,” Minaj told Interview magazine. “You’ve got to have something else to go with that.”
Minaj, especially, spoke to her, maybe because she was so often mistaken for an experienced young woman. She’s been described as very developed for a 12-year-old, ran around with an older crowd, was hit on constantly by much-older boys, flattered and frightened by the attention. She did date a boy who was 15, but one classmate tells the Post she never considered him her boyfriend.
Her sister and her family have no idea where the girl is in the system — if she’s being arraigned today, if Children’s Services has her. Her mother is at the Queens County Courthouse, running around, frantically trying to find her. “This is a surprise,” she says. “A shock.”
She was busted on a street corner in Arverne, a particularly rough part of Far Rockaway, Queens. She lives in close proximity to the Redfern Houses, one of the most dangerous places in New York City, where tributes to residents who have been killed by other residents are part of the landscape — such as it is — and where many of the assaults and shootings are committed by 14-year-old boys.
Her housing project is located on one side of Beach Channel Drive; on the other side are the new developments, Arverne by the Sea, affordable two-family houses, right on the beach, meant to lure middle-class white families to the area. Also under construction: a separate community center and grocery store, specifically for the use of new residents only. The strip itself is otherwise desolate, a good chunk of the street ripped up and under what residents complain is endless roadwork.
There is no movie theater, no strip mall, no bookstore or bowling alley or coffee shop. The area is so dangerous that even adult residents come and go urgently and with efficiency. “I come in, I go to my apartment, I leave, I go where I have to go,” one middle-aged man told The Post. “There are always kids hanging out, making a lot of noise, vandalizing the property.” Last month, he says, he saw cops in the lobby, maybe twice, and it’s always better when there’s a police presence. But he’s seen none this month, and can’t remember the last time cops did vertical patrols, canvassing the stairwells and hallways and rooftops.
“I’m always hearing some story about drugs and gang violence,” he says. “I can understand how she got into doing it.”
The only nearby recreation is found at the community center, a five-minute walk away. It’s a sizable one-story structure that takes up nearly an entire block; the windows are double-wrapped with iron grates; a painting hung on the edifice advertises free health screenings with the slogan, “Your health is your wealth.”
During the summer, the center is open only for toddlers and babies, and the older kids roam around, on their own or in packs. On Friday, a group of young boys stumbled across a pigeon with an injured wing, hobbled on the ground, and set about beating it to death. A young father, in a white wife-beater and white kerchief tied over his head, walked his two toddler girls around the project. One of the little girls slipped and fell, hit the ground crying, and the father lifted her up a few inches, abruptly shook her back and forth, then put her down in disgust, turning his attention to his approaching friends. He left his little girl to cry it out.
‘She was running around with Terrence and his crew,” says one resident, who asked to go unnamed. Terrence is Terrence Jenkins, 21 and the leader of The Handsome Hustlers.
“When I heard she got arrested, I couldn’t believe it,” Jenkins told the Post yesterday in a jailhouse interview. (He was picked up, along with his father, stepmother, half-brother, and about three dozen other people in the same sweep that caught the girl.) “I watched her grow up. She’s like a little sister to me.”
Jenkins — so reedy his light-gray prison jumpsuit billows on his frame, left leg shaking, a tattoo reading “BILLZ” surrounded, just to clarify, by floating dollar bills on his inner left wrist — insists the Handsome Hustlers are a harmless crew, not a vicious street gang. He denies having anything to do with the girl being in possession of crack, let alone selling it on a street corner. “She’s the reverse of my age,” he says, eyes welling up. “Why would I have her doing something like that?”
The Handsome Hustlers — also known as “HH” — have a female cohort, the Hollywood Hotties. No one who knows the girl thinks she was part of this crew, but she spent the bulk of her free time with them and talked about them often. Another resident, a young teenage girl who knows the family, says that the Handsome Hustlers are known for getting into fights.
Jenkins says he’d watch over the girl at the community center’s dances and chase away the older guys who’d try to hook up with her. He was helping to plan her birthday party, which was supposed to take place at the center the night after they all got busted. “We were gonna surprise her with a cake,” he says.
Her older sister is disgusted. “Terrence is trying to blame it on her,” she said on Saturday morning, smoking a cigarette in the courtyard outside her building. She knows, she said, that Terrence is out on something, parole or probation, but isn’t sure what. (Jenkins says he’s only ever been arrested for trespassing and marijuana possession.) “She’s never been arrested,” her sister said. Then her stepfather, 6-foot tall and tattooed, burst out of the building. “Why are you talking to the press?” he yelled. “Don’t say nothing!” The mother, it turns out, was livid when she discovered her daughter and husband had been saying anything to anyone.
Given her tender age, no one thinks that the girl will be tried as an adult. Those who know her say her mom is very involved, but there is a chance that Administration for Children’s Services could remove her from the home. Still, her friends say she rarely misses school — she’s about to go into the 8th grade at PS 105, right across the street — and is immaculate in her presentation. She likes to wear her hair in pin-curls, and she wears Prada and Gucci knock-offs. Unlike her older sister, she doesn’t smoke. “She’s always well-dressed and neat,” says a friend who has known her since pre-K. “She does hang with older girls, like 17, 18. Her best friend is 18.” She will fight, says this friend, only if repeatedly provoked. “But I never expected this,” she says. “This is a shock.”
It’s often such a cliché, such an empty, lazy adjective. But it’s the one most used in this case, and the one most apt. The mom and sister, her friends and neighbors: Shocked. Cops who’ve seen a lot worse: Shocked. Jenkins, the crew leader: Shocked. It’s one of those rare New York cases — such as Kitty Genovese, the young woman stabbed to death in 1964, despite 38 people hearing her scream for help — that makes the city pause, wonder how things got to this point, hope that maybe something good will come of it. The real shock, of course, will be if anything actually does.