Brooklyn’s top prosecutor announced indictments against 21 suspected members of the Folk Nation street gang on Tuesday.
The defendants — who range in age from 17 to 41 years old — were variously charged with murder, weapons possession, assault, and armed robbery for their alleged involvement in multiple shootings that spanned Flatbush, East Flatbush, and Canarsie that injured four and left two young men dead, according to Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez.
“These defendants terrorized the streets of Brooklyn by opening fire on perceived rivals and recklessly firing their guns — including in broad daylight — endangering innocent bystanders,” said Gonzalez, who noted one instance where a 15-year-old boy was killed after being mistaken for a rival gang member.
Gonzalez alleges the defendants committed numerous violent crimes to establish dominance over rival Brooklyn gangs, particularly local subsets of the Crips and Bloods.
Members of Folk Nation would go on hunting expeditions, which they would call “spinning the flossy,” where they would search for gang rivals and shoot them, Gonzalez said.
Two of the suspected gang member’s search and destroy missions ended in murder, including 22-year-old alleged rival Darren Harrison, who one of the defendants gunned down amid a 2017 Canarsie ambush, and 15-year-old Rohan Levy, who one defendant allegedly mistook for a rival gang member, according to Gonzalez.
The defendants used Facebook Live and Snapchat to showcase their gang activity, with videos showing members shooting guns off rooftops and loading pistols in the subway, Gonzalez said. Following Harrison’s murder, one of the defendants bragged about the shooting on social media, while texting “We spun them, we had them rollin, duck in, runnin.”
During a press conference Tuesday, Gonzalez suggested the origin of the gangs’ is lost on current members, who are merely engaging in a culture of violence passed down from generation to generation.
“By their own words, they don’t know why they are shooting at each other, they have no historical knowledge of what started this feud in the first place. They just know that they are expected to shoot at and attempt to kill rival gang members,” Gonzalez said.
