The Gangstas of Godwin Park
They were rich, white, and barely old enough to be in high school. They lived in the online world, strutting their toughness and their fascination with violence on their MySpace pages. And then one night, the line separating the virtual from the real vanished, and a sixteen-year-old boy from one of Houston’s nicest neighborhoods lay dead.
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These changes in the socioeconomic balance of the school have shown up in its once-glorious statistics. Bellaire still belongs among the top high schools in the nation; in Newsweek’s 2005 poll of the best American high schools, it ranked 112, and its 3,400 students produced a raft of AP scholars (323). This year, Bellaire has 40 National Merit Scholars. Seniors are heading, as always, for Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Stanford, Yale, Columbia, and other top schools. Orchestra, debate, science, and baseball programs continue to win national and international honors. The case could be made that the school has triumphed despite being under enormous social pressures. But success has not come without pain. In-school suspensions jumped from 336 in the 1999—2000 school year to 855 in 2003—2004, the last year for which statistics are available. The total number of disciplinary actions soared from 441 to 1,082 in the same period. Then things got worse: In the months between the Christmas season of 2005, when Jonathan Finkelman was murdered, and the end of February 2006, a popular football star, Desmond Hamilton, was shot and killed; a sophomore girl was charged with shooting and killing her mother; and a student was stabbed more than twenty times, leaving a pool of blood in the hallway for other kids to step over. “This year it seems like the place has gone to hell” was the way one sophomore described the situation at Bellaire to me. Today, it isn’t unusual to stroll down the halls and hear kids from all programs—from IB and AP to special ed—addressing one another as “pimps” and “hos.”
Jonathan had the ability and the desire to inhabit all worlds. As a freshman, he was as well liked by the jocks on the football team as he was beloved by his old friends from Camp Young Judea, where he had chosen to hold his bar mitzvah. The black and Hispanic kids envied his myriad Ecko T-shirts, which are manufactured by the company his family bought a controlling interest in back in 1999 and marketed to kids all over the country. But most important to Jonathan was his family, which was so close as to be claustrophobic.
That the Finkelmans settled in the Meyerland vicinity was notable; the neighborhood was a place where Jews could take care of their own and, they believed, could protect their children from negative influences while teaching them to follow religious tradition and embrace the values of family, education, achievement, and community. Jonathan’s grandfather Wolf Finkelman arrived there in 1946, having lost his parents, three sisters, and three brothers in concentration camps. Relocated with the help of Jewish family services, he finished high school, married, and eventually built a very successful import business, which he recently turned over to two of his three sons, Alan (Jonathan’s father) and Steve. Within Houston’s Jewish community, the Finkelmans were admired for their generosity and their intense loyalty to one another.
Jonathan’s parents divorced when he was seven, however, and Alan remarried soon after. Alan was strong willed and opinionated, as were Jonathan’s older brothers, David and Joshua. Indulged and praised at every turn, the older boys fell out of favor with Bellaire parents as they grew up and developed a reputation as troublemakers. According to law enforcement sources, a few parents went so far as to ask Alan to try to control his older sons, but nothing changed. “The boys were raised with unconditional love,” recalled a parent whose children grew up in Bellaire. “It was ‘circle the wagons,’ because they were right and everyone else was wrong.”
Both boys had encounters with the law that involved drugs, and both received deferred adjudication. Alan intervened to protect his sons when he could: When Joshua was sentenced to fifteen days in the county jail on a drug charge in 2004, for instance, his father asked the court for leniency. “He has changed the majority of his past acquaintances,” Alan wrote the judge. “On many occasions I have heard Joshua say to someone that he is unable to play football or attend an out-of-state university because ‘I screwed up.’” His request was turned down.
Alan’s behavior was in tune with that of many prosperous parents who are desperate to save their children from all threats large and small. The young men in Godwin Park were described by friends and family as “good boys,” regardless of their involvement with drugs and crime and violence. “I see denial every day,” the principal of a Houston alternative high school told me. “Parents don’t want to see what’s out there.”
For Jonathan, strong family ties were both a blessing and a curse. He idolized his older brothers, but their reputations preceded him at Bellaire. Though he was more like his mother—quieter, gentler—the kids and the teachers looked for a wild streak, and he felt compelled to fulfill their expectations. The trouble was, Jonathan wasn’t particularly tough. He didn’t really enjoy playing football, and in an extraordinary school he was an ordinary student. He needed an identity to keep himself afloat in the social sea of affluent Bellaire, where, one of his old friends told me, “Everybody knows every brand. They do expensive. That’s what makes you at Bellaire: your car, your clothes. You won’t see the same outfit twice.” Jonathan retained his camp friends—the good kids who, like him, raised money for Ukrainian orphans—but he also found a place among the school’s faster, richer students, the ones who had been in rehab, who were familiar with Mexican beach resorts, and who touted Lacoste shirts on their MySpace pages as if they were bespoke. Jonathan had the money to join in: He took friends to the World Series and to expensive restaurants. Selling drugs, casually, just to people he knew, kept money in his pockets and made him even more popular. And Jonathan had backup: “Nobody messed with him because they were afraid of his brothers,” said the same friend. “If he had a problem, his brothers would take care of it.”
He spent a portion of one summer at Houston Learning Academy, an alternative school, trying to beef up his academics alongside other kids who were trying to improve their grades and test scores, and he spent a year at a yeshiva in New Jersey, trying again to figure out who he was. “He never really said no,” a close friend of his, a pretty girl still struggling with his death, remarked. “He didn’t have a problem with people telling him what to do, and he’d do it.”
TO RICE UNIVERSITY SOCIOLOGY professor Stephen Klineberg, the changes occurring in west Houston, in and around Bellaire, where Jonathan Finkelman grew up, and the encroaching poorer sectors like Hiram Clarke, around six miles away, where Dontae Moore grew up, reflect “a double revolution that is taking place nationwide.” In places like Meyerland, the rich continue to get richer—“the class structure is increasingly rigidified,” in Klineberg’s jargon—while in places like Hiram Clarke, poorer minorities, moving into neighborhoods vacated by middle-class whites, have the proximity to witness but not share in the bounty of those who have done very well. On the one hand, this generation of kids is more comfortable with diversity than any other in the history of the United States. But at the same time, class divisions widened by poor schools and limited opportunity threaten that harmony. Immigrant parents might be proud that they are doing better than relatives back in the home country, but their children compare themselves with American kids and find their lives wanting. Some kids work hard to pull themselves up, but it takes a very strong child—with supportive, attentive, driven parents (something in short supply these days, even on the right side of the tracks)—to succeed in this environment, which often requires long bus rides to and from school, working at minimum-wage jobs afterward, and finishing homework after that.
Throughout his early years, Dontae Moore kept himself afloat on a child’s natural optimism. The Hiram Clarke neighborhood did not automatically encourage looking on the bright side. It had once been settled by middle-class whites, many of whom worked in the growing Medical Center area. Nearby Windsor Village Methodist Church, which is now among the largest black churches in the nation, was populated almost entirely by whites as recently as the late seventies. The Houston Independent School District bused white kids to a predominantly black high school to try to maintain racial balance, but to no avail. The whites left, and blacks moved from decaying inner-city neighborhoods like the Fifth Ward to these once-suburban homes. So too did Hispanic immigrants, who could save enough money by sharing cramped apartments to eventually move up to freestanding houses. Over time, the median household income of the neighborhood declined to its current $36,000 a year, with 17 percent of families below the poverty level. For young black men, the unemployment rate is a disaster: Only 20 percent of black male teens are employed today, versus 52 percent in 1954. Hiram Clarke is not a place to dawdle; 76 percent of the deaths in the neighborhood have been linked to destructive habits, which can include alcohol and drug addiction and abuse of various kinds.
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