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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Dontae’s family was part of this diaspora. After living in several crumbling black neighborhoods around the city, an aunt named Joyce Hill landed here in 1995, settling in a worn, four-bedroom, 1,300-square-foot house, taking in any family members who needed her help, a group that already included the solemn, dark-skinned son of her brother.
In his room at Aunt Joyce’s house, Dontae stored the keepsakes of a difficult life: an album with a faded photo of his mother, beaming and beautiful in her Sunday best, and a picture of the grandmother who took care of him after drugs took his mom away and she gave up her children, including Dontae, who was then three years old. (That grandmother died in front of Dontae, collapsing in the driveway of their home one day, leading to his life with his father’s sister.) There are pictures of brothers and sisters, who are today scattered around the city, and of his father, who on summer weekends took Dontae and his younger brothers fishing in Clear Lake or Galveston. “It was like a man meeting,” Dontae told me during one of our two interviews at the Harris County jail. There is also an old report card tucked into the album, from Windsor Village Elementary in 1996, when he was in the third grade; with an overall average of 71, Dontae must have been proud of the 80 he got in spelling.
He was a good boy for whom bad luck had a serious attraction. When Dontae was in the ninth grade, his dreams of playing high school football abruptly ended when he was struck by a car while crossing the street after getting off a Metro bus. He woke up in the middle of the street, one leg broken in five places. After doctors installed steel rods and a plate in the leg, he spent a year in bed, cut from the football team, watching TV, a cousin or two curled up next to him for company. “Once I got in the accident,” he said, “I felt like half my life was over.” He bounced in and out of a few more schools, got in a fight when provoked, but generally stayed out of trouble. At home he was the chief child tender, watching the ever-growing number of babies who came with the other relatives his aunt took in. At one point, at least four adults and eight kids lived in the rent house on Woodring. “I used to walk the kids to school and pick them up—make sure nothing ever happened to them, make sure nothing ever happened to my people,” Dontae explained.
“He looked at himself as the man of the house,” Aunt Joyce told me, and this was true in the extreme, in that he almost never left. Even his girlfriend, a pretty, studious eighteen-year-old who is now at Texas Southern University, knew better than to invite Dontae to her high school prom. For his whole life, until he was charged with capital murder for allegedly shooting Jonathan Finkelman, Dontae Terrell Moore never spent a night away from his family.
BY FALL 2005, the beginning of Jonathan’s junior year at Bellaire, both of his brothers had left for college. The pressure intensified to choose between kids from nice homes who occasionally used drugs and alcohol and kids from even nicer homes who habitually used drugs and alcohol. The girls he knew from camp and his friends from the football team urged him to slow down, to cut back on the hard partying and the marijuana, but he didn’t. That his behavior was self-destructive was not lost on him. “I like hanging out with you because you make me feel like a good person,” he told one of the many girls who wanted to be close with him. “I feel like there’s something missing in my life,” he told another. It didn’t help that he was not academically inclined. As a student who sometimes helped him with his work explained, “Bellaire is a very competitive school. I have a 3.0, and I’m in the third quarter of my class.” Jonathan wasn’t like the driven kids who pushed to get into the top 10 percent of their class; he just wanted to graduate, go to college, and join the family business so, he told friends, he could stay home with his kids.
A family cruise over the winter break seemed to provide the needed respite from all these pressures. Alan’s second wife had just had a baby, so it was only his father and his brothers, together in a way they hadn’t been for quite some time. The Caribbean cruise on the Grand Princess went to Belize, Cozumel, and Grand Cayman; the boys spent most of their time in the casino, slipping comfortably into old roles. When a steward on the ship tried to keep the underage Jonathan from gambling, his brothers were there to make sure he got in. A friend from Bellaire was also onboard, and the two spent time together taking pictures with her cell phone camera, which she would later post on MySpace.
But back home for the rest of winter break, Jonathan returned to business as usual, which meant dealing. According to law enforcement sources, a Bellaire freshman named Warren Payne was looking to buy some drugs, and he called Jonathan, who mentioned Lorcet, part of the panoply of prescription painkillers that had been growing in popularity over the past few years. (Enterprising Texas kids had realized they could drive to the border, cross into Mexico, and legally buy drugs that produced highs equal to or better than the illegal drugs they had to sneak around to buy in the U.S.) Jonathan told Warren the price would be $20 for nine pills. The two agreed to meet later in the afternoon for the pickup.
Jonathan didn’t really know Warren, but the fact that Jonathan had a class with his older sister must have given the younger boy a pass. Warren’s predilections, however, should not have been hard to miss. At fifteen, he was deeply invested in the gangsta life. If you didn’t know that he was white and redheaded and lived with his father and stepmother in a $462,000, 3,733-square-foot house in Bellaire—plus swimming pool—you might think he was another bad boy from the hood. His MySpace page was a virtual paean to drugs and sex: It included a quiz titled “What thug drink are you?” (Answer: “You love just gettin f—ed up for the hell of it … your not drinkin to score because ur the ultimate thug …”), a parody of a handicapped sign featuring a man in a wheelchair receiving oral sex, and a photo of a woman’s buttocks adorned with what appeared to be a deep red slap mark. His friends seemed to love it: Female classmates were always sending him messages with hearts and smiley faces, and boys wanted him to chill with them.
What happened next makes sense only in the context of the essential irrationality of teenage life: Police investigators say that Warren met Jonathan on the street to buy the drugs, and Jonathan objected to the denomination of the bills. After an argument, he gave Warren fewer pills than he wanted. Later in the day, the police say, Warren called Jonathan and said he was working on a deal for a large number of pills. Jonathan could make $500. Was he interested?
He was. According to law enforcement sources, Warren called Jonathan’s phone several times that day. “The only reason Jonathan went through with the deal,” one of his friends explained, “was because it was a ridiculous amount of money.”
“IT WAS GETTING KINDA COMPLICATED AT THE HOUSE” is the way Deonti Rice, one of Dontae’s friends who was living with the family, describes what he saw as a worsening economic crisis on Woodring Drive late last year. Joyce Hill, who had worked at a McDonald’s near Loop 610 for several years, had hurt her back on the job and was on medical leave. She had been living from paycheck to paycheck. Earlier, she had found Dontae a job there, and he had worked alongside her, packing fries and doling out Happy Meals, even though he remained in almost constant pain from the accident. While Aunt Joyce worked hard to make ends meet, some of the boys in the house felt duty bound to help out. Dontae, never the best student, had dropped out of school the previous spring, when he was a junior; he had been having trouble with his leg and was hoping to have more surgery. He and his best friend, a boy named Chris, looked for better-paying jobs but had no luck. “We filled out applications at hardware stores, fast-food joints,” Chris said. “It would take a long time to call back or people wouldn’t call back.” Deonti had a job as a men’s room attendant at a hip club called Toc but lost it. “A two-story house. The light bills had to get paid. Nobody had a real steady job, and it was coming down on us,” Deonti said. “You gotta pay the bills, the lights—you gotta step up. You can’t just sit back and let things fall apart.” Aunt Joyce knew the neighborhood; she warned the boys in her house that she didn’t want them doing anything illegal to help pay the bills. “I tried to keep them out of trouble, but you can only do what you can do,” she said.
It was around that time, however, that Jeff Lopez—the brother of Warren Payne’s friend Steve—started showing up at Woodring on a regular basis. “He seemed like a cool person,” Dontae told me. “That’s why I hung around with him.” Dontae had met him at a house in the neighborhood, a place where a guy did tattoos for money. White kids showed up there too, usually high; Dontae could tell they had money by the things they had and the cars they drove.
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