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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Jeff was doing all right too. He was a couple of years older than Dontae and was paying his way through TSU. “Jeff was always about money,” Deonti said. “He carried himself like a person with money.” He dressed well, and he had a gold grill flecked with red that he wore over his teeth. For a long time it had seemed that money hadn’t mattered to Dontae; he was happy to stay home and play NBA video games or hang out with his old friends. “I could not have money, he could not have money, and we could just laugh all day,” Chris told me. To get out of the house, they’d take the bus to Sharpstown mall, sometimes, or the flea market on Martin Luther King. Other boys in the house were more restless; they’d watch TV shows like MTV Cribs and want their own private piece of the good life. Crime probably seemed like a viable career track. “People won’t hire me,” one of Dontae’s friends told me while we were eating at a fast-food joint. “Are you gonna do it this way?” he asked, motioning toward the kids working behind the counter. “Or the fast way? If that’s the way I gotta do it, that’s the way I’m gonna do it.”
It was Jeff who gave Dontae a glimpse of the faster world, particularly as Jeff spent more and more nights away from his family and more time sleeping on the couch at Woodring. “Jeff was constantly throwing money in Dontae’s face” was the way one member of the household put it. On the other hand, Jeff paid his way, respected Aunt Joyce, and sometimes bought fast food for everyone in the house. The only problems were his constantly ringing cell phone and the comings and goings—short trips that, more and more often, took Dontae away from the house.
Then, one December night, Jeff asked Dontae to go out riding with him. He got into a sedan with Jeff and a black man whose name no one seems to know and headed for Godwin Park.
THERE IS VERY LITTLE AGREEMENT about what really happened in Jonathan Finkelman’s car on the night of December 27. In the disjointed accounts police investigators gathered after the shooting, the only undisputed fact seems to be that a young black male got out of the sedan and into Jonathan’s car along with Warren Payne. Once inside, after some discussion, the black male pulled a gun and announced his intention to rob everyone present by saying, “Give me your stuff.” When Jonathan and the friend he had brought along were slow to react, he pointed the gun at Jonathan’s head to show that he was serious. Warren told police investigators that Jonathan reached for the gun. A struggle ensued, shots were fired inside the car, and one hit Jonathan in the head, showering the interior with blood.
The other three occupants stumbled out of the car at the same time, running either to escape more shots or to escape arrest. Warren tried to race across the grass, but the bullet that felled him had pierced his liver, passed through his lung, and narrowly missed his aorta before exiting his body. One of the boys called 911, as did several residents who lived around the park. Jonathan’s front seat passenger escaped into some nearby bushes and called one of Jonathan’s closest friends, who, in turn, called his father, a doctor, who rushed to the scene and gave Jonathan CPR, to no avail. Warren was taken away in an ambulance with life-threatening injuries.
The police who arrived at Godwin found their teenage witnesses uncooperative: No one seemed to know who had been in the park or who had fired the shots. In all the confusion of that night, one detail has stayed in the minds of a few people on the scene: Alan Finkelman and his brother Steve both arrived at the scene wearing Ecko T-shirts, one of the gangbangers’ favorite brands.
It didn’t take long for the police to track down Jeff Lopez. He was arrested on December 29, two days after the shooting, and charged with aggravated robbery with a deadly weapon. His indictment reads that “he did … intentionally and knowingly threaten and place Jonathan Finkelman in fear of bodily injury and death, and … did then and there use and exhibit a deadly weapon …” Witnesses told the police he’d had a shotgun. Interrogated, he claimed two Jamaicans had committed the crime at Godwin. Then he said it was two guys from New Orleans. After he was released on $53,000 bond, he stayed away from the Woodring house, though he would call, on occasion. “I’m not going down for capital murder,” he would say, chewing over his case with anyone who answered the phone. In the meantime, several of the boys, including Warren, had identified Dontae out of a photo lineup.
Just before Valentine’s Day, Jeff was arrested again, for possession with intent to deliver “a controlled substance, namely, 3, 4 methylenedioxy methamphetamine, weighing more than four grams and less than 400 grams.” This time there was no bond. He seems to have cooperated with the investigation: Almost a month later Dontae was arrested and charged with capital murder. (On his MySpace page, Steve Lopez posted a close-up of his brother sneering with his gold grill, and when friends asked about him, he answered, “Mayen he doin good mayne we just waittin to see wats good but hopefully everything goes well cuz people dont kno da real shit and dats y hes in there.”
Dontae now resides on the seventh floor of the Harris County jail. Unlike minor criminals, who sport orange jumpsuits, he is dressed in the yellow worn by all violent offenders, and the shackles on his arms and legs do not come off when he sees visitors. He says he did not shoot Jonathan, though he admits to being at the scene that night. “I am not supposed to be here,” he said of his current surroundings, and the story Jeff told investigators—presumably that Dontae was the gunman—is not, he says “the real story.” On his aunt’s advice, he reads the Bible often, most notably the Book of Job, and writes as best he can to the people he once took care of at home, begging the kids to make something of themselves: “I pray to Lord Jesus every other hour asking to forgive stupid mistakes I made in the past I just ask could I get cap murder drop to something else where I could get bond. Because only evidence is people lying on me … They say I’m Cold blooded killer every one know that’s not true.”
He is now an unwilling passenger on the Harris County capital murder train, which runs straight to death row, especially if you’re poor and black. The district attorney’s office can employ all the state’s resources to get the death penalty, while Dontae has only a court-appointed lawyer with far too many cases and far too little money to investigate his claims. The other attorneys his family saw expected retainers of at least $25,000. Dontae’s relatives want only a fair investigation and a fair trial. So far, the murder weapon, thought to have been a revolver, has not been found. Only one bullet was recovered from the crime scene. Dontae’s chief accuser has a criminal record, and the identification of Dontae (one of two black men on the scene) as the shooter by teenage boys on a dark night could probably be challenged by a good lawyer. Even the police say that the photograph from which Dontae was identified hardly resembles him. As Aunt Joyce’s eldest daughter, April, told me, “All the boys were doing something they had no business doing. Nobody’s gonna win. Everybody’s losing a child.”
Denial has set in on all fronts. Many of the kids now say that Jonathan was foolish to go to the park that night. “He got shot by sheer stupidity,” one e-mailed me. “Hanging out with the wrong people.” The Finkelman family, through a spokesman, insists that Jonathan’s murder was not a drug sale but a robbery gone wrong. Before he stopped talking to the press, Alan Finkelman contended that the Lorcet found in the car was legal. Critical of media accounts of his son’s death, he told the Houston Chronicle, “It was prescription drugs. This wasn’t like LSD or some funky-ass stuff. It was less money involved than you or I carry in our wallets.” Law enforcement sources, however, say Jonathan had no prescription for that particular drug.
Those loyal to Bellaire High and the Meyerland community retreated too. “Why don’t you do an article on a more-inner-city school?” a former student challenged me. “This is news?” a leader of the Jewish community asked. It was noteworthy that the person most vilified in the area following Jonathan’s death was not one of the kids involved in the killing but Peggy O’Hare, the Chronicle’s crime reporter, who wrote a poignant account of his life, titled “Teenage Tragedy.”
But the outcome hasn’t been tragic for everyone. Dontae and Jeff languish in jail, and Jonathan lies buried in a local Jewish cemetery—his grave marked for the first year, as Jewish tradition dictates, with stones from people who have visited it. But the person whose response to a dispute over drugs set in motion the events that led to Jonathan’s murder has not been charged with anything. Warren Payne, recovered from his injuries and out of drug rehab, has been spotted chatting on his cell phone in a park near Bellaire and smoking water pipes at the Hookah Bar, a teen hangout. His new photo on his MySpace page shows him in a hot and heavy clutch with his girlfriend, and his friends still post messages there. “Oh shit itz Warr3n!!!” one wrote recently. “Yo gangsta status cain’t B d3ni3d now U got a battl3 scar.”
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