Across North Carolina, in big cities and small towns, law enforcement officers share Edgecombe County Sheriff Clee Atkinson’s take on gangs in the state: “It’s a big problem.”
Atkinson, other law enforcement officials and gang members spoke with WRAL’s documentary team to shine a light on the lure of the gang life and how younger people are enticed to commit crimes on their behalf.
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The interviews — conducted as WRAL produced Easy Targets: Gangs Getting Younger in NC — painted a bleak reality: A well-intentioned law to raise the age of people who can be tried as adults has made it easier for gang members to recruit kids.
Gangs have used the law to misinform young people, promising them little or no punishment for violent acts. They become easy targets, Atkinson and other law enforcement officials said.
“When the state of North Carolina raised the age, we raised crime,” said Nash County Sheriff Keith Stone.
Lawmakers are now trying to roll back parts of the law with a bill that awaits a decision from Gov. Roy Cooper.
You see people “13, 14, 15 years old — young kids with guns in their hands going to work for OGs in their 30s,” says Michael Easley, U.S. attorney for the eastern district of North Carolina.
Tim Prince is a Raleigh resident, a violence interventional specialist with a criminal record working to ensure the next generation makes better choices. He understands the gang life because he lived it. “If there's an issue, they're not fighting, they're shooting,” he said of young gang members.
In Nash County, Sgt. Michael Cannon works at a detention center where he’s in charge of classifying gang members. Many jails and prisons try to separate different gangs to reduce clashes on the inside and better protect both jail inmates and employees.
Cannon uses criteria including tattoos and clothing in a gang’s colors or with insignia to determine if someone is in a gang and which one. There are other indicators, too. “Handwriting's a big one,” Cannon said. “Are they capitalizing their C’s but lower-casing their B’s or vice versa? Are they crossing out all the C’s? That could be a sign that you might be a Crip or you might be a Blood.”
‘I didn’t want to be in the crossfire’
Cannon introduced WRAL to “Andrew,” a young man, dressed in an orange jumpsuit and ankle shackles, who says he was introduced to gangs when he was as young as 10 years old.
Andrew is a pseudonym. He spoke with WRAL on the condition of anonymity because he feared retribution from other gang members or prisoners.
Andrew says he was a good kid. He was aware of gangs from a young age, but it wasn’t until he was incarcerated for other crimes that he joined one, in part out of necessity.
“I was at Polk Youth Center. It's a youth prison. It's 17 to 21, and it was pretty much fight every day,” Andrew said. “People who were 20, doing life [sentences]. It was wild. They got nothing to lose in there. That's why it's so violent.”
Andrew says he joined a gang to have allies.
“I didn’t want to be in the crossfire,” he said. “I'd rather be with someone that promises good than bad, but, you know, there's no real good in it.”
He served his time at Polk, but he wasn’t able to leave the gang life on the outside.
“You can't really get out of it,” he said, “especially when you tattoo it on yourself.”
Andrew did community service on the outside. “We got together and picked up trash,” he said. “So we did good to give back for the bad that we did. But you can't sell drugs and ruin lives and pick up trash and expect to heal what you've done. It just doesn't work that way.”
Andrew is back in prison for murder. He said he stepped in when someone he knew was attacked and ended up killing the attacker.
“There's just an unspoken code that … if push comes to shove, you do what you have to do,” he said. “And if at the end of the day, if another gang member is in trouble [and] you're the only one around, you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do. … People will turn on you if you don't make the right choice at the time.”
Asked if gang life desensitized him to violence, Andrews said no. “It's prison that does that to you," he said.
“I've seen people get held down on their bed and stabbed,” he said. “I've seen people go to the shower and get stabbed, seen people about to go home die. It really changes your perspective and the way you act when you have to fear for your life every day.”
Andrew says he regrets joining a gang. “I wish I had never gotten involved in it,” he says.
‘The love that I was getting’
In Edgecombe County, Atkinson introduced WRAL to another young man — “Sean” — who joined a gang at 16 before moving to Rocky Mount.
Like Andrew, Sean is a pseudonym. He also spoke with WRAL on the condition of anonymity for personal safety reasons.
Growing up, his father was in prison and the relatives he was close with were drug addicts, Sean said. He said he was drawn to the gang life in part because of the camaraderie — “the love that I was getting from people that I didn't even know.”
“It was all a survival tactic to me,” he said. “There are a lot of things that I wish I'd never done, but I did have to survive. Either you’re going to be a shark or you’re going to be a guppy, and you had to be a shark when I was coming up.”
Eventually, Sean says, the costs of that lifestyle became clear.
“When I started losing too many close friends,” he said, “I'm talking about doing life, double life sentences in prison, being dead. It messed with me in all types of ways.”
Sean got out. He has a family, a legitimate job and no criminal record in North Carolina.
“I don't believe in the nonsense that they do out here — shooting this and doing all that,” he says. “That's a past tense life for me.”
He wants to reach kids in the way Atkinson reached him. Today, Sean considers Atkinson a big brother, a mentor.
“I was doing my share of messing the communities up,” he said. “I'm trying to be a person that helps rebuild it.”
‘Not the life you want’
Giving young people a warning, an example of the consequences of gang life is the goal of Will to Live, an intervention program in Edgecombe County Public Schools conducted in cooperation with the sheriff’s department.
“A lot of the gravitation to gang life, they want to feel love,” Atkinson said.
According to the state, 15,000 people went through the North Carolina juvenile justice system in 2023. Forty percent of them had a parent who wasn’t willing to help them.
“Who's going to teach them? Who's going to show them a better way?” Atkinson said. “If we don’t put the effort, who will?”
On the final Friday of each month, September through May, 12 students from Edgecombe County Public Schools spend a day with A Will to Live. Atkinson says the name of the program came from a conversation, years ago, with Sean.
“Local gang members out of the city of Rocky Mount, they said, ‘We need a will to live,’” Atkinson said. “And so that's the name of our local program, A Will to Live.”
The students tour the Edgecombe County jail, meet inmates and spend time at a local funeral home. They meet with a mentor to discuss making good choices.
Meanwhile, parents are in class, learning about school attendance, mental health, gangs, substance abuse and parenting strategies.
The students are handcuffed and dressed in inmate jumpsuits. In one exercise, they fill out their own death certificates at Hemby-Willoughby Mortuary and hear the questions a mortician would ask their parents if they died.
They visit the embalming room.
They go to the jail.
“We let them talk to local gang leaders that are in our jail,” Atkinson said.
On the day that WRAL shadowed the Will to Live program, a female inmate berated the students for not paying attention.
“You’re disrespecting your mamas, your daddies, your aunts, your grandmas,” she said. “Them people love and care about you so you can see where you don’t want to go.”
The inmates don’t hold back. They raise their voices.
“The route you’re going, you’ll be back here,” one says.
They get louder when the kids fail to take it seriously.
“You don’t want to be in here. I don’t want to be in here,” one inmate says. “... This is not the life you want. I promise you.”
Andrew, Sean, Atkinson and others hope the message gets through.