HARRISBURG – Residents of Harrisburg are expressing their concern to city law enforcement that someone had better do something about the nightmare of a bunch of gangsta-wannabe thugs in their midst, or someone is going to die.
Major speculation is going on among those associated with the thugs that there’s a perception of disruption in town since the “shift in direction” that the city council took on Thursday, February 16, when they removed James “Whipper” Johnson as police chief and replaced him with David Morris.
However, that might be a misplaced perception, as witnesses to the city’s most recent gang-related shooting have advised that Morris was not only the first on the scene when the shooting was called in in the early morning hours of Saturday, February 25, but he was there quickly, and was very reassuring to those at the scene as well as neighbors who were affected by the city’s latest shooting.
The latest shooting happened at about 2:30 a.m. that day and involved the same people who have been involved in what’s assessed by public officials as “gang-related activity,” despite the derision of some of the public to the effect that “there’s no gang stuff going on in Harrisburg.”
Some authorities believe there is, however. And as long as incidents that even remotely look like “gangbangers” keep happening, the premise is solid: There are some “gangs” in Harrisburg, they are rival, and if they’re not stopped, someone is going to die.
The three shot
Authorities were quiet about the identities of those shot, but nearly a dozen of their associates contacted Disclosure as soon as the situation emerged, advising who was shot and how it happened.
Photos of where the bullets landed on the morning of February 25 were taken for evidence; here, the photo shows how one of the bullets gouged the ground next to the house on the 200 block of East Dayton in Harrisburg. Some of the bullets struck the porch and sidewalk/steps of the house next door…where, it was reported, a 10-year-old boy was sleeping in the living room of the home, not eight feet from where the nearest bullet struck the house. Shown also on this page are many of the local denizens said to have been involved, either peripherally or directly, in many of the shootings in Harrisburg in the last six years. Most of them are still at large, not charged with anything recent by way of the shootings…which is causing many to opine that if something isn’t done soon, someone is going to be dead…and the way it works with the gangsta-wannabe crowd, it won’t be any of them, but instead will be an innocent bystander.
A birthday party had gone on in the day or two prior to the shooting, for one of the residents of the rental in the 200 block of East Dayton; the home is owned by Jamie Triplett, and rented by well-known local crim Marion Godsey, 52, and his girlfriend, Miranda Guadalupe Murphy (Murphy’s 33rd birthday was Feb. 23). Her two children reside with them.
Godsey was only just last April placed on 30 months probation on a late 2011 Narcotics charge, and he’s still paying on $4,664 worth of fines and fees of a massive $6,814.30 order.
Living in a Diefenbach rental house next to Godsey is Charles “LoudPack” Williams, who has no discernible criminal history in Saline.
At the house in the overnight hours was also Bobby Evans Jr., 34, reportedly Godsey’s cousin. Evans is the local crim who owes an astronomical amount of fines and fees in a 2003 case originally charged as murder, and pled down to Aggravated Discharge of a Firearm. He’s also the man who was paralyzed from the waist down in a late December 2014 shooting incident on North Jackson Street in Harrisburg, which many believed would cool his heels a bit when it came to the gangbanger life.
The wannabe charged with paralyzing Evans is Xzavier Gibbs, now 19, and who was a juvenile when the incident took place so it’s difficult to track his multiple crimes, since some were charged as juvenile, some were charged as adult even though he was a juvenile when they were allegedly committed, and some have occurred in the last year or so and have gotten him hemmed up in big boy court.
Gibbs reportedly had, about the third week of February 2017, gotten out of Illinois Youth Center (juvie) in Harrisburg and was free to go about his criminal business…which he did, allegedly, right after an incident on the morning of Feb. 24.
Rotten Xzavier beaten
As it turned out, sources indicate that on that day, Gibbs was beaten with ball bats and shovels out in the yard of a man considered a local snitch, Dennis D. Jackson, 31, the morning before the shooting.
Jackson caught his first felony conviction in 2005, and was sentenced to six years in IDOC for moving cocaine through the county.
Since that time, he continued to get charged with and get out of every imaginable kind of crime – dope, weapons, trespassing, obstruction, home invasion. Several are still pending, years after they were charged, the most recent (2014-15) involving cocaine and violence.
Gibbs and his brother, Ian Hamilton, have buddied up to Jackson, who is said to have been providing a measure of “protection” for them as in a “gang” circumstance. It’s termed here as “gang circumstance” because most of those who are aware that these people function in this way have stated that the bunch doesn’t operate with a gang “name” nor are they affiliated with any established gangs; they just consider themselves as such.
Jackson and others associated with this group were understandably upset with the beating inflicted on little Xzavier.
They blamed the ongoing rivalry with the Godsey/Evans bunch and began making noises about “getting back” at whomever had damaged their boay.
History of shootings since 2011
Regular readers (as well as 90 percent of Harrisburg) are familiar with the previous shootings in Harrisburg that seemed to kick off in earnest in 2011, including the one that paralyzed Evans on North Jackson south of the bypass on Dec. 28, 2014 (which actually began in Carrier Mills earlier that Sunday evening), as well as the one that took place in front of a set of apartments on West Towle Street, located
Xzavier Gibbs
Dennis Jackson
Ian Hamilton
Ramonte Scott
Jared Crawford
north of the bypass and just off Main Street.
Said to have been peripherally involved in that September 2015 situation was one Jared “Hood” Crawford, a 29-year-old Harrisburg punk who is also a convicted coke dealer from back in 2007.
As well as those listed above, there are a number of other shootings having taken place, including on Baker Street and Granger Street (both South Granger, in the south part of town, and North Granger, just off the bypass to the south).
One of these was in a house on North Granger in June 2012, in which one woman, Aretha Coleman, was injured by a flying bullet.
As it turned out, those involved in that shooting thought her son, Ramonte Scott, was in the house (he’d been tossed out by Coleman in the previous days) and apparently they were gunning for him.
In 2013, Hamilton, at the age of 19, was involved in a shooting in town and then again in 2014, he was involved in a home invasion and attempted shooting, accused of pulling and firing a handgun on a woman holding a baby; the weapon had run out of bullets and so she and her infant were not shot.
Add in the various shootings occurring at a local bar (Los Amigos, which owners on Sunday, Feb. 26, announced that they were closing “because of all the trouble” they’ve had at the bar, a couple at some housing locations, and some random home invasions in which folks were very fortunate they were NOT shot…and the phrase “the usual suspects” starts to emerge, with the names mentioned here coming into focus.
Helping Bobby down the stairs
Charles “LoudPack” Williams and Marion Godsey were helping their buddy Bobby Evans get out of the house on East Dayton Street in the early morning hours of Feb. 25, wrangling his wheelchair down the flight of stairs at the front of the house.
Authorities haven’t said whether the group of gangbangers were waiting for the three or if they pulled up as the group was working with the wheelchair with Evans in it.
Whatever the case, the group of three were fired upon from the street, and male voices could be heard after the gunshots faded; then, report those at the scene, a white Chevy Impala with Kentucky plates sped off.
All three men were reportedly struck; Evans with a leg wound, Williams with a serious gunshot wound to the chest.
Williams was airlifted out of Harrisburg to an undisclosed trauma hospital for treatment.
Public lauds Morris
To his credit, Harrisburg Police Chief David Morris was the first on the scene after a number of people dialed 911 in the wake of the shooting.
Those present and interviewed by the chief said that he handled the situation professionally and with a great deal of calm and compassion for the victims, both the ones who were struck by gunfire, as well as the neighbors whose morning was seriously disrupted.
In speaking with the witnesses and people peripheral to the incident, nearly everyone had the same impression: That the group who attacked may have been comprised of Dennis Jackson, Jared Crawford, Xzavier Gibbs and Ramonte Scott.
Authorities, as of press time, have declined to state who it is they believe was involved in the shooting; in fact, they hadn’t even identified the victims.
However, the “persons of interest” are very well known to the public, who have also opined that these locals have become aware of the situation surrounding Morris’ ascension to the office of police chief.
For a year now, there has been a considerable amount of rancor between certain members of the Harrisburg city council and then-chief Whipper Johnson. That rancor reached a somewhat chaotic pitch on Feb. 16 when the council voted to demote Johnson and replace him with Morris.
The announcement of the change reportedly sent several of the “usual suspects” into gales of glee, as they – not the sort to follow even local politics – believed that there was an abundance of not only chaos on the council and within the police department, but also palpable animosity.
While that wasn’t necessarily the case – Johnson has told Disclosure that he’s just fine with being given his Sergeant rank back, and holds no ill will toward anyone – the local thugs reportedly are acting on rumor and innuendo alone, and it seemed that crime stepped up a notch in the week or so after the announcement that Morris was at the helm was made.
Therefore, those who were peripherally involved in the latest shooting expressed to Disclosure their gratitude toward Morris’ demeanor and professionalism…as it proves the thugs wrong.
The only thing the folks on East Dayton, North Cherry and North Mill say that they wish had happened would have been for Morris to announce whether or not the general public was at any risk from whomever it was that pulled off this shooting.
‘This will go on all summer’
But the greater concern is what will happen after this incident…because, say these folks who know all those involved or allegedly involved, it’s been going on for years, and this is just the latest volley in the back-and-forth.
“This is going to go on all summer,” predicted one woman, who told Disclosure that she moved to another section of town because of what’s going on out on the north side.
“I had to get my kids away from this,” she said the day the shooting happened. “There’s just too much risk involved and you can see why. They just roll up on a house where there’s one of them they don’t like, and they start shooting. They don’t care who else is there. They just shoot.”
Another woman who lives about three blocks south of the scene said that everybody has been making fun of the ones who shot up the scene on Towle Street a year and a half ago, claiming “they can’t hit the broad side of a barn,” a notion that, technically, might be true…but the problem, she said, is that there’s “always the possibility that someone is just sitting on their porch and it’s ‘wrong place, wrong time’ and they’re the one who catches a stray bullet in the head.”
In the meantime, those whose derision toward the notion that there are “gangs” in Harrisburg might want to talk to the folks whose lives have been completely disrupted by the ongoing battle between these groups, and look up the legal definition of “gang”…because in legalese, it works for every single one of these incidents dating back to 2011 in Harrisburg.
And in the meantime, they’d better hope that some of these naysayers aren’t among those who are charged with dealing with the thugs and wannabe-gangstas…because apparently, the gangbangers don’t care who believes they’re a “gang” or not; they’re just going to keep doing their thing because so far, they still can.