By Jessica Garcia
The words of Washoe County District Judge Steven Kosach echo relentlessly in Roberto Nerey’s mind: “I want you to go in (to prison) as a man and come out as a man and when you come out, I want you to help your community.”
Nerey tells the story of his 1991 sentencing for charges of conspiracy to commit murder and murder because it’s the story of an undeserved
favor granted to him with a reduction from 12 years to two years in prison.
It’s the story of how Nerey went from exacting revenge on the gang that shot at his house just after he graduated from Hug High School to counseling today’s youth entangled in the very same gang population.
It’s the story of the rehabilitation of a 19-year-old Latino immigrant, somewhere between a teenager who believed in the American dream and an adult who faced murder charges. Nerey explains his journey of going from gang involvement to prison for his role in Reno’s first documented drive-by shooting.
“When he sentenced me, he only gave me two years,” Nerey recounts. “I looked at my lawyer and went, ‘What? Two years for murder?’ He looked at a kid’s eyes. ... He knew I wasn’t set out to kill nobody. I made a mistake, bad enough to go to prison, but not bad enough for him to throw away the keys.”
In the past, Nerey has spoken with the Sparks Tribune about the importance of his sentencing from which his passion for at-risk and hardcore gang youth stems.
This week, he speaks on a more personal level and details his life more intimately — and with more pain — than he has in the past. A recent event involving the shooting of his own son has triggered confusion, anger and a feeling of senselessness as the very work that he’s invested himself in has left an emotional scar on him.
Still, he continues to offer help to teens as long as they’re willing to accept it.
To read Nerey’s story, see the Wednesday edition of the Daily Sparks Tribune.
Gang Unit strives for more than enforcement
By Cortney Maddock
Created in 2001, the Regional Gang Unit (RGU) is a collective group of 25 members of the Sparks and Reno police departments as well as the Washoe County Sheriff’s Department who specialize in understanding gangs in the community.
Sgt. Magee, who asked that his first name not be used for safety reasons, has worked for the Reno Police Department for 26 years and with the RGU for more than seven years. Magee began working with the gang unit as an officer and has since been promoted to a supervisor.
Magee said the importance of the RGU, which covers all of Washoe County, is that it gives law enforcement the ability to focus on and investigate gang-related crimes with officers who are experts in the field.
“We act as a conduit to our partner agencies for prevention and intervention,” Magee added, explaining that the gang unit works with multiple organizations to provide activities and alternatives for gang-affiliated youth.
Magee said that he commonly sees 15- to 18-year-olds who are in gangs or associate with gang members. He said that the gang unit strives to prevent youth gang membership.
“We are the only agency that I know of that sends certified letters home informing parents that their child is being considered for being put in the gang intelligence file,” Magee said. “We get parents who say they didn’t know all the time.”
Magee said that the letter the RGU sends also includes information about intervention and prevention, and that officers also talk to the parents about their child’s involvement in gangs.
“The Regional Gang Unit is a group of men and women who are dedicated to their communities,” Magee said. “Not only do we investigate crimes but we provide information about prevention and education. The prevention and intervention part is huge to us.”
For the complete story on the RGU, read the July 26 issue of the Daily Sparks Tribune.
Getting Up After Being ‘Down’
Local girl tries to cut her gang ties after almost helping to shoot her own cousins
By Jessica Garcia
Bianca Belts was supposed to be at the scene the night of May 18 when two men from Reno were shot at the intersection of York Way and Simms Circle in Sparks. She could have been the one in the car that drove up from behind to ask three young passengers, “Where are you from?” She might have been responsible for pulling the trigger.
But she’s glad she wasn’t, for the shooting victims were her own cousins. Belts was a member of 18th Street, the gang she claims is responsible for the incident.
“They’re from the gang I was in,” she said. “If I would have been there and picked up the gun – for you to pick up a gun, especially if you’re a girl, they’d say, ‘Dang, this girl’s down.’ You get that respect and I was really willing to do that. But now that I think about it, what if I was there?”
Belts, 17, has only spent four days in school this past year. She’s been in and out of the Jan Evans Juvenile Detention Center in Reno, as well as 13 months in a Las Vegas jail. Most recently, she spent a year in jail in Prescott Valley, Ariz.
It’s been a hard price to pay for the dysfunctional family life she’s been through. At 9, she was taken away from her mother on allegations of molestation. She has eight other siblings scattered throughout the United States and Mexico. She’s had 63 placements in foster homes and she’s run away from nearly all of them.
Gangs are in Belts’ blood, especially since she idolized her mother, also a gang member, from a young age.
“What makes me so angry … is the world didn’t care about me,” Belts said. “They saw me going through all this. ‘Oh, whatever, she’s going to end up like her mom.’ I had family, but it wasn’t the people I needed surrounding me and loving me. … I was disowned. Because of that, I felt I had to prove myself.”
Read more about Belts in Wednesday’s edition of the Tribune.
Symptom of a larger problem
A Sparks City Councilwoman has been an advocate for gang intervention for almost two decades.
By Cortney Maddock
Working to curb escalating gang-related activity in the community, Julia Ratti and other community activists and leaders worked to form and promote the Gang Alternatives Partnership (GAP) in 1991.
Now a city of Sparks councilwoman, Ratti said the purpose of GAP was to address a problem that only a few knew about in the early 1990s.
“The only people who knew that it was going on was law enforcement and the people involved in the gangs,” Ratti explained.
Ratti said that as a community, the partnership worked with other organizations to create activities for at-risk and gang-affiliated youth in the hope of preventing gang membership. She added that funding for such programs is difficult to obtain and that many preventative programs are compromised because of budget issues. The lack of a secure funding source is what led to the demise of the Gang Alternatives Partnership and its programs around 1999.
“There’s nowhere near enough,” Ratti said. “As a society we are not investing in our kids sufficiently. That ‘we’ is a big we. I fully believe that if we are going to address this problem, it needs to be a community-wide initiative.”
Ratti said that social problems are not solved overnight. She added that a research paper published in 1999 by herself and Assemblywoman Sheila Leslie suggests a three-pronged approach to gangs: prevention, intervention and enforcement.
“You can’t do it all with enforcement and the police will tell you that they can only deal with the crime aspect of it,” Ratti said. “There is a never-ending pipeline of kids who will get involved if you don’t deal with the prevention side, but I think the one that gets lost the most is the intervention side.”
Ratti said she believes that gangs are symptoms and not the cause of the problem, adding that society needs to address the core problems including poverty, education and discrimination.
For the complete story on local gang intervention and prevention efforts, read the July 26 edition of the Daily Sparks Tribune.
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