Wallace Parrish, 19, of West Fourth Street was arrested last weekend in connection with the Sept. 28 death of 44-year-old Johnston Avenue resident Isidro Leonardo, an employee of United Taxi on Watchung Avenue. Parrish made his first appearance before Superior Court Judge Joan Robinson Gross on Wednesday, when he did not comment at length about the case that authorities have described as a robbery gone wrong.
It was not immediately known Thursday whether Parrish had secured legal representation, but details about his life during the months leading up to Leonardo's death seemed to reveal a troubled background that included a 2009 arrest in Ewing.
Mercer County Prosecutor's Office spokeswoman Casey DeBlasio said Tuesday that Parrish in June entered a three-year pretrial intervention program that was to include requirements of periodic supervision and 50 hours of community service. Pretrial intervention, or PTI, is a program through which defendants, mostly first-time offenders, are offered rehabilitative alternatives to traditional prosecution. Assuming certain conditions are met, successful completion of the state's PTI program results in charges faced by a defendant being dismissed.
DeBlasio said Wallace had no criminal record prior to August 2009, when he was charged with robbery, endangering an injured person and solicitation or recruitment to join a street gang in connection with an incident involving five other teenagers.
The Union County Prosecutor's Office, in announcing Parrish's arrest last weekend, identified him as a confirmed member of the Sex Money Murder gang set, which is active in the Trenton metro area and in Plainfield. Plainfield Police Sgt. Larry Brown, the division's veteran gang specialist, said Parrish was known to local authorities prior to Leonardo's death, but only dating back a short while.
narcoblogger has stepped into the breach left by Mexican journalists, who dare not report as they used to do. Thirty journalists have been killed in Mexico since President Felipe Calderon started his war on the drug cartels in 2006, making Mexico the most deadly country in Latin America for the media. Most are victims of the drug cartels, not caught in crossfire but targeted for reporting what is going on.
Last month, four reporters from the central Mexican state of Durango were kidnapped after reporting a prison riot, which followed the revelation that the prison governor was allowing inmates to go out at night and commit murders. The journalists were freed only after their TV station agreed to broadcast a video, produced by one of the drug cartels, which showed corrupt policemen who were apparently working for a rival cartel.
Today, attention has turned to Tamaulipas state where police have found 72 unburied bodies dumped on a ranch. They are presumably victims of the ever more vicious drug war, which in this part of Mexico pits Los Zetas against the Gulf Cartel. In recent weeks, the industrial city of Monterrey, Mexico’s wealthiest, has been almost brought to a standstill by cartel road blocks, kidnaps and gunbattles, following the murder of a local mayor. Police chiefs, political candidates and senior state officials are frequently targeted for assassination. The drug gangs are trying to seize the Mexican state, and closing down the media is just one part of their plan.
Saturday, 9 October 2010
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