Gang leader's slaying endangers truce
H-Block figure gunned down in Roxbury; police try to prevent retaliation
A 20-year-old gang leader from Roxbury was shot to death last night near his home on Holworthy Street, the first breach of a landmark four-month truce between two of the city's most violent gangs that have been linked to a rash of shootings in recent years, police and local ministers said.
The four shots that a minister said hit Jamhol Norfleet, a leader of the H-Block gang, were fired a year to the day after the slaying of Carl Searcy, a leader of the rival Heath Street gang, who was fatally shot while biking away from a friend's house.
"It's not a coincidence," said the Rev. Jeffrey Brown, an architect of the truce between the gangs and a cofounder of the Boston Ten Point Coalition, a group credited with curbing city violence over the past decade.
As he left Boston Medical Center, where Norfleet was pronounced dead last night, Brown said he was going to meet with gang members at Jamaica Plain's Bromley-Heath public housing development. "That death [Searcy's] was as tragic as this one," he said over his cellphone. "There's little doubt who did it."
Police had not officially identified the victims -- Norfleet's sister also was wounded -- and said they had not arrested anyone in last night's homicide, Boston's 69th of the year, five more than at the same time last year, when the city registered a 10-year high.
A police official said the department has increased patrols in the Bromley-Heath area to head off potential retaliation.
"This is very tragic, and I think very painful, and calls for tremendous concern by a lot of people," said the Rev. Ray Hammond, another cofounder of the Ten Point Coalition. "We don't want to see a war flare up between these two groups."
A spokesman for Mayor Thomas M. Menino, who had hoped to make an example of the truce for other gangs, declined to comment.
The shooting occurred shortly before 7:30, when police received calls about two people being shot on Holworthy Street.
Brown said one of the shots grazed Norfleet's teenage sister in the leg. He did not know her name, but said she was treated and released from Boston Medical Center.
Brown said Norfleet had received a call on his cellphone last night and was told to meet someone outside.
Shortly afterward, someone came from behind him and fired a volley of shots, two of which hit him in the head, Brown said.
The minister described Norfleet as a gang member on the mend. He said Norfleet, who would have turned 21 next week, had a job and had entered a program to earn his high school equivalency certificate.
"He was helping his friends to better their lives," Brown said. "For someone to do something like this speaks more to the sickness in their own soul than anything about Jamhol. He was a brave kid, a strong kid."
The truce brokered between the gangs last summer was made after the FBI had attributed about 20 shootings since January 2005 to the decades-old feud between Heath Street and H-Block.
That violence stopped in July after a temporary cease-fire took hold. A deal negotiated by Brown, other ministers, and police transformed the cease-fire into a truce.
In the four months before last night, police had not connected a single shooting to either group, law enforcement officials told the Globe.
Violent crime in the areas of Jamaica Plain and Roxbury, where the gangs live, had plummeted by as much as 80 percent, police said.
Much of the recent violence between Heath Street and H-Block can be attributed to the April 2005 slaying of Yorki Lipscomb, 18, whom police identified as an H-Block member. He was killed near Harold and Crawford streets.
Efforts to stop the violence took hold July 12, when Herman Taylor III, 18, who police believed was an innocent bystander, was fatally shot while standing on Humboldt Avenue next to an H-Block leader.
Last night, yellow police tape surrounded the area where Norfleet was gunned down.
Yolanda Mejia, who lives on Holworthy Street, said she was coloring with her 7-year-old daughter when she heard shots.
"I ran to the window, but by the time I got there, I only saw someone lying on the ground," she said.
Suzanne Smalley of the Globe staff and
correspondents Richard Cherecwich and Elizabeth Ratto contributed to this
report. 
