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Marc “Bando” Taylor, Jashawn “Trilly” Tate and Damari “Juggy” Blackwell, all 18 years old, were scheduled for first appearances via videoconference Thursday before U.S. Magistrate Judge James B. Clark III in Newark, U.S. Attorney Craig Carpenito said.
Taylor, Tate and Blackwell are associated with violent street gangs tied to three neighborhoods -- the Marion Gardens Housing Complex, Rutgers Avenue, and the Curries Woods Housing Projects, Carpenito said.
All three gangs have been operating together since at least last September, he said.
“Since the inception of this alliance, members and associates of Marion, Rutgers, and Curries Woods have operated as a cohesive unit, particularly with respect to their retaliatory acts of violence against rival gangs,” Carpenito said.
The three men charged in the shooting drove to the area of Martin Luther King Boulevard near Oak Street – rival gang territory – on July 7 to get even for a previous shooting, the U.S. attorney said.
Taylor fired several rounds from a .45-caliber Glock 21 handgun
through the front passenger window of their black Volkswagen while Blackwell “simultaneously attempted to fire a Tec-9 assault pistol through the sunroof,” Carpenito said.
The 12-year-old girl was taken to nearby Jersey City Medical Center with a gunshot wound in her leg while city police chased the getaway car, which had previously been reported stolen out of Edgewater.
Tate was driving as the car hit a pedestrian and another vehicle on Communipaw Avenue while fleeing onto southbound Route 1&9 and over the Hackensack and Passaic rivers.
Tate eventually stopped the heavily damaged vehicle at the ramp to the New Jersey Turnpike near Newark Airport, where he and the others bailed out, authorities said.
Police quickly captured them.
Federal authorities charged Taylor, Tate and Blackwell with assault with a dangerous weapon in aid of racketeering activity. All three already faced local charges, as well.
Carpenito credited Jersey City police, the Hudson County Prosecutor’s Office, and the Newark field offices of the FBI and the ATF.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Desiree Grace Latzer of Carpenito’s Organized Crime and Gangs Unit is prosecuting the case for the government.
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