As thousands of high school seniors signed their letter of intent on National Signing Day, Irvington High School stands out. While the public school is on the rise as a football powerhouse and is in one of the most competitive conferences in the state of New Jersey, their community has suffered from violence, crime and poverty.  The success of the program has been a much needed bright spot.

“We’re trying to change the narrative of what this city has been and the troubles that we’ve had in the past,” said Ashley Pierre, head football coach of the Irvington Blue Knights.

According to City-Data, Irvington’s crime rate was more than four times the national average, with 1,000 crimes occurring per 100,000 people for seven years straight. Though the crime rate did begin to decline in 2010, the rates are still high.

“Outsiders always talk bad about Irvington. They don’t realize people come from negative situations and that’s part of life,” said Savion Herring, Irvington’s offensive tackle and University of Cincinnati signee.

Coach Ashley Pierre, an Irvington native, played football at the University of Rhode Island and was an all-conference linebacker in 2007. When he was hired in 2015, he took over a team that was 3-7 overall and at the bottom of the Super Essex County conference. In his first season as head coach, he went 8-2 and had a top 50 finish in the state.

Irvington head coach Ashley “Rowdy” Pierre has been at the school since 2016. Since then he’s has a 24-9 record and has sent more than 12 athletes to division one schools. Photo by Chinedu Onyemaobi

“When I first took over this program, I tried to surround myself with men who cared and loved these kids,” said Pierre. “So we brought back some coaches from this city who have accomplished what we’re aiming at and that’s a championship.”

In a town where 25 percent of households live below the poverty line, the struggles at home can affect student-athletes both in the classroom and on the field. To combat these issues, Pierre has implemented a mandatory one hour study hall, weight lifting sessions, and  nutrition courses for his players. He also has a “Real World Wednesday”, where he brings guest speakers to mentor his players about the realities of life after football.

“What Rowdy [Coach Pierre] has done for our football program is truly special. There’s a different level of focus in our football players and it transcends beyond the classroom,” said Dr. John Taylor, Irvington’s Athletic Director.

Darren Fields, Irvington’s 6′2″ defensive back, will be playing at University at Albany State University of New next year and has played in Irvington township since his Pop Warner years. The start of the 2018 football season did not start off on the right foot, as Fields was sidelined with a fibula injury and missed the first eight games. Getting to this point in his life was not easy as he was faced with adversity early on his life.

“From the way I was raised, to be honest, I’m not supposed to be in the situation I am right now,” said Fields. “All I can do is be a great example to my brother and sister and show them the right path so they can be successful.”

Irvington High School had 12 student-athletes sign to division one schools in 2017. Most notable was  Lancine Turay, who is at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill and is the brother of Indianapolis Colts linebacker Kemoko Turay. This year, Irvington has six student-athletes signing to division one schools. Coach Pierre believes this is just the beginning of Irvington’s success.

“Next year we should have around 10 guys sign. This is just the start of something special” said Pierre. “We’re going to be around for a long time. Just stay tuned.”

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Sitting quietly by himself on a bench inside of Brooklyn’s Borough Hall, Abubaka Miller, 54, remembered and mourned the murder of his son 10 years ago. His son, gang member Tiamya Fortune, 25, was shot in the neck because of an on going gang dispute in front of Marcy Houses in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn on July 4, 2005. Miller, who was awakened by a phone call while asleep that evening, said it is a day he will never forget.

“A phone call came through saying they shot Mya,” Miller said solemnly. “I was pissed, I was upset and I really wanted to kill the guy [who killed him]. But you know what I had to say? Fair exchange is no robbery.”

Miller, once a gang member himself, said he came to accept his son’s death because his son was in a gang and understood the dangers.

“At times he had to go to his gun,” he said. And when he went to his gun, he might have succeeded, but it came the day when somebody pulled a gun on him.”

With gang violence increasing, Borough President Eric Adams and NYPD officials gathered yesterday at Brooklyn’s Borough Hall to speak with about 100 community residents on knowing the early signs of gang activity in their homes and neighborhoods.

“I’m hoping that we can start an initiative where we can give information out,” Adams said. “The more information we can get out there, the better we can be to combat this issue we call gang violence.”

Most recently, Carey Gabay, aid to Governor Andrew Cuomo died after being shot by a stray bullet earlier this month before the Brooklyn West Indian Day Parade. Police said the incident was gang related.

According to the NYPD, in North Brooklyn alone, there are 73 separate gangs. Some of those include newer gangs such as Hood Starz, Wave Gang, and Rockstarz. More traditional gang’s like Crips, Bloods, and Latin Kings are still active as well. Of 220 shootings, officials said that about 202 were due to gang motivated or gang related activity. Police said that 12 to 23 year olds are the most vulnerable to gang initiations.

Former gang member and now mentor at the organization Next Steps, Beloved, said that he used his past life to become a role model and open communication lines for the youth.

“Here I am talking to a young boy [in a hospital] and he’s telling me he’s been shot,” said Beloved. “So I walk out of the hospital and take my shirt off then come back in and say, ‘I’ve been shot five times and the dude that shot me, I shook hands with.’”

Martha Works, who serves at the 81st Precinct as the Community Council President ,said that the first step to solving the intensifying gang violence is by infiltrating schools. She said more educators should have been at the forum.

“If there is going to be a change in the development of young people’s minds, we need to let them know that they have opportunities and that they have choices. Officials have to get into the schools,” said Works.

The former substitute teacher said that educators and other community members need to unify and take action. She said she will be taking the information she learned back to the community.

“We have to stop saying what we are going to do and start doing it,” she said.

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Long after the red double-decker bus carried the newly crowned Super Bowl champs through the Canyon of Heroes, hundreds of Giants fans turned celebration into chaos.

A deep blue mob rode roughshod through Lower Manhattan’s Franklin Street, going on a two-block rampage that left at least two arrested, and an unmarked police car destroyed.

The incident started innocently enough, in the middle of Broadway at the intersection of Franklin Street, when the unruly fans started climbing up street signs, surfing through the crowd, and chanting, “Let’s Go Giants!” But quickly the mood changed.

In a crude homage to Eli Manning, fans of Big Blue chucked beer bottles and cans into the air, hitting some of their fellow fans in the face and drenching them in froth. The police quickly stepped in, forcing the group down Franklin Street towards Sixth Avenue.

Not content to simmer down, the group became increasingly brash, briefly jumping onto the roofs of the cars lining Franklin Street as they pleaded for their comrades to cheer them on. The group continued to the intersection of Franklin and Church Streets where they came to a standstill in front of police barricades, continuing to chant and pop confetti into the crowd.

The situation reached its crux when individuals from the crowd climbed onto an unmarked police car parked just inside the barricades. People from the mob took turns atop the police cruiser, first jumping up and down on the trunk and hood, before moving to the roof to get a higher vantage point.

When it became clear that damage was being done to the car, some fans climbed on top of the vehicle, catapulted themselves into the air, and body slammed the roof, collapsing it entirely. Another fan stomped the windshield of the vehicle, leaving it in shambles.

Giants fan Mohamed Yousef, 22, watched the incident unfurl.

“A bunch of people just took their shirts off and jumped on top of the police car,” Yousef said. “It was stupid, crazy, and unnecessary.”

After the car had taken a five minute beat-in, police quickly apprehended two of the shirtless ruffians, slamming them to the ground and cuffing them. The arresting officer had no comment on the incident, but verified that the destroyed car was in fact a police cruiser.

Ars Metnak, 22, said he had seen the same group of fans jumping on top of a van near the Century 21 in the Financial District earlier in the day.

“I don’t get it, the way they are acting is crazy,” said Metnak.

In an ironic twist, Herman Maisonave, 47, of Queens, stood just around the corner from where the perps sat in handcuffs, holding up a sign that read, “Please don’t arrest me. I’m not occupying Wall Street, just celebrating a Giants win!”

“I’m just here to poke fun at the NYPD, and give Giants fans something to laugh at,” Maisonave said. “I saw this coming.”

And while the rest of the dispersed mob lauded Maisonave’s sign as they walked by, the longtime Giants fan had harsh words for those that caused the bedlam.

“What they did, puts a sour note on all Giants fans,” he said.

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A dead cat lies unnoticed in a trash-strewn alley on the 3000 block of 32nd Street, between Diamond and Fountain in the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 2010. The neighborhood has been plagued by an influx of illegal guns, a phenomenon that has done little to drive down the area's high violent crime rate. (Meredith Bennett-Smith / Pavement Pieces)

PHILADELPHIA – At first glance the pure white cat seemed asleep, serenely impervious to the empty liquor bottles that encroached on its resting place in a trash-strewn alleyway on the 3000 block of North Philadelphia’s 32nd Street. The cat was in fact dead, a feral victim gone completely unnoticed in North Philadelphia’s Strawberry Mansion neighborhood, an area with a violent crime rate consistently ranked in its city’s top percentile. This dubious honor made more infamous by Philadelphia’s homicide rate, which currently hovers just above three times the national average.

Gun violence is a daily way of life in Strawberry Mansion, where according to several residents, obtaining a pistol is as easy as walking up to a corner and asking for one, and where the specter of violence leaves no one in the community untouched.

Rick Ford knows all about life on North Philadelphia’s streets. Ford was born in raised in this neighborhood. He learned to hustle during the heyday of Philadelphia’s crack epidemic in the 80s and 90s, when at least one murder occurred every day.

“Twenty years ago I was the villain down here,” Ford said, gazing down Diamond Street’s stretch of redundant row houses. As a result of this “street lifestyle,” he also spent a period of time homeless before finally deciding to turn his life around in October of 1990.

Standing outside a local church on a recent Saturday morning, Ford looks more like a politician than a former drug addict. His expressive eyes are muted behind a pair of Armani dark glasses, and his black overcoat and crisp white shirt covers the scars left by old bullet wounds.

Neighborhood activist Rick Ford, referred to as the Mayor of Strawberry Mansion among this many friends, jokes with a friendly plainsclothes policewoman stopping by to pay her respects in front of a Diamond Street church on Dec. 11, 2010. Ford, who twenty years ago was a local gangster, has since gotten clean and now devotes his life to preventing Strawberry Mansion's youth from traveling down the same violent road. (photo by Meredith Bennett-Smith)

As he stands talking on the sidewalk, various members of the community stop their cars to pay their respects. It’s not for nothing that people in the neighborhood refer to him as the Mayor of Strawberry Mansion.

Today, Ford runs a youth athletic league, is a leader in the community organization Men United for a Better Philadelphia and gives talk at schools about the allures and dangers of guns and gangs.

But in an area flooded with illegal firearms, the temptation for some can be overwhelming — with potentially lethal consequences.

“These kids can get a gun quicker than they can get a job,” Ford said. “If I needed a gun now, I’d just go right to a corner.”

As he said this he pulled out his cell phone with a flourish and dialed his nephew Lance — not the nephew now in jail for murder, but the one, currently at home after his latest stint in prison — to prove how easy it was in fact to find a gun.

Ford concentrates his efforts on the youth of the neighborhood, the kids who have not yet become entrenched in the cycle of crime and recidivism. What frustrates Ford is that the new generation’s motivations for violence seem to be growing ever more trivial.

“What’s all this killing about?” he said. “We’re the only culture killing each other. It’s black on black crime, senseless stuff, senseless nonsense.”

For Ford, sports have the potential to be so much more than a casual game played between teammates. Baseball is a chance to bring kids from different blocks together, to inspire a sense of camaraderie that transcends whether you live on 30th or 32nd Streets, and can be the difference during a territorial dispute turned violent. An argument that might before have been settled with an exchange of blows is now just as likely to include a splattering of bullets.

Tyrone Williams, community liaison for the Strawberry Mansion Neighborhood Action Center (NAC), feels the weight of neighborhood killings just as Ford does. He sometimes finds himself wondering whether he did enough to try and stop them.

“[Violence] cuts through the fiber of the community,” Williams said. “It tears it thread by thread. If the guns weren’t so easy to get, I don’t think these murders would occur. Some people just act differently when they have a gun.”

In an affirmation of the heartless nature of the violence, Williams’ boss at the NAC, Executive Director Lenora Jackson-Evans, had her own son killed in March of this year.

The question of how these guns find their ways so easily from under the countertops of licensed weapons dealers and into the pockets of repeat offenders and teens is a complicated one, with both city, state and national implications. In the past few years, several gun control laws have been proposed in the Pennsylvania General Assembly, only to be voted down in the face of a well-organized, well-funded gun lobby.

Last month’s November elections were not encouraging for advocates of gun control legislation, with the Democratic Party losing its tenuous control of the House and Governor’s Office.

In response many cities, including Philadelphia, have passed their own versions of bills like the Lost and Stolen Amendment, a law meant to crack down on an illegal weapons trafficking tactic known as straw purchasing.

In a straw purchase a buyer who is licensed to own a firearm sells them to unlicensed buyers under the table. A felony under federal law, these transactions provide a simple means for someone without a permit to buy a weapon. The Lost and Stolen Amendment makes this process harder by forcing permit holders to report missing weapons.

Philadelphia’s Lost and Stolen Amendment was passed in 2008, along with four other gun ordinances, all of which were immediately challenged in court by the National Rifle Association. Two were ultimately struck down because of a state preemptive statute that limits the rights of cities to enact their own gun control policies.

“[The ordinance] does some good,” said Martha Johnston, a senior attorney for the Philadelphia City Solicitor’s Office. “But it would be better if it were statewide.”

Gun control ordinances enjoy a diverse base of local support including Mayor Michael Nutter and the City Council, Police Commissioner Charles H. Ramsey and the grassroots organizations that rallied in support of gun reform, including CeaseFirePa, Mothers Against Guns and Mothers in Charge.

According to a 2008 study published by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, in the seven states already enforcing a Lost and Stolen requirement, there is a 67 percent reduction in the number of crime guns traced back to sources within their borders.

Paper statistics aside, all such policies are ultimately only as effective as the extent of their enforcement.

Office Ed Fidler, a 13-year veteran of the Philadelphia Police Force, scoffed at the effectiveness of policies targeting illegal weapons holders.

Officer Ed Fidler points to a bullet hole in the shoulder of a mannequin wearing a red, child-sized jacket in the back room of the Crime Scene Investigation unit's offices in North Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 2010. The jacket belonged to a four-year-old boy killed by a stray bullet, and now remains at the 8th and Poplar Street headquarters as a chilling reminder of gun violence's countless innocent victims. (Meredith Bennett-Smith / Pavement Pieces)

Due to circumstances outside of his control such as jail overcrowding, men arrested for violating the Uniform Firearms Act (VUFA), are rarely held for long.

“Why are people with four, five gun arrests still on the street?” Fidler said.

After a six-year stint with a patrol unit, Fidler is now an investigator in the Crime Scene Unit. He is sent to fresh priority crime scenes — a homicide, a discharge of an officer’s weapon or a police shooting — to catalogue and analyze any evidence left behind. More often than not, this includes firearms.

Among your average hustler, 9mm handguns manufactured by Hi-Brite or Bryco are popular because they are small, lightweight and cheap, Fidler said. However, assault rifles like the AK-47 and its knockoff cousin, the 7.62mm SKS, are often favored by drug dealers because of the intimidation factor that accompanies their increased firepower.

Holding up a SKS involved in the 2008 shooting death of Sergeant Stephen Liczbinski, Sgt. Steve Crosby was blunt. This firearm is not meant to hunt deer or anything else, Crosby said sharply.

“This is meant to kill people,” he said.

Sitting later amidst the debris of his cheerfully cluttered desk, Crosby reflected on his own 11-year stint on the force. A former carpenter and electrician, Crosby came across as equal parts tough guy and proud father, reveling in his exploits as a young patrolman while later showing off a photo of his oldest daughter, an aspiring singer and actress.

Like Fidler, Crosby expressed frustration with a revolving door system that often allows repeat VUFA offenders to walk free.

“The solution is keep them in jail,” Crosby said.

Jail was not the answer for Ford, however. For him, rehabilitation starts with the spirit, not the penal code. “The key to this thing is love,” he said.

“My mother was an alcoholic,” Ford said. “I found my mother on the floor dead. She did the best she could. But I wasn’t getting that ‘I love you.’”

A pastel toilet sits on the crumbling front porch of a decrepit, uninhabitable three-story home on 32nd Street in the blighted Strawberry Mansion neighborhood of Philadelphia on Dec. 11, 2010. The area, situated in the Northern section of the city, boasts one of the highest violent crime rates in a municipality with a homicide rate currently three times the national average. (Meredith Bennett-Smith / Pavement Pieces)

In a neighborhood where fearful gas station attendants fortify their convenience stores, where decrepit, boarded up houses vie for attention with weedy empty lots and grimy take-out windows, hope is a precious commodity.

“I’m tired of the vigils,” Ford admitted. “[Tired] of the teddy bears, the yellow tape. Two nights ago, three people were killed in a ten-block radius.”

He may be tired, but Ford said he’s come too far to give up now.

“The struggle continues,” he said, “But victory is certain.”

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