you got a point about social media and not seeing things as much. But I’m gonna be honest, I hardly ever knew of people getting killed for sneakers during that time. Robbed? Of course. But killed? I started noticing people getting killed moreso for the chains. But everything was a robbery. Summer youth checks, you getting stuck. Coats,’ getting stuck up, jansport, yapped. Not giving it up? Stomped out.. most of the killings I knew about was always drug related. Innocent people sometimes got hit. No doubt but it wasn’t completely reckless. Again, I might be seeing it cus we see shyt more on video In these present days. I just know warning shots is not known anymore in this day and age.
Definitely was happening bro. I personally know someone who got put in a wheelchair over Jordans. But yeah it was happening back then, to a wide extent.
MAY 14, 1990
SENSELESS
IN AMERICA'S CITIES, KIDS ARE KILLING KIDS OVER SNEAKERS AND OTHER SPORTS APPAREL FAVORED BY DRUG DEALERS. WHO'S TO BLAME?
https://vault.si.com/vault/1990/05/...apparel-favored-by-drug-dealers-whos-to-blame
For 15-year-old Michael Eugene Thomas, it definitely was the shoes. A ninth-grader at Meade Senior High School in Anne Arundel County, Md., Thomas was found strangled on May 2, 1989. Charged with first-degree murder was James David Martin, 17, a basketball buddy who allegedly took Thomas's two-week-old Air Jordan basketball shoes and left Thomas's barefoot body in the woods near school.
Thomas loved Michael Jordan, as well as the shoes Jordan endorses, and he cleaned his own pair each evening. He kept the cardboard shoe box with Jordan's silhouette on it in a place of honor in his room. Inside the box was the sales ticket for the shoes. It showed he paid $115.50, the price of a product touched by deity.
The killings aren't new. In 1983, 14-year-old Dewitt Duckett was shot to death in the hallway of Harlem Park Junior High in Baltimore by someone who apparently wanted Duckett's silky blue Georgetown jacket. In 1985, 13-year-old Shawn Jones was shot in Detroit after five youths took his Fila sneakers. But lately the pace of the carnage has quickened. In January 1988, an unidentified 14-year-old Houston boy, a star athlete in various sports, allegedly stabbed and killed 22-year-old Eric Allen with a butcher knife after the two argued over a pair of tennis shoes in the home the youths shared with their mothers. Seven months later a gunman in Atlanta allegedly robbed an unnamed 17-year-old of his Mercedes-Benz hat and Avia hightops after shooting to death the boy's 25-year-old friend, Carl Middlebrooks, as Middlebrooks pedaled away on his bike. Last November, Raheem Wells, the quarterback for Detroit Kettering High, was murdered, allegedly by six teenagers who swiped his Nike sneakers. A month later, 17-year-old Tyrone Brown of Hapeville, Ga., was fatally shot in the head, allegedly by two acquaintances who robbed him of money, cocaine and his sneakers. In Baltimore last summer, 18-year-old Ronnell Ridgeway was robbed of his $40 sweatpants and then shot and killed. In March, Chris Demby, a 10th-grader at Franklin Learning Center in West Philadelphia, was shot and killed for his new
Nikes.
In April 1989, 16-year-old Johnny Bates was shot to death in Houston by 17-year-old Demetrick Walker after Johnny refused to turn over his Air Jordan hightops. In March, Demetrick was sentenced to life in prison. Said prosecutor Mark Vinson, “It's bad when we create an image of luxury about athletic gear that it forces people to kill over it.”"