On Oct. 21, 1960, as “West Side Story” was playing on Broadway, a real blood feud was playing out at a youth dance and on the streets of Spanish Harlem between two rival gangs called the Viceroys and the Dragons.
About 8 p.m. that night, William M. Jenkins, 18, was shot through the stomach and back, rendering him a paraplegic. He continued his life of crime, however, becoming known to the police as Wheelchair Willie, while two teenage brothers in the Dragons were arrested and imprisoned for shooting him.
“West Side Story” popped up again on Broadway last month, and, 49 years after it happened, so did the case of the Jenkins shooting. After Mr. Jenkins died on March 13 at age 66, the city medical examiner’s office ruled his death a homicide due to infectious complications caused by the gunshot wounds, making it the oldest reclassified homicide in New York Police Department history, a police official said.
“I can’t believe this,” one of the brothers, George Lemus, now 64, said after he was told the news Wednesday at the computer repair business he runs in Midtown Manhattan. A little while later, he looked down at his arm. “The hair stood up,” he said, holding out the arm, still fresh with goose bumps.
Mr. Lemus’s brother, Robert, died a decade ago at age 58. The shooting haunted him until his death, said his son, Robert Lemus 3rd: “He lived with a level of remorse for the fact that, at his hands, someone had a handicap his entire life over an evening of probable misunderstanding.”
The district attorney’s office said it would not prosecute because the brothers had already served time (Mr. Lemus said he was imprisoned for a year and half and his brother for five years) for the shooting and because witnesses and medical records would be hard to come by, the police official said.
The victim’s brother, Samuel A. Jenkins, even questioned how his brother’s death could be attributed to long-ago violence rather than the myriad medical problems he endured in his life or the recent acute deterioration of his health.
He said the whole matter was better off left in the past.
“It’s kind of old, and it was kid stuff then,” Mr. Jenkins said.
When asked about the Lemus brothers, he said that his family held no grudge: “Willie forgave them and I forgive them, if they are still alive.”
The fights of the 1950s and ’60s between gangs with fanciful names might seem downright quaint compared with the drive-by violence fueled by automatic weapons that would come later. But as the Jenkins case shows, tempers and bullets flew easily even then.
In East Harlem, according to the book “Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York,” by Eric C. Schneider, “dark-skinned Puerto Ricans organized the Viceroys while their light-skinned rivals formed the Dragons.” George Lemus, who said his parents were Cuban, insisted it was geography, not race, that divided them: the Dragons south of 106th Street, the Viceroys north of it.
He said that El Barrio was so crowded that the gangs were a necessity for protection. Sometimes, he said, the Dragons and Viceroys banded together to fight the Red Wings, an Italian gang that reigned north of 118th Street.
“These gangs go deep,” Mr. Lemus said. “That’s the law of the street.”
On Oct. 21, 1960, he was with Dragons who faced off against some Viceroys on 103rd Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, according to old typewritten detective reports.
Samuel Jenkins, who was 11 that night, said the story was told often in his family. He believed some friends came to the dance to get his brother, a big kid known as Husky Willie, “to make sure they had a fair fight.”
William Jenkins’s son, Charles Martinez, 49, picked up the narrative. “My father told me he had fought the two guys, hand to hand,” said Mr. Martinez, who was born in February 1961, four months after the shooting. “And then the guys came back. My dad said ‘Oh, you want some more?’ And they just stood there, so he tried to walk away and they shot him in the back.”
About 8 p.m. that night, William M. Jenkins, 18, was shot through the stomach and back, rendering him a paraplegic. He continued his life of crime, however, becoming known to the police as Wheelchair Willie, while two teenage brothers in the Dragons were arrested and imprisoned for shooting him.
“West Side Story” popped up again on Broadway last month, and, 49 years after it happened, so did the case of the Jenkins shooting. After Mr. Jenkins died on March 13 at age 66, the city medical examiner’s office ruled his death a homicide due to infectious complications caused by the gunshot wounds, making it the oldest reclassified homicide in New York Police Department history, a police official said.
“I can’t believe this,” one of the brothers, George Lemus, now 64, said after he was told the news Wednesday at the computer repair business he runs in Midtown Manhattan. A little while later, he looked down at his arm. “The hair stood up,” he said, holding out the arm, still fresh with goose bumps.
Mr. Lemus’s brother, Robert, died a decade ago at age 58. The shooting haunted him until his death, said his son, Robert Lemus 3rd: “He lived with a level of remorse for the fact that, at his hands, someone had a handicap his entire life over an evening of probable misunderstanding.”
The district attorney’s office said it would not prosecute because the brothers had already served time (Mr. Lemus said he was imprisoned for a year and half and his brother for five years) for the shooting and because witnesses and medical records would be hard to come by, the police official said.
The victim’s brother, Samuel A. Jenkins, even questioned how his brother’s death could be attributed to long-ago violence rather than the myriad medical problems he endured in his life or the recent acute deterioration of his health.
He said the whole matter was better off left in the past.
“It’s kind of old, and it was kid stuff then,” Mr. Jenkins said.
When asked about the Lemus brothers, he said that his family held no grudge: “Willie forgave them and I forgive them, if they are still alive.”
The fights of the 1950s and ’60s between gangs with fanciful names might seem downright quaint compared with the drive-by violence fueled by automatic weapons that would come later. But as the Jenkins case shows, tempers and bullets flew easily even then.
In East Harlem, according to the book “Vampires, Dragons and Egyptian Kings: Youth Gangs in Postwar New York,” by Eric C. Schneider, “dark-skinned Puerto Ricans organized the Viceroys while their light-skinned rivals formed the Dragons.” George Lemus, who said his parents were Cuban, insisted it was geography, not race, that divided them: the Dragons south of 106th Street, the Viceroys north of it.
He said that El Barrio was so crowded that the gangs were a necessity for protection. Sometimes, he said, the Dragons and Viceroys banded together to fight the Red Wings, an Italian gang that reigned north of 118th Street.
“These gangs go deep,” Mr. Lemus said. “That’s the law of the street.”
On Oct. 21, 1960, he was with Dragons who faced off against some Viceroys on 103rd Street, between Park and Madison Avenues, according to old typewritten detective reports.
Samuel Jenkins, who was 11 that night, said the story was told often in his family. He believed some friends came to the dance to get his brother, a big kid known as Husky Willie, “to make sure they had a fair fight.”
William Jenkins’s son, Charles Martinez, 49, picked up the narrative. “My father told me he had fought the two guys, hand to hand,” said Mr. Martinez, who was born in February 1961, four months after the shooting. “And then the guys came back. My dad said ‘Oh, you want some more?’ And they just stood there, so he tried to walk away and they shot him in the back.”
Mr. Lemus said the fight was sparked by something “very, very stupid,” when a Dragon insulted a Viceroy with “something about his mother.” Mr. Jenkins, he said, decided to play the father figure. “He came to reprimand us or something,” said Mr. Lemus, who said he “blanked” the episode out. “He sort of kept looking for me and I guess you could say he found me.”
Samuel Jenkins said the injuries stopped his brother from doing things he loved.
“He was a good boxer, he played baseball and basketball,” he said. “He could have had a good life.”
Police records show the shooting did not curtail William Jenkins’s criminal behavior. Wheelchair Willie was arrested four times from 1971 through 1991, on criminal charges including attempted murder. In 1975, he was accused of robbing someone from his wheelchair, the police said, and was sent to prison for three years on lesser charges of assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
Samuel Jenkins said that his brother lived on disability payments and that he had worked for a time as a drug counselor. He said his brother was “black and Puerto Rican, and he stood with the Puerto Ricans.”
He later became a Muslim, he said. “He was married twice, to Gloria and Beverly,” he said. “He had one kid.”
Though the shooting occurred in 1960, it is counted statistically as one of the 92 homicides in New York City in the first quarter of 2009, among the lowest numbers in many years. Five other homicides this year were linked to injuries from previous years.
“If someone is shot on New Year’s Eve and dies the next day, it makes sense to record it as a homicide in the new year,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. But he found the Jenkins reclassification a bit harder to accept. “When shootings and deaths are separated by decades, and now by almost a half century, it’s counterintuitive that they are consistently declared homicides.”
George Lemus, who was 13 at the time, turned his life around after prison, becoming a designer of men’s clothing in a textile firm and, more recently, a computer repair businessman. He said he has been married 40 years, has six children and six grandchildren and even took in foster children, appearing with his wife on city posters advertising for foster parents.
Even still, he said he always worried someone from the Viceroys would come after him. “There’s still retaliation out there,” he said. “As much as you think it couldn’t happen, it could.”
In 1996, his brother and William Jenkins reconciled, spending a few nights sleeping under the same roof and talking about some of what happened.
“It didn’t happen because we hated each other, it happened because of the situation we were in,” said Mr. Lemus, who added that he was scared to meet with Willie.
“I’ve thought about the fact that I felt sorry for Willie,” Mr. Lemus said. “It wasn’t really personal. It was gang-related.”
He paused for a moment, then looked up. “Even though the guy was in a wheelchair, he wasn’t doing the nicest things.”
Samuel Jenkins said the injuries stopped his brother from doing things he loved.
“He was a good boxer, he played baseball and basketball,” he said. “He could have had a good life.”
Police records show the shooting did not curtail William Jenkins’s criminal behavior. Wheelchair Willie was arrested four times from 1971 through 1991, on criminal charges including attempted murder. In 1975, he was accused of robbing someone from his wheelchair, the police said, and was sent to prison for three years on lesser charges of assault and criminal possession of a weapon.
Samuel Jenkins said that his brother lived on disability payments and that he had worked for a time as a drug counselor. He said his brother was “black and Puerto Rican, and he stood with the Puerto Ricans.”
He later became a Muslim, he said. “He was married twice, to Gloria and Beverly,” he said. “He had one kid.”
Though the shooting occurred in 1960, it is counted statistically as one of the 92 homicides in New York City in the first quarter of 2009, among the lowest numbers in many years. Five other homicides this year were linked to injuries from previous years.
“If someone is shot on New Year’s Eve and dies the next day, it makes sense to record it as a homicide in the new year,” Police Commissioner Raymond W. Kelly said. But he found the Jenkins reclassification a bit harder to accept. “When shootings and deaths are separated by decades, and now by almost a half century, it’s counterintuitive that they are consistently declared homicides.”
George Lemus, who was 13 at the time, turned his life around after prison, becoming a designer of men’s clothing in a textile firm and, more recently, a computer repair businessman. He said he has been married 40 years, has six children and six grandchildren and even took in foster children, appearing with his wife on city posters advertising for foster parents.
Even still, he said he always worried someone from the Viceroys would come after him. “There’s still retaliation out there,” he said. “As much as you think it couldn’t happen, it could.”
In 1996, his brother and William Jenkins reconciled, spending a few nights sleeping under the same roof and talking about some of what happened.
“It didn’t happen because we hated each other, it happened because of the situation we were in,” said Mr. Lemus, who added that he was scared to meet with Willie.
“I’ve thought about the fact that I felt sorry for Willie,” Mr. Lemus said. “It wasn’t really personal. It was gang-related.”
He paused for a moment, then looked up. “Even though the guy was in a wheelchair, he wasn’t doing the nicest things.”
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