LA Mourns Slain High School Football Star

19-year-old gang member charged with capital murder
By Rob Quinn,  Newser Staff
Posted Mar 12, 2008 3:10 AM CDT
LA Mourns Slain High School Football Star
Students from Los Angeles High School arrive for the funeral of their friend, standout football player Jamiel Shaw, at the West Angeles Cathedral in Los Angeles Tuesday, March 11, 2008. The 17-year-old was shot to death March 2 on the sidewalk just a few doors from his Arlington Heights home in Los...   (Associated Press)

Mourners packed the funeral of a Los Angeles high school football star yesterday as police charged a gang member with capital murder in his death, the LA Times reports. The shooting of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw only three doors away from his home was the latest in a spate of killings that has shocked even Angelenos numbed by gang violence. Shaw's alleged killer,19, is a member of the Hispanic 18th Street Gang released from jail a day before the killing.

"That is what we are up against in this city, sociopaths like that who just got out of jail and within a day had a gun and in an instant took that young boy's life," said the city's police chief, who announced that a thousand new police officers are being hired to combat the problem. Shaw's mother, who was serving in Iraq when she learned of her son's murder,
compared gang members to the terrorists she fought overseas. (More Los Angeles stories.)

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