Gang violence keeps Providence women in court

Venita Lovett spent as much time in court last week as most members of the judiciary.

On Tuesday, following a two-week trial, a gang member was convicted of killing her son, Kasean Benton, who was gunned down in an ambush on the city’s South Side two years ago.

But her daily trip to Providence County Superior Court was not over.

On Wednesday, she was back in court. Same building. Same courtroom. Same judge. This time she returned to see Kasean’s twin brother, Jaheeim, make an appearance to face six felony charges for firing a gun at three men in Pawtucket last summer. Jury selection in his case began on Monday.

Mrs. Lovett, a deeply religious woman, is on the front lines of the escalating violence that has sent scores of young men to their graves or to state or federal prisons where they spend a good portion of their lives.

The Benton boys were, and are, according to the police, members of YNIC, a street gang with a racial epithet in its name. YNIC and Comstock, another gang named after Comstock Avenue off Broad Street, are bitter rivals. Both groups are composed of young black men from the South Side. Many of the feuding gang members were once friends who slept at each other’s homes, ate dinner together and played pickup basketball and youth football.

Somewhere along the line, the friendships went awry. Knives and guns replaced reason and self-control.

Donald Young was convicted last week in the murder of Kasean Benton, a rival gang member.

A jury found Donald Young, a Comstock gang member, guilty of gunning down Kasean Benton. At one time, they were friends.

Teny O. Gross, executive director of the Institute for the Study & Practice of Nonviolence on Oxford Street, said that the rivals all once hung out at the Davey Lopes Recreation Center on Dudley Street near Rhode Island Hospital. Around 2005, they split into separate gangs: Comstock and YNIC. The friends became enemies. Gross “doesn’t remember anymore” what caused the rift.

“It started off as youthful energy and fighting,” he said. “Then, guns got involved.”

Lovett is a weary 52-year-old mother who gave birth to 10 children — “six living, four passed.” Among the dead are Kasean and three other siblings, including a set of twins, all of whom she said died from crib death. She said that, in 1996, she moved to Providence from Newark, N.J., to care for her ailing mother.

“I wished I never came to this wicked place,” she said.

The family lived on Sycamore Street in theSouth Side and she said she spoiled her children. They always had the latest video games and the finest basketball sneakers. She said that her sons and friends, as many as 15 of them, including Donald Young, would stop by the house for sandwiches, macaroni and cheese and chicken dinners. Often times, she said, they slept over.

Lovett said that a well-intentioned celebration triggered a rift between the boys that led to a three-year explosion in violence.