Word: flints
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Just a few communities south of Flint, in the rural lakefront enclave of Highland Township, train jumping has been elevated to the status of an art form. For generations, on any given weekend during summer, as many as three dozen kids might jump a train, eventually reminiscing the joy rides into tall tales. To be sure, getting onboard isn't that tough. The trains routinely stop at the Hop-In Grocery for a coffee break. But when the train gets going, it really gets going. The wheels clank heavily against the tracks and the cars rattle and shake fiercely...
...Highland Township teenagers who hopped the CSX train on June 18 were far from pros. Afraid to jump off at Holly, they froze and wound up 25 miles north in a rough section of Flint. One of the boys, Michael Carter, 14, ended up dead. Another, Dustin Kaiser, 15, was beaten brutally before taking a bullet in the head. And the third, Nicole, 14, whose family asked that only her first name be used in this story, was pistol-whipped and shot in the face after being forced to perform oral sex. A few days later, six suspects, four...
...black-on-white, is quickly escalating into a small-town version of the O.J. Simpson case. During a preliminary hearing last week, as Nicole testified against a row of handcuffed suspects, one of her supporters yelled, "Hang 'em!" Meanwhile, the defendants' families are murmuring about conspiracies against their boys. Flint Mayor Woodrow Stanley is struggling to manage a crisis that threatens to further damage the city's image. "This incident is holding the entire city up to national ridicule," laments Stanley, who is black. "All of the positive crime-fighting things I've done have been blotted...
Eventually it did--in a hardscrabble section in northern Flint. And this is where events become murky. From the start, Nicole and Kaiser have insisted that, while they weren't particularly distressed about being alone in the city, they had but one real goal: getting to a phone to call their parents. But this conflicts starkly with the spirit that had them freewheeling across the neighborhood. "There are just too many pay phones between where they got off the train and where they were attacked," says Flint police sergeant Thomas Korabik. "They are trying to make themselves look better...
...Saturday night, June 21, at around 7 p.m., an anonymous caller offered Flint police the name Christopher Darling, 18, in connection with the attack. Darling, arrested the following afternoon at home, gave a statement that implicated himself and five others, including two pairs of brothers, Korabik says. Over the next 36 hours, a battery of police officers, uniformed and plainclothes, combed northern Flint. When the sweep ended, police had also arrested Anthony Hollis, 23; Adrian Hollis, 20; Terrance Reyes, 18; and Tyrone Reyes and Shannon Gould, both...