Gangs may be using Internet to recruit members.

Byline: Jeremy Roebuck

Feb. 21--PHARR -- In the days after Roy Garza's death, friends flooded their MySpace.com profiles with photos of the 17-year-old PSJA High School senior and messages like "R.I.P. LIL ROY."

But mixed in with these expressions of bereavement are posts from members of the Poboys, a Las Milpas gang to which Garza's friends and family members say he belonged.

Photos of teens flashing gang signs and threats of violence against the PSJA Central High School student accused in Garza's slaying pepper the pages of students linked through his social network.

The messages may be little more than idle talk from teens enamored with gang life, but Edinburg police investigator Robert Alvarez worries that local gangs such as the Poboys may be using social networking sites as a tool for recruitment.

Worse, he says, contact through MySpace could escalate simmering tensions between local street gangs into violent confrontations like the one that led to Garza's death.

"The way gangs grow is through communication," he said. "Now with the Internet, you have kids meeting together all the time -- kids from Donna to McAllen to Edinburg. These kids are getting past their teenage years and they're already getting ready to meet prison."

On the night of Feb. 12, Garza and four other friends found themselves under attack while driving on the 200 block of East Dicker Road. Garza sustained a bullet wound to the head and died as his friends sped to

the Pharr Police Department. Two other teens received minor wounds to the leg and back.

Later that night, Pharr police arrested 18-year-old Ulysses Sanchez after the other teens in the car identified him as the shooter. It remains unclear whether Sanchez was also a Poboy or affiliated with another rival gang, Pharr police investigator Lt. William Edmundson said.

Investigators looking into Garza's death have not publicly identified a motive for the shooting, but friends and family members suspect that his death was gang-related. Edmundson remained cagey on whether the teen's MySpace network has played a role in the investigation.

"We look at everything," he said. "Whatever you can find out there, we've probably already seen it."

But Alvarez would not be surprised to learn that Web sites like MySpace have played a role in similar violent encounters. Like child predators or other groups who have used the site to gain access to tight online communities, aspiring gang members are drawn to MySpace for its lack of policing and the ability to learn the language of underground subcultures, Alvarez said.

"Normally, you'd have to go out there and dis (a gang member). Here, you can do it from a computer," he said. "And once people start messing with you, you have to show you're more than just talk."

He compares the sites to known hubs of gang activity such as county jails and prison, where close proximity in confined quarters allows for easy recruitment.

"But what's worse is that people on MySpace are visiting the gang member's pages by choice," he said. "They want to be a part of a community, and it makes it easier for them to find what they're looking for."

Angie Cavazos-Criado, a San Juan police investigator who works in PSJA schools, said she was surprised to see the Poboys linked to such a violent crime. Her experience with the gang on the PSJA High School campus has primarily been limited to schoolyard fights and teens causing trouble in class, she said.

"They're a pretty large group, but they just like to make themselves known on campus," she said. "They like to wear their little hoods and pretend to be Mr. Bad."

But on the MySpace pages of Garza and his friends, threats and name-calling abound. One girl who identifies herself as a PSJA High School student has posted an obscene mutation of the name of the Poboys' rival gang, the Villains and Blacks. On Garza's page, posters identify his shooter as someone named 'Kilo' while others threaten to seek revenge.

Sitting in his office last week, Alvarez scrolled through one MySpace page after another pointing out profiles of members of local gangs like the Texas Chicano Brotherhood and the Valluco Soldiers. He has used the site to track activities of gang members in the area and said it has established links between gangs that have helped solve investigations.

He declined to talk specifically about how he has used the site to solve cases for fear of tipping off gang members whose profiles he continues to monitor. But he has started to see that easy access to a network of like-minded individuals has accelerated the growth of gangs like the Poboys.

"What it's taken gangs like the Texas Syndicate and the Tri-City Bombers 20 years to do will take the Poboys 10 years," he said. "In the future, I see a lot of our gang-related murders being younger people."

The logic makes sense to Maryanne Denner, who works in Hidalgo County's probation office and monitors the activities of prison gangs. Just like every corner of society, gangs were bound to find a way to make the Internet work for them, she said.

"Look at how it helped business," she said. "And gangs are effectively an underground business."

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Copyright (c) 2007, The Monitor, McAllen, Texas

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