Body found on Ledford Middle School property in Thomasville; school closed for the day
2 February 2023
FORSYTH COUNTY, N.C. — Members of the Forsyth County Sheriff’s Office’s Juvenile Intervention and Investigations team start their days with some literal heavy lifting. When you’re dealing with teens on the verge of their athletic prime, it’s important to stay in shape yourself.
“When the George Floyd protests were going on, I put in my application,” said Deputy J. Hollingsworth.
About a year later, he got a taste of what was to come in our communities, in the shape of an act that reshaped the history of the Winston-Salem Forsyth County Schools system.
“It didn’t come out on the sheriff’s office radio first. It came out on the school, the teachers had a radio,” Hollingsworth said, about standing in the front office of Mount Tabor High School on September 21, 2021, when a student was shot and killed in the halls of the school.
“As soon as we heard a fight was going on we took off before knowing all the details, and you get to the hallway and you see the gun smoke in the air,” he recalled. “And that’s when it hit like, ‘oh.’”
Within weeks of the shooting, Forsyth County Sheriff Bobby Kimbrough announced his intention to build a team to deal specifically with juveniles. By the following May, funding was acquired and the Juvenile Intervention and Investigations, or “JIIT” team, was born. In their short life, they’ve already earned street nicknames such as “the Ninja Turtles,” “the Guys in Green” and “the Undercovers.”
“We may look like we’re intimidating, but just talking to them, sitting down seeing how their day’s going, make them feel a little comfortable with us,” said Deputy I. King, another member of the team, of their work with students.
On the Friday after a Winston-Salem 12-year-old was shot and killed, the team spread out throughout the neighborhood to make sure friends and family of the victim could gather safely. Winston-Salem Mayor Allen Joines later detailed there was a “gang element” to that incident.
“To be there to protect the community, and everybody that’s there to celebrate this young girl’s life,” said Lieutenant James Rae.
Members of the team also spent part of their day playing basketball with three teens at a recreation center on Reynolds Park Road.
“At the end of the day, we’re not just law enforcement. We’re people. We go to the same grocery stores, we go to the same gyms, high school games, college games,” Hollingsworth said. “We live in the same community.”
In terms of work, however, their real heavy lifting comes after dark.
“We really go out and try to remove the criminals from the street and hopefully interact with some juveniles,” Rae said.
The following Thursday, the team spread out in some of the most high-crime areas of Winston-Salem. One of their first traffic stops involved four teenage boys, where the deputies found a concealed 9mm handgun concealed in the center console.
“They’ll call the on-call juvenile justice phone, and they’ll make a determination on whether or not a secure custody will be granted for any of these juveniles,” Rae said.
Those boys ended up being released to their parents. As Rae explained, the team resorts to trying to take our juvenile petitions taken out against subjects the next day, but that often means those juveniles will go to school the next day.
“They aren’t legally allowed to purchase those firearms but are getting them pretty easy, so what’s to say they don’t go back out tonight and get another one,” he added.
Later in the night, FOX8 switched vehicles from that of Lieutenant Rae to an SUV being driven by Sergeant J. Greiner.
“We’re trying to target some of our areas where we’ve had some of the recent homicides involving some of our gangs, criminal enterprises,” Greiner said, adding some of the gangs they’re dealing with in the city are “hybrid” gangs often named after neighborhoods or streets the members live on, or in.
Greiner also provided some insight into the ages of the gang members and their activities.
“We’ve seen them as young as nine and ten years old,” he said, adding most of the juveniles they deal with are in the 14 to 16-year-old age range. “It’s a shame when we catch a 14-year-old in a high-speed pursuit, going over 100 miles an hour, and they crash and jump and run from the vehicle and they’ve got a gun on them.”
Greiner detailed further, saying many of the kids get jumped into the gangs by committing petty crimes such as break-ins, then move on to more serious crimes.
“These kids are selling vape pens, marijuana THC vape pens in their middle schools, and we’ve had a lot of kids passing out in the bathrooms. We have to call EMS to come help them just because they’ve introduced this into the school,” he said.
Throughout the night, the team repeatedly pulled over vehicles with young children or juveniles inside. One of the stops involved an adult driver with two high school-aged girls inside and yielded the discovery of marijuana. Most of the stops took place well after 10 p.m., with the latest shortly before midnight.
“The marijuana was in a very large freezer-sealed bag, almost like what you would get in the mail,” Rae added.
County commissioners approved $2.2 million from the American Rescue Action Fund to form the JIIT team. That amount is expected to continue to fund JIIT through December of 2024. In the meantime, its members hope they can continue to intervene and investigate our youngest generation out of a life of crime.
“We can get these kids young enough, and at the right opportunity and the right moment,” Greiner said. “Sometimes these kids can hopefully change their lives for the better.”