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West Side Tongan Posse


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When Jessica joined the Tongan Crip gang in Utah, she was looking for someone to love her. All she wants now is to get out.

 

"You need to find something else better to do to occupy your time because the streets don't love you, they just take you away from the people who do," said Jessica, 21. "I joined a gang to be loved and I had to find out the hard way that the streets don't love you."

 

Known to her friends as Jussi Pooh, Jessica has spent her life trying to get "fast money" on the streets of Utah by stealing cars and selling drugs. She has experienced so much pain during her time in the gang that nothing can hurt her anymore, she said.

 

"Only things the streets got to offer is money, death or incarceration -- because they [gang members] don't want to end up in jail, so they going to give you the gun and tell you to go out and shoot somebody," she said.

 

"Second, when it comes to the money, trying to make a fast dollar, you going to be out here doing some of everything."

 

Jessica is now trying to turn her life around. She is a sophomore at Salt Lake Community College, studying criminal justice and hopes one day to be a probation officer. She is looking for a job and working to control her anger.

 

"When I get angry from now on, I just write," she said. "I use this stuff that goes on around me and turn it into stories and maybe I'm going to write a book some day.

 

"I think I could be a motivation to stop all this violence and stuff," Jessica said. "I used to be a complete hothead in the streets. I used to steal cars, all type of stuff. I'm just trying to better myself."

 

Jessica also tries to go to church every Sunday. She attends to First Baptist Church of Salt Lake City where she sings in the choir.

 

"Feel loved when I'm at church, a different kind of love, real love," she said, "a different kind of love than you get in the streets."

 

Jessica lives with her great-grandmother but she always wonders what her life would be like if she had a better relationship with her own mother. Jessica lived with her briefly but they argued often, creating a toxic relationship. Her father is a member of a different gang, the Glenmob gang.

 

"I feel like if me and my momma would have had a better relationship, then maybe I wouldn't be the way that I am," she said.

 

In Jessica's perfect world, no one in Utah would have guns, not even police officers. She dreams of a Utah without any gangs and she believes that the dream starts with her peers.

 

"We got to be the solution. We got to want this for ourselves," she said. "If only some of us want it, then it's not going to ever stop. People say we're a generation of no tomorrows, so they're basically saying, like: What have we got to live for? The only thing we're doing, we're killing each other. Like, you don't hear about stuff like this happening in no other city, all this stuff, we're killing people. People are dying young, 7 and 6 year olds. That hurt my heart."

 

For now, however, Jessica' main goal is to continue working on herself.

 

"I used to be a hothead," she said. "I still am a little bit but I'm trying to change for the better because I'm getting old. I'm 21 now.

 

"It's time for me to bring out the lady in me so people can see a positive change."

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