(5 of 10)
Doug floors his Ford truck through a yellow light, turns sharply and then slows, carefully checking out the other cars as he cruises the largely white working-class neighborhoods of Benson. He points to a light blue, wood-frame house. Dozens of pellet holes from two shotgun blasts scar the wall on either side of the front door. In the driveway, an elderly man tinkers with a blue Chevy Caprice, which is also riddled with holes. Doug drives by slowly, confident he won't be recognized. "We did that three months ago. Monday night about 2 a.m. me and six other guys just fired from the street." He shakes his head. "That old man's son has a problem with stealing cars." Doug puts an Ice-T disc on his car CD player and cranks up the volume. "There's a lot of rappers that make a lot of sense," he says. His friend Scott nods reverently. But neither Doug nor Scott can explain what the songs mean to them. While the lyrics may address inner-city issues, the tone resonates among white teenagers like them simply because it's the angriest stuff on the market.
"Now, let's say we were going to shoot that house," says Doug, pointing down the street. "Just about now I'd cut the lights and slow down. Then bang, bang, bang, and I'd punch it out of there." The truck lurches forward. Doug turns the stereo louder.
Most Omaha residents used to dismiss teenage gunplay as a problem confined to the north side of Omaha, which is largely black and poor. That comfortable notion was shattered last August by a seven-minute fire fight among mostly white teenagers in Benson. "I've lived in this area all my life, and now boys are shooting at each other for the hell of it," says Bonnie Elseman, a single mother in the neighborhood. "I now realize that I owe the blacks in Omaha an apology for ignoring all the shootings because I thought it was just their problem. I could just weep for these kids."
Especially for her son Jeff, an only child. He was one of the shooters last summer during the gun battle at 61st and Sprague, part of a tree-lined neighborhood of neatly kept, working-class houses. "We were just planning on < a big fight, like a rumble, when six cars came cruising down the street and the shooting started," says Jeff, 20, whose quick and warm smile defeats even his best efforts at posturing. He ran inside a house, grabbed his .32-cal. pistol and returned fire. Another friend retrieved a mini MAC-10, a semiautomatic he had hidden in the bushes, while a third pulled out a .22-cal. rifle. "That mini MAC saved us," says Jeff, who blindly blazed away at the cars, which circled the block three times. Seven minutes later, two youths lay wounded, one seriously. Neighboring houses were riddled with bullets; one car had 14 puncture holes. "It's weird nobody died," Jeff says. He pauses, running his hands over his neatly shaved head. "I never really did learn to shoot too well."