Mom: ‘You killed the wrong kid’
Man who shot sleeping teen sentenced to 25-60 years in prison
Weeping and trembling with anger, Jeani Haskins shouted across the courtroom at the man who killed her 17-year-old son in 2012, imploring him to look her in the eye.
“You killed the wrong kid,” Haskins told Quante L. Cruz, who was sentenced to 25-60 years in a state prison Monday for shooting Kareem Fedd.
“The reason we're here is because I wouldn't give up. I stayed on law enforcement's tail,” Haskins said.
Cruz, 29, did not react as Haskins spoke. He pleaded guilty before Lehigh County Judge Maria L. Dantos to thirddegree murder and burglary.
Fedd was shot Aug. 24, 2012, at his home in the 1100 block of Fullerton Avenue. His mother found him dead in his bed from four gunshot wounds when she came home from work. Cruz admitted that he climbed a fire escape and pushed in an air conditioner in Fedd's bedroom before shooting the teen as he slept.
Cruz's arrest came after a grand jury investigation. In court records, police said the homicide was planned with two other members of the Allen
town-based New Street Goonies street gang.
Fedd was a member of the Shotgun Crips gang. The two gangs were engaged in a violent clash in the summer of 2012 that resulted in 12 people shot, included two who were paralyzed.
The war began when Fedd walked into Goonies territory wearing Crips beads, Chief Deputy District Attorney Bethany Zampogna said. His killing was retaliation for a shooting that left a man in a wheelchair.
Zampogna acknowledged that Fedd was involved in gang activity, but said at 17, there was a chance he would have changed his ways.
“This was a terrible act of cowardice in the way this was carried out,” Zampogna said. “This rash of violence had no greater point of impact than when Kareem’s life was taken.”
Cruz’s sentence was the result of a plea deal, and was delivered in a packed courtroom. Dantos chided Cruz for remaining “stone-faced” while Haskins spoke, and told him she saw his friends in the back of the courtroom throwing gang signs as Cruz entered in handcuffs.
“You shot an unarmed child as he laid in his bed. The word coward, in my mind, is an understatement,” Dantos said.
The judge’s words provoked angry mutterings from Cruz’s supporters. Several repeated the word “family” as she described them as Cruz’s “boys.”
Cruz eventually broke his silence a few minutes into the judge’s remarks.
“There’s a lot of pain on both sides,” he said. “I’m not the best at expressing myself in certain situations. I’m just lost.”
“I hope you stay lost in prison,” Dantos replied.
Cruz’s attorney, John McMahon, told the judge that his client was remorseful.
Fedd’s family and friends filled half of the courtroom. Haskins, his mother, described coming home from work early in the morning and finding her son dead. Her younger son, who usually slept in an adjoining bedroom, was in her room that night because his air conditioner was broken.
“I could have come home to two dead sons,” she said.
Haskins shouted at Cruz in the courtroom, reminding him that she had to sign off on the plea deal that allowed him to avoid a potential death penalty.
“I’m giving you the opportunity for your mother to hold you in her arms again. My son didn’t deserve this. He did what you did … he chose the wrong friends,” she said.
Community activist Hasshan Batts from Allentown Promise Neighborhood was in the courtroom to support Fedd’s family.
“The system has failed you,” he told Fedd’s mother. “It failed your son long before he was murdered.”
Batts then turned to Cruz’s side of the courtroom.
“The system has failed you, too. Two families are suffering right now.”