GARDEN CITY, Mich. – Imagine your son no longer wants to play Little League and then joins a gang in the suburbs.
The trend is happening more often, but the Original Suburban Gangster has a message for parents and their children.
The Original Suburban Gangster, who asked that his name be concealed, said things changed in junior high while he lived in Garden City.
"My parents thought everything was fine," he said. "I would them we're going bowling. They didn't know that we were having group fights at the bowling parking lot."
He said his transformation from a jock to a gangster happened as a result of small escalations that began when he was bullied.
"I was picked on for everything from shoes to hair to clothes," he said.
But then other students stepped in and protected him. He said they empowered him to fight back.
"They stood up for me when I was getting picked on, and taught me not to take anything from anyone because they had my back," he said.
Together, they started fighting teens at neighboring schools.
"School against school escalated to group against groups. Groups against groups escalated to gangs against gangs. Once it became a gang, it went to another level," said the Original Suburban Gangster.
Despite still being teens, police considered them to be a gang. The gang decided it needed colors and chose red.
"I wore the colors because they were the colors that were my favorite my entire life," he said.
The severity of the fights began escalating, and the Original Suburban Gangster said he would receive phone calls telling him that there was a hit on his life.
Then, the group the Original Suburban Gangster should carry a gun.
Things escalated when a fellow gang member was disrespected, he said.
"Once we were challenged to come out and fight that group, there was no question about it, we were going," he said. "When we showed up to fight that group, nobody was there. Somebody said we should shoot the house anyway."
On the way to the house, they discussed who would pull the trigger. Another gang member handed the gun to someone who wasn't in the gang, so the Original Suburban Gangster said he'd fire the shot.
"We drove by, I hung out the passenger window and I fired a shot. That shot hit a window of the bedroom of a 3-year-old girl who was sleeping. How do I feel? It haunts me still today," he said.
Soon after, the Original Suburban Gangster was arrested.
When I took that gun, I felt like that was my responsibility," he said. "I didn't take it because I wanted to. I took it because I felt like I was expected to. And if I didn't, cool was going to go away again."
Jail was where he picked up his nickname, the Original Suburban Gangster. He didn't like the sound of it, so he decided to change his life.
"I was going to be 'Suburban Gangster,' and they were going to prosecute me for it," he said. "I look back now and think that they tried too hard to prove a statistic that wasn't there."
"We started off as a group of kids from one school fighting a group of kids from another school. Something that has gone for generations," he added.
He insists there isn't much of a difference between who he was on a basketball court and who he was in a gang.
"I was molded into a gang member. The more we were accused of it, the more we became one," he said.
The Original Suburban Gangster believes it's as simple as having a support system in place.
"I think that instead of labeling somebody, something that you're trying to help them not become, I think that we could have a program that gives them an alternative," he said. "Enroll them into a program developed to reach out to kids who don't know how to cope with the pressure of cool."
Today, the Original Suburban Gangster is giving back to his community by helping the same police officers who arrested him, and reaching out to parents and children.
"I think that we need to educate our principles and teachers about suburban gangs. Teach them the signs of the patterns that can lead to a drive-by shooting, or worse," he said.
"As these teachers and principles learn these patterns, and see them willingly to their students, then we individualize our students. We single out these students into a program that gives them the alternative, that teachers them that it's okay not to fight," he added.