Her son, Jay Sparks—17, sharp-eyed, and twice as stubborn—sat slumped on a bench nearby, glaring at the phone in his hands. Across the alley, a neon sign flickered over his rival, Killa, and his crew. Killa was 18, with a record longer than his tattoos and a grudge against the Sparks family dating back to a feud between their mothers in the late '90s. The fight tonight was inevitable. Jay had been warned: "Don't mess with Killa. That boy’s got a chip on his shoulder bigger than this whole town," the gang’s older members had said. But pride, like Blackstone itself, was built on rot.