Young murderers share profile of hardship: A deadly mix of poverty & peer pressure

BY MOST ACCOUNTS, Marquis Moses was a deeply troubled teen.

He used marijuana. He skipped school so many times and got so many flunking grades that he had to repeat the 11th grade.

By age 17, he'd already been arrested twice as a juvenile - once for assault and once for drug possession.

And he lived on a seedy North Philadelphia block with a single mother who, he has said, frequently beat him and called him names.

No one foresaw that he would become a killer.

But, maybe, someone should have.

Kids who kill, experts say, share a common profile of hardship: they're high-school dropouts or troubled students; they have previous arrests; they have an uninvolved or absent father and/or were born to a teenage mother; they are involved with drugs or have relatives who are; they come from low-income neighborhoods; and they have family members with criminal records.

In a city where the number of kid killers rose 52 percent, from 19 in 2007 to 29 in 2008, experts say that it's more important than ever for youth advocates to preemptively treat the troubles that can deliver teens to their deadly destinies.

Moses made his leap from troubled teen to murderer on July 15, 2007, when he decided, as he walked with five friends two blocks from his mother's then-home, to "drop a body" and randomly punch a stranger, according to court documents.

With a single jab of his fist, Moses knocked David Cheng to the ground, according to court records. Cheng, 55, fell and hit his head on the pavement. He was declared dead on the scene at Lehigh Avenue near Germantown.

Moses later told police that he was high on drugs during the incident. In a recent letter to the Daily News, he insisted that he wasn't guilty - even though he pleaded no contest in court - and "took the case for a friend who just came home from a placement."

Moses was convicted of third-degree murder and sentenced to eight to 16 years in state prison.

His case was an eerie precursor to last year's high-profile slaying of Starbucks manager Sean Patrick Conroy, who died after five teens on a similar "drop-a-body" mission beat him, triggering a fatal asthma attack in a Center City subway concourse.

Both cases illustrate another trend in juvenile homicide: Murders by juveniles typically are carried out by pairs or packs by teens reluctant to look like wimps.

"Delinquency is, by and large, group behavior," said Phil Harris, a criminal-justice professor at Temple University. "Kids take bigger risks in a group than alone."