“Word,” said Ellis, a Ferguson native, grabbing one of the freshly assembled Molotov cocktails. “”I’m down for whatever with y’all.”
As they ran through a cloud of tear gas during demonstrations in Ferguson, Missouri, on Monday, Andre Ellis, 17, linked arms with Graig “Shine” Cook, a self-identified Bloods gang member who’d befriended him two nights earlier.
“What we doing now that they gassed us?” asked Ellis, the Bloods’s newest recruit, half his face covered with a red handkerchief traditionally worn by the gang’s members. “Should we go home?”
“Nah, we going to get more batch,” said Cook, using a slang term for the mixture of gasoline and nail polish remover that a handful of protesters had used to make the Molotov cocktails they’d hurled at police. “Then we coming back on them bitches.”
Ellis followed Cook down a side street littered with spent bullet casings. There, half a dozen Bloods members and their friends had stashed the flammable “batch” mix. “We all about hitting them [police] hard tonight,” Cook, a St. Louis resident, told the others. “This a war right now.”
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