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Gang activity plagues Long

It was around midnight one steamy Saturday when two gang members with the street names Clown and Baldy were cruising Freeport, looking for someone to kill.

Clown, whose real name is Jose Mendez, was a cherub-faced 16-year-old Freeport High School dropout with his second child on the way. Baldy, born Maynor Murcia, was a 25-year-old construction worker with a shaved head and a hard stare.

Driving along a residential street south of Merrick Road, the pair spotted their victim: a young man in a Yankees cap who they thought was a rival gang member. Jumping out of their Nissan Altima, they pumped nine bullets into his back and head.

But Miguel Adames, 22, had no gang ties, police said. Soft-spoken and shy, his passions were baseball and hip-hop and his dream was to be a music producer. He was gunned down as he headed to his home, just three blocks away.

Mendez and Murcia, who in separate confessions would later describe what happened that night, last month began serving 20 years to life for the murder. But as Adames' family and friends commemorated the first anniversary of his death on Tuesday, they were still coming to terms with the loss.

"If anyone didn't deserve to be killed like that, it was Miguel," said Jonathan Hernandez, who runs a Freeport recording studio and was with Adames the night he died. "That's what really gets me. He went out of his way to avoid trouble. All he liked to do was make music."

That anguish is echoed in communities from Hempstead to the Hamptons, where authorities say pockets of gang activity persist despite five years of aggressive federal, state and local crackdowns. During that time, at least 33 people have died and dozens have been injured in gang-related attacks on Long Island, authorities say.