Brooklyn: Birthday bash ends in tragedy

A sweet 16th birthday bash turned bloody in Brooklyn early yesterday when a teenage partygoer was gunned down and another was wounded in a barrage of gunfire, cops said.

"They shot my cousin!" yelled a relative of 17-year-old Ronald Petgrave, who was gunned down outside the East Flatbush building just before 1:30 a.m.

At least five bullets ripped through the torso of the aspiring rapper moments after he was joking and dancing in the packed basement party for one of his female classmates, Teara Hardy, cops and friends said.

"Right now, the family, they are just shattered," Ronald's brother Clinton, 31, said. "He loved music. That was the first thing in his life."

Another 17-year-old boy who was shot was taken to Kings County Hospital, where he was in stable condition hours later.

The gunfire - witnesses heard as many as a dozen shots - sent partygoers scrambling into the basement.

"It was like a stampede," said Tanya Creddille, 28, of Georgia, who brought her 8-year-old daughter to her cousin's party. "We didn't know if they were going to come in here with a gun."

She found Ronald in front of the three-story brick building near Winthrop St., next to her 1990 Nissan Maxima, which was pierced by two bullets.

"I was sitting there praying for him," Creddille said. "Why does this have to happen?"

A gun was recovered, but there were no arrests. Police said the motive was unclear.

But some friends believe the gunman was lying in wait for Ronald, the youngest of six kids who lived nearby and went weekly to Refuge Temple, a local Pentecostal church.

Ronald, who once attended Wingate High School, was in an alternative program and trying to focus on his grades.

"He made a turnaround," family friend and neighbor Jose Aponte, 40, said. "He was going to show everybody he could doit."

As a member of a rap trio called Send Bread, Ronald, whose nickname was Madness, wanted a record deal, pals said. "He was full of spirit," said Aponte's son, group member Marlon Aponte 20.

At least five bullets ripped through the torso of the aspiring rapper moments after he was joking and dancing in the packed basement party for one of his female classmates, Teara Hardy, cops and friends said.

Friends don't let friends rap.

Seriously, my heritage is Welsh/English. My cultural heritage produced drinking songs, Gilbert and Sullivan, and Noel Coward. (And after we immigrated, Barbershop music.) The black cultural heritage a hundred years ago brought about ragtime and jazz, and fifty years ago contributed to the foundations of Rock and Roll.

In the last forty years, the Black-O-American culture has produced Rap music (later sanitized and euphamised as "HipHop") in which violence and drug use are glorified, women are demeaned as "b!+chs", and in general, powerless, backward, poorly educated men who happened to be good at the manly and incredibly important skill of rhyming words attempt to compensate for their lack of productivity or positive values by making themselves big and powerful in songs bought by people who like to turn their stereos up so loud you can hear it five cars away while turning their own brains to pudding. With guns.

The "Great Society" did what the Klan could not...it destroyed the black family. Giving a handout to single mothers taught three generations of black men they could leave without any emotional pain or societal disdain, giving a welfare check instead of work created people who thought money came from Uncle Sugar and who didn't feel bad about contributing nothing but additional hungry mouths to society. Good Lord, even the WPA forced people to work in order to get paid because FDR thought it demeaned a man to just "give him money."

Rap music kills, and beyond that, is just too d@mn loud and vulgar. If its consumers can't grapple those clear and simple facts, we have failed as a society no matter how many checks we write. A culture that gives out freeping awards to Rap singers is so broken we may not be able to fix it in a thousand generations, if we are allowed that long before the Visigoths storm the gates.

Yeah, in 40 YEARS! we haven't had anything but rap from the black community. WHEN is the black community going to put out singers again??? 40 YEARS with the same "music", if you can call it that. Before rap, it seemed that the music from the black community was constantly evolving; there was do-wop, blues, gospel, ragtime, jazz, and even rock and roll. It seemed like it was changing every 5-10 years. But 40 years of stinking, crappy, pukey, violent rap! It's gotta end! We really need a change. PLEASE!

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