Brittany Smith was a week away from graduating from the most prestigious academic institution in the world two years ago. Today she faces accessory to murder and firearms charges and her boyfriend is going to jail for life.
Brittany could have done anything she wanted to do with her degree and Harvard connections. But her boyfriend turned out to be her downfall. Her shady boyfriend, Jabrai Copney, decided to take advantage of her Harvard pedigree by robbing Ivy League drug dealers with a gun and eventually killing one.
Brittany would let Copney use her phone and key-card to arrange the robbery and hid the gun in a friends room after the robbery turned into a murder according to prosecutors. She also helped pack the marijuana that was stolen and hid her boyfriends gunpowder stained clothes according to the District Attorney, Daniel Bennett.
In court Copney’s accomplice, Blayn Jiggetts testified that he had sexual intercourse with Brittany’s friend, Harvard student and drug dealer, Chanequa Campbell. Both Chanequa and Brittany were both aware of Copney’s plan to rob Justin Cosby and both of them have his blood on their hands.
Ivy League drug dealers like Chanequa are nothing new and are relatively harmless. Gun toting thugs who rob them are very rare, and murderers who kill Ivy League drug dealers on campus are few and far between.
Why were Chanequa and Brittany hanging out with gun toting, drug dealer robbing thugs? Both of them had attended the Prep for Prep program in New York City that takes poor, minorities from urban areas and places them into prestigious private schools and later elite colleges. Chanequa would attend the prestigious Packer Institute in Brooklyn, and win a National Merit Scholarship as well as scholarships from the New York Times and Coca-Cola and worked for Goldman Sachs during the summers.
Chanequa would also find a way to supplement her income at Harvard, selling marijuana and cocaine to Harvard students. However it wasn’t drug dealing that led to Chanequa’s downfall, it was the wanna be gangsters that she and her friend, Brittany were sleeping with. Chanequa wound up testifying against Copney to avoid charges. She might have avoided jail time but she never got her Harvard degree and her life will be tainted by the incident forever.
Smith is not so lucky. She will probably wind up in jail. Brittany Smith won a volunteer award from Harvard and although she attended Prep For Prep she graduated from Frederick Douglass Academy in Harlem and not a prestigious private school.
Now instead of being on Wall Street, Law School, or pursuing whatever career that her Harvard degree to get her, Brittany wasted four years of college, working hard to pursue a degree to be labeled a criminal, allegedly take part in a murder and face jail time.
Why was Brittany Smith, a Harvard intellectual dating a man who thought that he could earn money by getting his thugged out friends from New York to rob a drug dealer in her own campus? Why was her friend Chanequa Campbell, another Harvard intellectual with the safe position of Ivy League drug dealer, sleeping with his thugged out friend, Blayn Jiggetts?
Chanequa and Brittany are not the only Black girls who went to elite educational institutions only to throw it away because of her gangster boyfriend. Afrika Owes attended the prestigious elite private school, Deerfield Academy and had recently visited Harvard and Yale only to be incarcerated in the notorious Riker’s Island jail in New York City/
Afrika was arrested on gang and gun charges for allegedly helping her boyfriend Jaquan “Jay Cash” Layne. She would help bring guns to Layne’s gang, according to police and police say Jay Cash told his elite boarding school educated girlfriend
“[I'm] just a gangster. That’s the life I live. I live this gangster sh – -,” “[I] won’t be doing a damn thing but selling crack,”
Owes would allegedly plan her life around Jay Cash’s drug dealing plans. In a recorded conversation she claimed she could go to Penn if Cash planned to move his crack selling operation to Philadelphia.
Tiesha Sargeant was another girl from an educated pedigree who’s life was taken away due to her boyfriend’s drug selling. Sargeant was from Brookyln and attended the same Prep For Prep program that helped Chanequa and Brittany prepare for private school and Harvard. Tiesha would attend the elite all-girls private school, Brearley, and the prestigious liberal arts college, Weslyan and go on to work at Conde Naste and on Wall St.
Tiesha had a live in boyfriend, Keve Huggins. Keve would sell t-shirts and promote parties and also sell marijuana. Some local thugs got word that Keve was selling marijuana out the apartment he shared with Tiesha and decided to rob him. The thugs broke into Tiesha’s apartment for a robbery and tied both Tiesha and Keve up.
While the thugs left Keve, they shot his educated girlfriend in the head, killing her instantly. People I know tell me Keve wasn’t a thug just a regular kid who sold pot. But still his illegal activities led to her downfall, not unlike the activities Brittany and Afrika’s boyfriends.
Why are educated Black women dating thugs? Are they buying into the media’s glorification of the Black male thug? Tyesha told friends that “banker types” were not that interesting. Possibly the media’s emasculation of the educated Black “nerd” led her to think that banker types were boring in comparison to the Black thug, glorified by hip hop culture.
Tyesha, Afrika and Brittany are not the only Black girls who’ve dated thugs. Their stories got to the media because their boyfriends’ activities led to there death or incarceration in contrast to their elite schooling. I can think of several educated African American females in my circle of friends who have dated the “thug” type.
While statistics may show that there are way more educated African American females than males, that is no reason for any of these women to date “thugs” who use violence and guns while making there money from illegal activities. If they can’t find a man at Harvard there are plenty of other colleges that have hardworking law abiding African American males. If they can’t find a man on Wall St. there are plenty of bus drivers, teachers and other law abiding working class citizens.
Dating a “thug” is not just an exciting thing to do. Women have been attracted to “bad boys” since the beginning of time but the consequences of dating a thug can often be death, incarceration, or domestic abuse.
NewsOne Original | News One
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04-27-2011
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