On Feb. 6, 2011, the Steelers lost Super Bowl XLV to the Packers 31-25. Five weeks later, Jarami Thomas paid for it with his life. The 20-year-old placed a $40 bet on the game over Facebook, according to the Tarrant County District Attorney's, and lost it to a member of an Arlington street gang called Lynch Mob. Another member of that gang, 19-year-old Clevin Earl Brown Jr., was sentenced today to 50 years in prison for shooting Thomas to death in front of an Arlington convenience store, the DA's office said in a release. Brown was one of several Lynch Mob members who ambushed Thomas and his friends in the 3200 block of Green Oaks Boulevard in the early hours of March 14, 2011, the release states. He had been lured there with the promise that he could settle his debt by fighting the man he lost the bet to. Instead, the gangsters blocked Thomas' car in, dragged him from it, and stood by as Brown shot him in the arm and chest. He died shortly after his friends drove him to a hospital. The man who actually made the bet with Thomas, 18-year-old Edward Washington, is still in jail -- awaiting trial on charges of engaging in organized criminal activity and murder. A jury found Brown guilty of those same charges last week, and deliberated less than five hours on Monday before sentencing him. Allowed to address Brown afterwards, Thomas' mother reportedly waved two $20 bills at him and screamed: "Is this all my son was worth to you?"
''They may have been into drugs but they didn't do anything to harm anybody,'' said their aunt, Cheryl Watkins. ``It was cold-blooded murder to lay them out like that.''Miami-Dade County's 80th and 81st homicides of 2008: Rashawn and Deon Beneby, brothers and suspects in a string of violent robberies, shot dead Thursday afternoon next to the Liberty City middle school they once attended. ''It's cold-blooded, outright killing out there -- and we're not even in the summer yet,'' said the Rev. Richard Dunn, a community activist who lives three blocks away. Witnesses said a group of men were gathered outside an apartment at the Annie Coleman Gardens housing project when the shooting started.Someone mowed down the brothers, some 15 yards apart, on a grassy strip next to the chain-link fence that separates the community from the baseball field at Charles R. Drew Middle School, 1801 NW 60th St. Rashawn was executed -- shot in the head an...
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