Sean Bell’s family is still demanding justice. Two years undercover cops shot to death 23-year-old Sean Bell outside of a Queens, N.Y., nightclub on his wedding day eve, members of his family finally met with federal prosecutors. Bell died when cops fired on the unarmed groom and two friends in a haze of 50 bullets. The officers who fired on the three men were acquitted of criminal charges. “Justice was never served in this case,” family attorney Michael Hardy told Newsday. “We still want justice for Sean.” The family has been pressing the U.S. Justice Department to bring civil rights charges against the officers. Following their meeting with federal prosecutors on Tuesday, the family now believes that it is possible.  In a statement, the Rev. Al Sharpton said he believes today’s meeting is “a sign that the federal government has begun to seriously look into the egregious denial of the civil rights of Sean Bell, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield.” Bell’s family felt the same way. Bell’s family. “Sean had a life ahead of him,” fiancée Nicole Paultre Bell told reporters. “This has given us hope.”

White S. African pleads guilty of shooting Black kids. A White South African teen pleaded guilty Monday to shooting and killing four Blacks during a shocking shooting spree earlier this year, reports The Associated Press. Johan Nel, 18, appeared for the start of his trial in a court in Mmabatho, which is 185 miles away from Johannesburg. The courtroom was full of the victims’ family members. Prosecutors were set to present their case this week. Nel fired on children in deprived Black neighborhood back in January, according to witnesses.  After shooting relentlessly, he even stopped at one point to ask a farmer for more ammunition. When the farmer refused to provide him with any, he shot and killed his ostrich. A 3-month-old baby (who was being carried on his mom’s back), a 10-year-old boy, a 31-year-old mother and a 35-year-old man died from the attack.  

Death Row Records founder wants Kanye’s cash. Things must be pretty tight for Suge Knight in the cash department these days. Having lost his rule of the multi-million-dollar Death Row Records to bankruptcy, he’s turned to suing a fellow industry figure. Knight wants Kanye West to pay his medical expenses and damages including the loss of a $135,000 diamond earring after a 2005 shooting. Knight claims he was also forced to take a private jet back home to Cali from West’s Miami after-party where the incident took place. Knight was shot in the leg and accuses Kanye of failing to provide adequate protection. An unusual claim for a man who was once the most feared in rap music. Among other things, Suge’s lawsuit alleges “the loss of use and enjoyment of his earring,” which apparently got lost in the commotion. Talk about hard times, huh?

Common had been at the barber shop where five were shot.

Rapper Common had just received a hair cut at a New York salon hours before a man was killed there, according to Allhiphop.com. Two gunmen shot at a 19-year-old man in Brooklyn before the man ran into the salon and was killed there early this week. Four other bystanders at the shop were reportedly wounded, including an off-duty cop. The suspects fled the crime scene in a blue Chevrolet Tahoe, according to reports.

Soulja Boy disses ex-assistant, promotes new CD.

Having disposed of actor and rap great Ice T in a war of Web words, Soulja Boy has responded to a YouTube attack from his ex-personal assistant. “Q,” as the former aide identifies himself, recently posted a video claiming he’d been threatened at gunpoint to take $45,000 of his old boss’ cash, so he complied. Q insists that his story is true, explaining that he always had access to Soulja Boy’s account and that he could’ve emptied it on many occasions if he chose to. The rapper, however, isn’t buying Q’s story, and says that Q could’ve simply explained the threat on his life and asked for the cash. “I don’t care if I got $10 million lying on the floor,” Soulja Boy says. “You don’t touch one dollar without asking me. …I’m 18 years old, and I’m glad that I learned this lesson at an early age.”

Violence visits Game’s family for second time in ‘08.

Months after The Game had a physical confrontation with a cousin at a relative’s funeral, and the rap star’s sister is recovering from a shooting. Bfly, also an aspiring rapper, wasn’t seriously injured in the drive-by that happened while she recently sat on her porch in Compton, Calif. A post on Bfly’s MySpace page reads in part: “Lord, please pray upon the soul of my shooter…I am happy I have another day to live among these devils, but shelter me from evil, shelter me from harm. Continue to bless me with a voice to bless others, and a heart to forgive.”

Two men are finally arrested in post-Katrina cop shooting. Two men who are suspected in the shooting of a New Orleans Police officer in the wake of Hurricane Katrina were finally caught - thanks to a Crimestoppers tip. U.S. marshals nabbed the two men late last week who had been released in 2006 in a post-Katrina mix up. Vincent Walker, 46, was arrested Thursday at an apartment complex in Birmingham, Ala., by members of a U.S. Marshals Service fugitive task force, the agency said in a news release. Jamil Joyner, 25, was arrested Friday on a street corner in Philadelphia. New Orleans Police allege that Walker and Joyner were looting a convenience store in Algiers on Aug. 30, 2005, the day after Katrina hit the city, when officers confronted them. Police said the pair exchanged gunfire with officers and veteran officer Kevin Thomas was wounded. Walker and Joyner were arrested shortly afterward and booked with attempted first-degree murder. In the criminal-justice quagmire that followed the storm, the two men were first held at an out-of-town jail. But in an action that was never documented because of the storm, they were released in mid-2006, apparently because they had been held beyond the deadline for the District Attorney’s Office to present sufficient evidence to hold them. They were officially charged with attempted murder in February 2007, but by then authorities were unable to locate them.

Lima, Ohio, chief says the community needs to assist officers.

The head of the Lima, Ohio, Police Department acknowledged that there may be some lessons to be learned in the shooting death of a Black woman while she held her baby, an incident that widened the racial rift between cops and the Black community. Chief Greg Garlock, pressed by Lima’s African-American preachers, released a statement saying that the department will review the findings of the various investigations into the practices of the S.W.A.T. team and its member, Sgt. Joe Chavalia, who killed Tarika Wilson on Jan. 4. The officer was acquitted by a jury earlier this month. “It is my intent to take the information derived from all those investigations, along with an examination of ‘best practices’ of other SWAT teams in the United States, to determine what we can do to enhance our internal practices,” Garlock said in his statement. He said that the community plays a crucial role in helping police solve crimes. Speaking for the ministers’ group, Coalition for Change, the Rev. H. Frank Taylor, described Garlock’s actions as “a good step. It’s good we have gotten such a quick response. …I believe police are here to serve and protect citizens of this community. If there is a perceived high-risk threat to apprehend a person, police move that mission to secure and apprehend. Under no circumstances do police move to a search and destroy mission,” Taylor said.

Montreal immigrants riot over police shooting. Saturday’s shooting death of an unarmed Honduran teen at the hands of police that led to a riot in a Montreal immigrant community, will be investigated quickly, the city’s mayor said Monday. The rioting happened in Montreal North, a mostly Haitian area that police call “The Bronx of Montreal” because of its poverty and crime, reports the AP. At the height of the riots Sunday evening, angry young people set cars on fire, shot an officer in the leg and looted stores. Officers arrested six in connection with the rioting and hundreds of officers, donning riot gear, roamed the area looking for the young suspects who set fire to eight cars outside a fire station. Before Saturday’s shooting of 18-year-old Honduran immigrant Freddy Alberto Villanueva, police say they were trying to make an arrest when they were surrounded by about 20 people in Henri Bourassa Park. When some of them ran toward the police, one officer fired his gun, they say. The officer shot two other unarmed people, but Villanueva was the only one who died from his wounds. No officers were wounded in the incident, reports the news service. The city’s mayor, Gerald Tremblay, says the reasoning behind the shooting will be investigated by Quebec provincial police and that he will reach out to connect with community leaders. About a quarter of the people who live in Montreal North are immigrants. Of that amount, about 15 percent are Black and 3.5 percent are Latino. “One thing is for sure – we have to do better than we’ve been doing,” he said. And some community leaders agree. “What we are seeing are youngster, a community that is in revolt because they don’t like the way they are being treated. They don’t like how authorities interact with them,” an area youth group leader told the AP. Meanwhile, the family of Villanueva, whose family came to Canada in 1998, is still looking for answers. “We only know what we see in the news, in the newspapers, that’s all,” his sister, Julissa, said.

Russian forces advance into Georgia. Russia’s military pushed further into the former Soviet Republic of Georgia Monday sending the country’s forces scrambling to escape. However, early Tuesday the Russian President called a halt to the fighting. After a weekend of several Russian attacks by air in Gori, streets in the major Georgian city were deserted Monday. Russian President Dmitri Medvedev said Tuesday he was halting military operations in Georgia because they had accomplished their end, though explosions continued to rattle the now largely empy city of Gore. In a televised statement in Moscow, Medvedev said that after five days of operations “the aggressor has been punished” and largely driven from the two Russian-allied separatist provinces of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. More than 2,000 people are feared dead as a result of the fighting. As BET.com reported earlier, the fighting started when Georgia asserted its authority in S. Osettia.

The Ohio officer was acquitted by an all-White jury on Monday.
Two days after an all-White jury in Ohio acquitted a policeman who shot and killed an unarmed Black woman and wounded her infant son in front of her five other children, U.S. Justice Department officials say they might bring civil rights charges against the officer. The shooting, which took place in early January, drew national attention, as community activists and civil rights leaders, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, spoke out about the racial implications in the case. Lima Police Sgt. Joseph Chavalia, who fired the shot, is White; the victims, Tarika Wilson and her 13-month-old son, Sincere Wilson, are Black. Get more details at BET.com/News.

Jim D. Adkisson allegedly shot to death two people and seriously wounded five others. Knoxville , Tenn. , Police are trying to determine whether to charge a madman with a hate crime who busted into a church and blasted away, killing two people and leaving five others in serious or critical condition. People scurried under pews or ran from the church as 58-year-old Jim D. Adkisson began firing, witnesses said. But Greg McKendry, 60, who was killed in the melee, is being hailed as a hero because “he stood in front of the gunman and took the blast to protect the rest of us,” Barbara Kemper, a member of the Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church, told The Associated Press. Also killed was Linda Kreager, 61, died at the University of Tennessee Medical Centre a few hours after the shooting, a city spokesman told AP. Witnesses said that many of the 200 congregants, who had gathered at the church watch a play, pounced on Adkisson and detained him until the police arrived. Kemper told police that said that the alleged shooter shouted before he fired his shotgun. “It was hateful words. He was saying hateful things,” she said, refusing to repeat what the gunman said. Adkission’s motivation is unknown. The church, which promotes social progressive work and desegregation, among what many would consider liberal issues, has provided sanctuary for political refugees, fed the homeless and founded a chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, AP reports, citing the church Web site. The FBI is assisting with the investigation, in case it is deemed a hate crime, according to AP.  Watch the video below.