In the 1997 cult classic Paul Verhoeven film Starship Troopers, Johnny Rico, played by Casper Van Dien, who had kept some of his personal life private, is asked why he joined the Mobile Infantry, but refuses to answer. Then, in the famous shower scene, Dizzy Flores, played by Dina Meyer, who knew Mr Rico at home in Buenos Ares, is asked, and she responds that “He’s here because of a girl.”
And so it is that Zaakir McClendon is now looking at spending the rest of his miserable life in prison because of a girl. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:
The sixth, long-sought suspect in the Roxborough High shooting is finally in custody, police say
Zaakir McClendon was charged in the shooting that killed Nicolas Elizalde and wounded four other teens outside Roxborough High School.
by Ellie Rushing | Friday, August 15, 2025 | 11:45 AM EDT | Updated: 2:33 PM EDT
The sixth and final person involved in the Roxborough High School shooting that killed Nicolas Elizalde and wounded four other teens is in custody, police said — a significant development in a case that law enforcement has spent the last three years working to fully solve.
Zaakir McClendon, 20 — who is already jailed for a separate, unrelated killing of another teen — was charged Friday with murder, aggravated assault, and related crimes after police said new forensic and cell phone evidence placed him at the scene of the September 2022 shooting outside of the high school.
Elizalde, 14, and other members of Roxborough High’s junior varsity football team were walking to the locker room after an afternoon scrimmage when five young men with guns jumped out of a car and fired more than 60 shots toward the group. The gunmen, police said, appeared to be targeting a player on one of the teams, or a teen who was walking past them.
Naturally, I had to use the mugshot of young Mr McClendon, tweeted by Steve Keeley, because the newspaper declined to publish it. The neck tattoo means automatically guilty. It’s a bit hard to read, but it appears to be “NIMB” or “NLMB”, the first of which could possibly be a bad abbreviation for “numbskull.”
Mr McClendon would seem to not be a very nice guy. Mr Keeley also tweeted:
McClendon was arrested July 9th & charged with shooting & killing 16 year old Nafis Betrand-Hill on Montgomery Avenue on April 13th. @philadao @DA_LarryKrasner has now charged McClendon with shooting & killing two Philadelphia teenagers in the past three years.
Young Mr Elizalde was killed on Tuesday, September 27, 2002, just short of three years ago, which means that now-20-year-old Mr McClendon was a minor at the time he was involved in the mass shooting. That didn’t stop Troy Fletcher, who was 15 at the time, from being sentenced to 25 to 50 years in prison, after Common Pleas Court Judge Barbara McDermott, who said that if he were an adult she’d have sentenced him to 40 to 80 years, listened to pleas for mercy and this idiocy:
Kempis Songster, who does restorative justice work with the Philadelphia District Attorney’s Office, spoke of Fletcher’s potential for redemption.
Songster said that he, too, had shot and killed someone at 15, and that if not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision to overturn mandatory juvenile life sentences, he would still be in prison. Now, he is a father and husband, and works to heal families affected by crime — work he said he sees in Fletcher’s future.
“Restorative justice”? Perhaps someone smarter than me can tell me how you can “restore” someone who is stone-cold graveyard dead to life.
Zyheid Jones, who also pled guilty to the crime, along with the murder of Tahmir Jones, was sentenced to 30 to 60 years by the same Judge McDermott, after yet another sob story in court. Those sob stories were not enough for Messrs Fletcher and Jones to name the sixth member of the mass shooting, so, despite their apologies and pleas for mercy, the gang “stop snitchin'” culture was stronger than their remorse.
The three remaining (alleged) killers are already under arrest and expected to go on trial this fall. Six teenagers and young twenty-somethings, going to prison for decades, due to the utter stupidity of gang culture in the City of Brotherly Love.
But the kicker, in the original story cited, was:
Those phone records, sources said, revealed for the first time a potential motive in the Roxborough High shooting. Messages between McClendon and others involved showed there was a conflict between one of the shooter’s friends, a girl, and a member of one of the football teams at the scrimmage, the sources said.
Young Mr Elizalde wasn’t even the target in the Roxborough High shooting. We were not told if the target was one of the wounded, but he survived the shooting, while an innocent bystander has now been pushing up daisies for the last three years. Depending upon the trials of the four who have not yet pleaded guilty, there could be six young men males spending decades in prison for killing someone who wasn’t even their target.
The four remaining suspects should, if guilty — they have not yet been convicted — never see the outside of prison again. If guilty, they should spend the rest of their miserable lives shuffling around the grounds of the worst prison the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania has. Prison will not somehow ‘reform’ them, but only make them worse people, people who should never be allowed to menace civilized society again.