Robert Garnett will tonight join his underage cousins in jail. While investigating the Jimbo Chen robbery, police raided a house on Curl Thompson Street, in the Jane Usher Boulevard area, where they found a loaded 12 gauge sawed off shotgun stashed inside a gas range stove. In the house at the time were a 17 and a 16 year old along with 18-year-old Lindon Castillo, 20 year old Kiwani March, 18 year old Walter Longsworth, and Keith Middleton. The mother of the two minors is Lavern Garnett. She says her she knows her sons are innocent because there was no gun in her house.
Lavern Garnett, Mother of Accused
"I don't know anything about that because before I left my house, I searched everywhere. I was cleaning up my whole house, cleaning my stove and everything, because I know that I would have stayed at my mom and I did not come back in. So I made sure that I cleaned out everywhere that was possible. So what I did was leave one of my son, he is a 16 year old, a minor, in my house.
I went to my mom and came back and afterwards I sent my little boy, the next one, to keep his brother company. When he reached home, that was when I got a call from one of my neighbors to tell me that police are harassing my sons in the house. They beat them up and after that they ransacked up the whole house. And after they done ransack up everything, they took the boys to the station. I have never seen a gun before. I have only seen guns on TV and maybe in magazines or whatsoever. I don't know where a gun could have come from."
Keith Swift,
Do you know your sons to have guns?
Lavern Garnett,
"No, I don't know them to have guns or nothing like that. I know they have their friends and sometimes they hang out in front of the yard and thing but not with guns. I will not uphold a in my house because I have nine children from a three year old to straight up. And so I will not uphold a gun in my house, especially a loaded gun like the one they said my son had because I don't play so."
Bail was granted to Lavern's sons but they were unable to meet today's deadline. Her sons will be released tomorrow. Bail was also granted to Castillo and March. Lavern Garnett is outraged that her 17-year-old son was charged as an adult. Police listed Allan Phillips as 19.
