‘Kia Boys tried to kill me,’ mother says in viral Facebook rant
By Derrick Rose
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MILWAUKEE, Wisconsin (WISN) — Angry is an understatement.
What happened to LaPorche Barham Thursday morning set her off on a fiery Facebook Live rant about reckless drivers in Milwaukee.
Now, she’s getting praise for saying what many people are thinking.
“I’m telling y’all, right now, get your [expletive] kids,” Barham said to the camera in the 30 minute video, which, by the time this story was published, had 56,000 views.
Just before 10 am, Barham said she was pulling out of her driveway somewhere in the area of Marshall High School when she noticed a reckless driver swerving back and forth on her street more than a block away.
Cautious, Barham said she immediately pulled her car to the side. She thinks the reckless driver spotted her maneuver and decided to target her. She said the driver swung the car at her vehicle.
She said the person pulled off, but came back and targeted her vehicle again. She said she had to jump the curb to get onto someone else’s property to avoid getting hit. She said after the second encounter, the driver and passengers stopped, laughed and stared at her before pulling off again.
She is confident the people in the car are members of the ‘Kia Boys’, a group of juveniles and teens in Milwaukee who steal cars to simply take them on reckless joyrides. Some even post videos of the crime to social media.
The vehicles, or “stollies”, of choice for the groups are Kias and Hyundais, which have been stolen in Milwaukee at an exponential rate.
Barham’s encounter came one day after a violent crash in Milwaukee where police officers chased what was believed to be a stolen car. A woman who was working as a rideshare driver had the vehicle carjacked from her the previous day.
Barham said she’s had enough of the reckless driving epidemic this city has endured. In her video, she said she contemplated what she would have done had she been armed.
“That was a threat to me using a whole vehicle,” she said in the video, adding, “But I would have been a person that’s been wrong if I would have just ended up shooting or killing these kids. This [expletive] is not OK. It’s 10 o’clock in the morning! And they try to take my whole life with a vehicle!”
She put equal blame on the parents of the people committing the crime. She said they should be reporting their children to police because they likely know their kids are involved in the crimes.
“I can advocate for this community 1000 times, okay, do everything to put positive stuff into Milwaukee. For what? We can’t even come together to do what’s right: reporting your own children you know is around here doing stuff. Do something with these kids, man.”
In an interview via her Facebook account Thursday, Barham said the responses to her videos have been overwhelmingly positive, despite her colorful language. She even contemplated deleting the video.
“I was so mad at myself for just cussing and everything like that, you know, knowing that I’m a leader in this community, but I was just angry so I’m like, ‘You know, I’m gonna leave it out there,’ because I really meant everything that I said on there.”
She said the anger she felt was compounded by the fact this happened on her daughter’s 15th birthday and felt somewhat worse than when a gunman took the innocent life of her 18-year-old son, Maurice Grimes, in 2019.
She said she hopes the reckless drivers will think about the risks they are taking with their own young lives.
She fears they won’t.
“It hurts to bury your own child. It hurts as a parent it hurts to have to bury your child. I know a lot of them wouldn’t care. But parents and siblings; they have to go through a lot when we have to bury our children,” Barham said. “They don’t even care.”
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