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Girl, interrupted: almost two years after brutally stabbing a teenage gangbanger, Ashley Benton is determined to reclaim her life. But her problems are not over yet.

Article Excerpt
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Ashley Benton, Houston's most famous teenage killer, asks that we not take her photograph. It is February, and since her trial ended last summer, she has let her hair grow longer, and she has lost some weight. In a few weeks, her brace s will come off. "I want people to forget the old Ashley," she tells me, and then she sighs. "Maybe I'll be able to walk down the street again and not have to worry about someone realizing who I am."

Maybe, but it's not likely. On a sunny afternoon in June 2006, twenty to thirty teenagers from two of the city's Hispanic street gangs--MS-13 and Crazy Crew--confronted one another in Ervan Chew Park, in the Montrose area of Houston. Some of them were carrying bats, golf clubs, and tire irons. One reportedly had a machete. When the melee was over, a fifteen-year-old member of MS-13, Gabriel Granillo, lay near a basketball court, dead from a stab wound. The next day, police detectives announced that they had arrested his killer. It was Ashley, who was then sixteen. She had come to the fight, said the detectives, carrying a double-bladed knife with serrated edges, which she had plunged straight into Granillo's heart.

That year, there had been several stories in the media about Houston's growing gang problems, but this one sent shock waves through the city. In part, what surprised residents was that the fight had taken place not in the gang-ridden apartment complexes of southwest Houston but in the city's center, midway between the Galleria and downtown. Yet what was re ally startling was that Ashley was a beautiful Anglo girl, with thick brown hair, full lips, and glowing amber eyes; newspaper accounts described her as an Angelina Jolie look-alike. She lived with her mother, a talented jazz singer who performed at local nightclubs and at society parties, in a four-plex not far from Ervan Chew Park. Until the confrontation, she had never had a serious brush with the law. Why, just about everyone wanted to know, would such a girl be involved...

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