Yes, I know: I concentrate too much on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia, and while this story is from there, it could have been just as true in St Louis or Chicago or New Orleans or any of our major cities.
Looking down 38th and Wallace Streets, using images from Google Maps taken in July of last year, the neighborhood doesn’t look like one of the worst in the City of Brotherly Love. Oh, it’s certainly not Rittenhouse Square or Chestnut Hill, but the rowhouses aren’t falling-down dilapidated, and the streets at least look on the clean side.
Within (long) walking distance of the University of Pennsylvania, it is not in the Philadelphia Badlands, at least as such things are defined, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t become infected and infested with some of the same terrible culture that can be seen too often in Philly.
Teens in West Philly went from brothers to enemies. A trial offered a window inside the lesser-known feud.
Authorities believe the feud between the Young Bag Chasers, or YBC, and the young men from 38th and Wallace Streets, began after one teen spit on another’s sister.
by Ellie Rushing | Friday, July 25, 2025 | 5:00 AM EDT
The boys were all friends, brothers even, before they started shooting one another.
They spent their days in the early to mid-2010s as most kids from the Bottom in West Philadelphia did: Riding bikes, playing basketball, getting into fights on the playground.
They started calling themselves the “Get Chicken Gang,” and neighborhood police said they’d soon see the name across their social media profiles: GCG.
But immature disagreements ultimately divided them and led to the creation of a new collection of street groups — and enemies — in the neighborhood. A yearslong, bloody gang feud followed that police said blanketed the area in shootings during the pandemic.
I have previously mocked the newspaper over its story telling us that there are no gangs in the city, just “cliques of young men affiliated with certain neighborhoods and families,” who sometimes had “beefs” with other cliques, and that, for a while, reporting in the newspaper used some pretty stilted language to avoid using the description “gang”, but reporter Ellie Rushing seems to have gotten over that at least somewhat.
A trial this month for the 2021 murder of 22-year-old Joseph Johnson offered rare insight into how authorities believe one of those lesser-known feuds began and ultimately spiraled: one between the Young Bag Chasers, or YBC, and the young men from 38th and Wallace Streets.
The case against Walter Kegler, the 38th Street member accused of killing Johnson, a YBC affiliate, over a perceived slight, came together at the height of the city’s gun violence crisis and in a resource-depleted neighborhood where dozens of young men were shooting one another in wars driven, in part, by the rise of drill rap music and the use of social media.
“(T)he young men from 38th and Wallace Streets”? I read all of Miss Rushing’s article, and unless I missed it, she never named them as a gang. Perhaps they are less organized? The article noted that Mr Kegler said that 38th and Wallace was no gang.
Just ‘cus you’re from somewhere and have friends doesn’t mean you’re a gang.
Of course, young Mr Wallace was testifying in his own defense, doing what he could to avoid conviction, so it isn’t as though you can trust a word he said. In the end, the jury convicted him of first-degree murder, and he received the mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, plus 20 t0 40 years for another, this time non-fatal, shooting in University City.
As the sentence was read down, Kegler was mostly calm. Stoic.
But once he was walked out of the courtroom, taken by sheriffs into the holding cell out of public view, he wailed.
Miss Rushing did a good job detailing not only what happened in this murder, but telling Inquirer readers about the stupidity of it all, and how the neighborhood culture led to the kinds of actions and decisions these “young men” took. If you have a subscription, or haven’t accessed any Inquirer articles in a bit, you should click on the link and read it.
Will the members of YBC and the 38th and Wallace ‘not a gang’ gang read about or hear about Mr Kegler wailing as he realized that he was going to spend the rest of his miserable life behind bars? Will they realize that continuing in their lifestyle and culture will eventually lead to themselves suffering Mr Kegler’s fate . . . or that of Joseph Johnson? It’s easy to be all strong and brave and proud, when you’re not looking a life sentence dead in the eye.
One final note. We have frequently criticized the newspaper for refusing to publish photographs of criminals, assigning the responsibility for that to Publisher and Chief Executive Officer Elizabeth “Lisa” Hughes and her determination that the newspaper be an “antiracist news organization,” but for Miss Rushing’s report, photos of Mr Kegler, screen captured at the left, were published. The Sacramento Bee gave as part of its reasoning to cease publishing mugshots as the possibility that an accused criminal might be acquitted, but the publication of the mugshots “publication can have a permanent damaging effect on individuals and communities.” That continued to become the larger McClatchy Mugshot Policy.
But, at least for Mr Kegler, who will spend the rest of his miserable life in prison, there’s really no further harm that can be done to his reputation and him.
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