BY EMILY MIBACH
Daily Post Staff Writer
An East Palo Alto man may be convicted of his third strike for being in a music video where he was seen holding guns, a prosecutor said yesterday.
Dellory Crooks Jr., 27, and four other members of the Da Vill gang participated in a music video for a rap Crooks wrote, according to San Mateo County District Attorney Steve Wagstaffe.
According to Wagstaffe, when Crooks was in court on Wednesday he said: “I’m a three striker over a music video?”
But the music video isn’t what the issue is, Wagstaffe said.
It is the fact that Crooks and the other four gang members are convicted felons and they were handling guns in the video, Wagstaffe said. It is illegal for felons to possess or handle guns.
Wagstaffe said his office first became aware of the music video in early 2015 while investigating what’s known as the Operation Sunny Day case. In that case, a criminal grand jury indicted 16 reputed gang members for murder and other crimes.
But the DA’s investigators put the video on the back burner, because none of the people in the video were among the 16 gang members that were under the scrutiny of prosecutors, Wagstaffe said.
Another tricky part of the case was determining whether the guns were real or not, Wagstaffe said. But recently, while speaking with a witness involved in both the Sunny Day case and the mu sic video, the DA’s investigators found out that in fact real guns were used, Wagstaffe said.
The others from the music video have not been arraigned by Wagstaffe’s office and will likely be in court today or sometime in the near future, the DA said. Crooks is in jail on $600,000 bail and will be in court on Oct. 30.
