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BY SCOTT SHIFREL, KERRY BURKE and JONATHAN LEMIRE
DAILY NEWS STAFF WRITERS
Updated Friday, May 23rd 2008, 12:44 AM
DeCrescenzo for News Alon Sherman at home in Brooklyn.


Two black teens were arrested Thursday in the beating of a young Jewish man that raised racial tensions in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
Namor Clarke, 17, and Basean Parker, 14, will be charged as adults for last Friday's assault on 16-year-old Alon Sherman, who was pummeled while riding his bicycle to buy baby formula for his infant brother, officials said.
Clarke and Parker took Sherman's wallet, cell phone and bicycle, cops said. Investigators deemed the assault a "crime of opportunity" that was not racially motivated, a law enforcement source said.
Although the NYPD didn't classify the attack as a bias crime, it strained race relations in Crown Heights and stirred more than 200 members of the neighborhood's Orthodox Jewish community to march on the 71st Precinct stationhouse last week.
"Police bend over backward to avoid the bias label," said Assemblyman Dov Hikind (D-Brooklyn), who attended a peace forum for Crown Heights' black and Jewish leaders on Thursday. "I'm disappointed to say the least."
Sherman suffered a broken jaw in the assault, which came nearly a month after Andrew Charles, the 20-year-old black son of a police officer, was assaulted, reportedly by a member of a Hasidic anti-crime patrol.
Clarke and Parker were charged with robbery. The stony-faced teens, both wearing hoodies, said nothing as they were led out of the 71st Precinct stationhouse to Central Booking last night.
Brooklyn District Attorney Charles Hynes' decision to try them as adults was a nod to the political pressure surrounding the two incidents, a source close to the investigation said.
"Catching these two kids takes a lot of the pressure off," said the source. "It's a low-level assault and a bike theft, but you would never know that from the relief" it brought cops and prosecutors.
But Jalen Parker, 13, insisted his older brother did nothing wrong and shouldn't be prosecuted as an adult.
"He was there, but he didn't hit the kid," said Jalen outside his Crown Heights home. "He's young and he's a good person. He just got himself at the wrong place at the wrong time."
Jalen added that his brother, an eighth-grader at Intermediate School 246, and Clarke weren't good friends, saying, "He just knows him from around the neighborhood."
An employee at the Catholic Guardian Society group home in Fort Greene where Clarke lives said the teen "isn't a bad kid. He's like any another teenager. He's here because he's had family troubles like all our kids."
Clarke - who has a prior arrest for robbery - and Parker were caught after police tracked Sherman's stolen cell phone to a delivery man who bought it from the teens, a law enforcement source said. The delivery man then led police to the suspects.
"I feel great about [the arrest]," said Sherman, recuperating at his family's home on Thursday. "It was wrong and disgusting what they did, [and] if they were charged as kids, they'd get out and do it again."

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_c..._on_jewis.html

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