From Youngster to Gangster: How Florida Boy Shot a Tourist : Violence: Antwan Brown says it was his first attempt to prey on visitors. His attorney calls the crime a search for status.

Antwan Brown was a pint-sized Miami purse snatcher, 14 years old and barely 100 pounds. What he lacked in size he made up in bravado, and when his victim--a middle-aged German tourist--resisted, he fired a single shot with a .38-caliber revolver.

“I don’t know why I did it,” Brown said in a recent interview. “It just kind of happened. I was trying to snatch that pocketbook. I took out the gun and shot her.”

The bullet ripped through the arm of the woman, Renate Morlack, and lodged in her spine, leaving her paralyzed. The shooting, which occurred Oct. 26, 1992, was one of the first of a series of attacks on European tourists that turned the international spotlight on South Florida and sparked a nationwide debate, still raging, over juvenile crime and guns.

In interviews with Brown, his friends, relatives, law enforcement officials, community leaders and others, a detailed portrait emerges of this incident, which became the crime of the year in Miami and a chilling symbol of the terror of life in the United States. Morlack, her family watching, was shot in the parking lot of a fast-food restaurant.

Brown was arrested four days later, after a $1,000 reward was offered and television broadcast a re-enactment of the crime. The person who called police may have learned of Brown’s involvement from Brown himself.

“He told everybody in school,” said his girlfriend, Malikata Hayes. “He wanted everybody to know he was bad.”

His lawyer, Larry Sparks, agreed. “I don’t think money was really the thing. In his corner of the world, he is a pretty little guy. I think he did it more for status, recognition.”

Brown pleaded guilty last May to attempted murder, attempted robbery and attempted burglary and was sentenced to 3 to 20 years. He is serving his sentence in the Hamilton Correctional Institute, a medium-security prison near the Georgia border.

“Man, I got a lot of time,” he said in a three-hour interview with Newsday in December.

“If someone would have shot my momma, then I’d say it ain’t enough time,” he said. “But since I received the sentence, I say it is too much time.

“Sometime I say I deserve this time. . . . Then sometimes I think, ‘Why’d they give me all this time?’ If I’d have shot somebody else, then they wouldn’t have gave me all this time. They did it because it was a tourist. . . . If a regular lady would have been out there and I’d have shot her, I bet I wouldn’t have caught that sentence.”

At another point, Brown, who is expected to serve nine years, said he sent Morlack a letter of apology.

Morlack refused requests for an interview. Prosecutors said she approved the plea bargains in the case.

Juvenile crime is sweeping the nation, perhaps nowhere as visibly as in Florida.

“Kids today are out of hand, very much,” said Antwan’s mother, Sandra Brown, 43. “I don’t know what happened to them. It’s like something came over the world and changed them to little devils.”

“Twan,” as she calls him, is her third son. The eldest, Charles, 24, is in the middle of a 7-year prison term for robbery. Dedric, 19, has been arrested once, but the charges were dropped. He is a high school graduate who recently tried to join the Army but was rejected because of a leg injury. He is unemployed today. Her youngest son, Javron, 12, comes home from school and hunkers down in front of the TV.

Sandra Brown has worked as a housekeeper at a nursing home for 16 years and takes home between $340 and $370 every two weeks. She pays $400 a month rent for a two-bedroom house that resembles a converted garage. She receives $245 a month in food stamps. Charles’ father was a high school friend. The father of the other three boys is Charles Stafford, a cab driver, who married her when Antwan was 10. He died in 1990 of complications from diabetes, and that’s when Antwan’s troubles started.

“My daddy wouldn’t let me do no crime,” Antwan Brown said. “He give me a beating. He was always telling me that he wanted me to be the best.”

Dade County Board of Education officials confirmed that Brown’s grades went from B’s to D’s and F’s after his father died.

“I just was hanging around with the wrong people,” he said. “I wanted to be down with the boys. I wanted to be trend (popular). They got all the females, they got all the girls.”

“The big change (was) when he started at Northwestern High School,” said his mother. “He started changing. The older boys he started hanging with would say if you are going to be in the in-crowd, you got to show the bullyness.”

Steven Harper, chief of the Dade County Public Defender’s Juvenile Division, says Brown is far from unique.

“The culture of violence is that without violence, they have no other power,” he said. “We face the fact that criminal behavior is the norm. . . . There is no long-term goal; there is just the next high point.”

Antwan’s first gun was a .22-caliber. “I bought it for $5 from a baser,” he said, using the slang for a crack addict. “Me and my friend shared it. Everyone else has got a gun, so we wanted a gun.”

A gun, neighborhood youths claim, is a necessary accessory at Friday night parties, big affairs with 50 to 60 teens congregating around a group of girls in a back yard, their disputes, fistfights and gunplay spilling out on the street.

“Man, you go to a party and people be shooting at you, you got to have a gun,” Antwan said. “Maybe you get shot. Maybe you shoot first.”

Sometime over the summer, Brown lent his pistol to a friend and never saw it again.

Brown’s girlfriend, Malikata, was his contact with law-abiding society. At 15, she is a B-student, hoping to get into college and later become a teacher or a singer.

“I used to tell him not to do it, not to commit crimes,” she said, sitting on the slab in front of her mother’s weatherworn wood-frame home.

She said he didn’t carry a gun when he was with her, carrying her book bag and holding her hand. They used to go to the movies and the Sizzler steakhouse on dates.

“I never thought he’d do anything more than stealing cars and purse snatching,” she said.

But Antwan’s life was different away from Malikata.

“I wanted to be a gangster,” Brown said, breaking into a grin that flashed the gold caps on his two incisors. “I just wanted to be like that. They got big car, big money, all the females. That’s what I wanted.”

On Oct. 19, Brown or one of his friends--their accounts differ--stole a car at a football field. In the glove compartment of the Oldsmobile was a .38-caliber revolver, fully loaded.

A week later, Brown and three of his friends went out “Z-ing”--the street term for cruising the streets in a stolen vehicle, looking for a rental car filled with tourists. Brown said he was looking to graduate from random purse snatchings.

Brown claimed that this was his first night Z-ing. He said it took nearly an hour before they spotted what they were looking for, a rental car on 31st Street in the McDonald’s parking lot.

“We saw this car and it looked new,” Brown said. “I walked up to it and saw a map on the front seat and we knew it was tourists.”

They peeked through the window and saw Morlack, her husband and two teen-age children getting ready to order. They figured they had some time. They bought gas and returned to the McDonald’s.

“We waited for them . . . and talked about it,” Brown said. “I said I would do it, I knew how to do it because I did it before.”

The Morlacks returned to their car and were getting in when Brown and one of the other boys ran across the street. “We were pulling,” he said, recalling how he grabbed the purse strap. “The (car) door was open and we were pulling. They pulled off and the door, I knew the door probably was going to knock me down, so I shot her.”

Police said Gunther Morlack had slammed the gear shift downward, into reverse, trying desperately to escape. He apparently didn’t see a gun.

“I didn’t know if I hit her,” Brown said. “I ran. I kept it (the gun) in my hand. I said, ‘Go, go, take me home.’ They just said, ‘What happened?’ I just said, ‘Take me home, take me home, take me home.’ ”

Brown said he walked past his mother and went right to his room. He put the gun in the back of his closet and got into his bed.

“I just laid there thinking, ‘Why I shot her, man, why I shot her.’ And I hoped maybe I hadn’t shot nobody, maybe I missed, I was just thinking everything,” Brown said.

He told his brother, Dedric, about the incident that night. “He said, ‘Hey, man, you messed up.’ And then he say, ‘Tell Momma right away.’ I say, ‘I ain’t going to tell,’ because I know she was going to tell the police.”

He went to school the next morning and started talking. He told a couple of friends and he told his girlfriend, Malikata.

“I didn’t believe him,” she said.