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Brian Steel, attorney for Young Thug, posed a question to Trontavious “Tick” Stephens, a confessed co-founder of the YSL street gang, about his youth on the streets of Cleveland Avenue as teenagers together.

“Have you ever seen someone work harder to become something?” Steel asked.

“I’d never seen anyone try to become anything before,” Tick replied.

After spending the last three days in court somehow tap dancing and sitting still at the same time, it was a moment of clarity. Many — most — people spend their lives seeking uplift. Stephens comes from a kind of poverty where the first aspiration is to stay one step ahead of imminent catastrophe. Self-actualization is for people with money.

Prosecutors say Tick is one of the founders of the Young Slime Life gang. And so did Tick, today, on the stand, in the third day of Adrian Love’s grilling.

As Tick answered questions affirmatively about the gang membership of people charged in the case – Derontae Bebee, Antonio Sledge, Jimmy Winfrey and others – Young Thug took off his yellow “Sp5der” jacket and began to look around the courtroom, contained and attention.

It would be hard for Stephens to deny a personal association when Young Thug name checked him in a song. Assistant district attorney Love played a short clip of Tick and other accused gang members singing along to “Eww.” The lyrics talk about how they would “wipe a ni**as nose” – which prosecutors say is gang slang for killing someone. Tick is in the song.

I ain't doin' any features unless you give me your b--ch

I'ma f--k for the cash then she gettin' robbed by Tick

Notably, Tick has done time for robbery.

But Love has been frustrated by Tick’s evasiveness and feigned ignorance – and it is plainly and obviously feigned in some cases – under questioning. Stephens had been unwilling to discuss his testimony with prosecutors ahead of the trial, while meeting with defense counsel.

The street commentariat has been describing Tick’s testimony so far as a game, a carefully-crafted display of simple ignorance and mild confusion, trying to bat away direct questions about his activities in the YSL gang and how it works. His answers have been indirect and circuitous. Until today.

Stephens named himself, Jeffery Williams – Young Thug – and Walter Murphy, who is sitting in a prison cell in Georgia after taking a plea deal in this case to serve 10 years, and to testify about it when called.

Stephens has a better deal: eight years on probation. But both men are among a dozen others who are similarly required to testify, and specifically to identify YSL as a gang, himself as a member of that gang, and that he committed crimes as a YSL gang member.

Tick looks about as happy as Johnny Knoxville at an insurance convention. Tick can’t just take the fifth or lie directly because it violates his plea deal. But if he speaks plainly about his activities and associations, he will return to the street as a marked man – a snitch – and Tick doesn’t have the money or the relationships to put distance between himself and the street. It’s raining anvils in the parking lot and he can’t find his car keys.

Steel laid Stephens’ difficult situation bare in his cross examination. The court sent Stephens to the filthy hellhole that is the Fulton County Jail, where people were getting killed, to await a trial which would have resulted in a 20-year sentence if convicted. His grandmother scraped up enough money to hire a lawyer for a few weeks, but he didn’t have enough money to sustain a private attorney through a year-long trial, never mind what this has become.  

This conundrum on the stand has taken the form of long pauses and answers that often fail to address the question asked, wriggling for enough room in his answers to create plausible deniability without the prosecutor having enough to declare him in violation of the deal.

One exchange is illustrative.

Love began showing pictures of Tick and other defendants taken from Instagram. In them, people are throwing signs, wearing red clothes. Tick has a tattoo of a five-pointed star, tinted red, with a capital B in the middle.

Love asked Tick what the B meant. “Can I explain?” he asked, repeatedly. He then said that the B meant “boss” and was a reference to gambling that he got as a prison tattoo while in juvenile detention. “It’s got dice in the middle of it. It’s about gambling.”

Figure skating on thin ice.

She then showed a 40-second video clip with himself and Young Thug, in which Young Thug throws up a “B” and gun signs. The prosecutor tried to link the signs he and Williams made to those commonly used to identify members of Sex Money Murder. Guns in the air are a common reference to Peter “Pistol Pete” Rollock, the legendary found of the SMM gang.

Love asked Tick about it, but he wouldn’t bite.

“Does the gun stand for Pistol Pete?” Love asked. “Not my two guns,” Stephens replied. “I was making a lot of hand gestures.

Rather than describe the BFL signs he made with his hands in the video as Bloods For Life, Tick said it stood for “bank first and last.”

It’s this sort of answer that makes people watching roll their eyes.

The problem for Tick, and for the defense, is that much of his testimony is about as believable as the claim by Williams’ attorney Brian Steel that “Thug” stands for “Truly Humble Under God” and YSL came from the Yves Saint Laurent label. Tick looks like he’s defending the gang and willing to say ridiculous things to do so. Every time he plays dumb, it reinforces the idea that YSL as a gang retains the power to intimidate.

Almost everyone connected with YSL has had a deeply troubled childhood, and Trontavious Stephens is no exception. Under cross examination by Brian Steel, Tick revealed that his mother died when he was a baby and his father was largely absent, leaving him to be raised by his grandmother, aunt and the streets.

Steel’s cross examination sought to humanize the relationship between Tick and Young Thug, and to highlight just how screwed Tick was without a deal.

Steel asked him about what happened to him when the Jonesboro South housing project shut down, and Williams moved to Cleveland Avenue. “When Jeffrey was living in the Cleveland Avenue area with family members, were there times they didn’t have enough food?” Steel asked. Yeah, Tick, answered.

“Did Jeffrey every share his last dollar with you to split food?” Steel asked.

“McDonald’s had a $3 meal.,” Stephens replied. “We found $3. We put together $3 to get that meal.”

Tick was first arrested when he was 11, after causing an explosion in a 6th grade science class, he testified. He was later sent to a group home. Two years later, police arrested him for stealing laptops from school and for firing a gun at a party, spending another year in juvey.

Over the last three days of testimony, Love teased bits of his juvenile gang history out of him, asking him to describe his days as a member of Raised on Cleveland, the ROC Crew. "I was trying to find my adult self," he said.

Tick haltingly described how ROC sublimated into the street gang 30 Deep as ROC Crew members – including himself – went to prison on various arrests, and then again how they rebranded as YSL because they needed to “change their image.”

Stephens has been convicted of dealing drugs, being a felon in possession of a firearm and in 2013 pulling a gun on a driver in a carjacking. He is obligated under the terms of the deal to say that he committed this crime as part of the gang. "It was alleged that ROC crew committed crimes ... I had a criminal record at the time, so yes." He denies ever committing a crime with the gang. In 2015, Stephens was arrested for selling drugs, but denies doing so as a member of the gang.

“I’m being honest the whole time,” Stephens said. “A lot of the things that are being said, I’m doing the best to answer your questions. … I don’t feel like telling the truth should make you a good or a bad person.”

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