Streator Must Confront the Culture Feeding This Violence

When news broke that 21-year-old Luis Y. Urena had been arrested in Missouri and charged with home invasion and aggravated battery with a firearm—stemming from a shooting that left a Streator woman fighting for her life—the reaction from many locals wasn’t shock. It was grim resignation. “Saw this coming,” they said. “All you have to do is look at his Facebook.”

And indeed, you didn’t need to be a detective. Photos of Urena posing with guns, rapping about street violence, and flaunting the aesthetics of a criminal lifestyle have been publicly visible for years. His affiliations with the so-called “NGB Crew” (an acronym that appears in local graffiti and music posts) are no secret. What’s unclear is whether anyone around him ever tried to intervene—or if they just hit “like” on his posts and moved on.

It’s time to stop pretending this is normal.

It is heartbreaking to see young men in our city—our neighbors, classmates, and kids—slipping into a self-destructive subculture that equates violence with status and drug dealing with ambition. That culture isn't born in a vacuum. It’s curated and celebrated online. It’s blasted from car speakers. And when those glorified lyrics talk about how hard life is in a place like Streator, they somehow always leave out the part about how much harder they’re making it for the rest of us.

Here’s the uncomfortable truth: The people selling fentanyl aren’t Robin Hood. They’re not “doing what they have to do to survive.” They are enriching themselves off the addictions and despair of our community—off the very people they grew up with. There’s no pride in that. No struggle worth celebrating. Just sadness, loss, and trauma that gets passed on to the next family, the next kid, the next funeral.

This town has seen its share of hard times. The factories closed. The mines shut down. We get it. But back then, people still had pride in hard work, in helping each other out, in building something to be proud of. Compare that to now—where a few Instagram likes on a gun pic are somehow enough to justify becoming a predator in your own neighborhood.

We have to say something. When someone in your life starts walking down that path—glorifying violence, joking about murder, treating drug dealing like entrepreneurship—it’s time to stop laughing it off. It’s time to stop excusing it. Because eventually, the behavior follows the bravado. And someone always ends up hurt.

This isn’t about one person or one crew. It’s about a culture that has taken root in too many places—here in Streator included—and which we’ve tolerated for too long. Whether “NGB” wants to be a real gang or just a clique of wannabe SoundCloud stars is irrelevant if the violence is real.

The victim in this case was a young woman. A daughter. Maybe a mother. Maybe someone just trying to sleep in her own home. And now her life is changed forever—because someone thought they were living out the lyrics of their latest mixtape.

We need to do better. All of us.

If you see this behavior—call it out. If you know someone caught up in this culture—talk to them. If you’re one of the people glorifying it—ask yourself what legacy you’re building. Is it fear? Is it pain? Is it a name in the paper next to “charged with attempted murder”?

We’re not just building or breaking a city with buildings and budgets. We’re building it every day with how we treat each other, what we tolerate, and what we celebrate. It’s time we stopped celebrating this.