A former Fayette County High School student who last week admitted to being a member of the Crips gang also had recruited a middle school student into the gang, said Fayette County District Attorney Scott Ballard.

Andre Scott, 18, was sentenced last week to four years in prison for participating in criminal gang activity.

Ballard said Scott had recruited a student at Fayette County Middle School to join the Crips gang. That student was “beaten in” to the gang, meaning he was beaten up without being able to defend himself for a specified period of time.

Scott said he didn’t think the beat-in lasted for more than a minute.

“He was recruiting a middle school student and that’s just not something we’re going to tolerate,” Ballard said.

During the brief trial prosecutors played a video that was posted on Scott’s MySpace webpage which showed Scott and others in a bedroom waving a gun around and pointing it at one another. A second video on the page was of the fight that Scott orchestrated in a restroom at Fayette County High School, Ballard said.

Ballard said it was evident that Scott orchestrated the fight because when the fighting stopped briefly, he told the participants to begin fighting again.

The fight was between a Crips member who had lost his “rank” in the gang because a girl tore up his bandanna on a school bus.

Bandannas are traditionally used by gangs as an identifying symbol, and they call them “flags.”

Another Fayette County student who was a recruiter for the Bloods gang and participated in the fight got four years to serve in a youth detention center, Ballard said.

Unlike Scott, who can get out on parole before his full sentence is served, the juvenile will not be able to get out early because there is no parole mechanism in juvenile court.

Another student who participated in the bathroom fight was sentenced to two years in juvenile detention, Ballard said.

Ballard said one of the juveniles prosecuted in the case received a death threat from the Southside Mafia, a gang reputed to have taken hold in Clayton County. There were reasons to take the death threat seriously, Ballard noted.

Ballard noted that his office has taken criticism for dropping charges against the only white teenager seen in the video of the bathroom fight. That student was wearing red, an initial sign of being in the Bloods’ gang, and was using his cellphone in the bathroom, Ballard said.

But it turned out that student was actually on the phone with his mother, a fact confirmed by checking his cellphone records, Ballard said.

Ballard said one thing that handcuffs his office from prosecuting gang cases is the lack of a way to protect witnesses. Because gangs often threaten harm to convince witnesses not to testify, it can hurt prosecution of the gang members because testimony is often needed to prove the defendant is in a gang, Ballard said.

During the trial, Scott’s attorney noted how he completed high school at another school despite the pending criminal case. It was also noted that Scott is attending the Atlanta Art Institute and another school to further his education while holding two jobs.

Defense attorney Rodney Williams said he has represented a number of gang members in court cases, but his experience was if Scott was a real gang member he wouldn’t have bothered to finish high school.

Judge Paschal A. English asked Scott several questions, including how many “Crips” gang members there are in Fayette County. Scott said he thought there were seven or eight.

Scott said he didn’t orchestrate the fight to take place at FCHS but said he was in the bathroom “to watch the fight.”

When asked how to keep gangs out of Fayette County, Scott replied that making sure kids get an education is important so they can learn to make the right decisions.

Scott’s father is imprisoned in California and his mother moved him away from the state when he was 8 in an effort to escape gangs, a defense attorney told the court.

“Some of this has been around him since he’s been growing up,” Williams said, referring to the gang lifestyle.

Williams said Scott used the Internet to download the “gang bibles” he was accused of distributing to two students.

No witnesses were called for the prosecution during the trial as Scott’s defense attorneys stipulated to many facts in the case.

In return for those stipulations, prosecutors agreed to drop three of the four charges against Scott: two for participating in a criminal street gang and one for disrupting a public school. Of those charges, one was for beating up another youth as a gang initiation and the other was for organizing the gang.