OAKLAND — It was supposed to be just another workday for Willie Bernstine IV, a father of two who showed up early last New Year’s Eve to his job at a local cleaning equipment business.
But two suspected North Richmond gang members had other ideas. As Bernstine approached his job at Auto-Chlor near Poplar and 14th streets, a man named Joseph Westbrook allegedly closed in, firing an AR pistol and a second handgun at Bernstine near the front of the business, according to police.
Westbrook, a 26-year-old Santa Clara resident, has long been North Richmond gang known as the Swerve Team, a group that was notoriously the target of a 2017 investigation involving three murders and 16 shootings around the East Bay. Westbrook is now in custody facing charges of murder with an enhancement for lying in wait, making him eligible for life without parole if convicted, according to court records.
Oakland police have said that the motive for Bernstine’s Dec. 31, 2024 homicide have to do with old conflicts involving groups in North Richmond and central Richmond, though Bernstine — a father of two babies — wasn’t actively involved in crime, authorities said.
Westbrook’s suspected driver, who has not yet been arrested or charged, was also a Swerve Team member whose name has come up in other homicide cases, authorities said. In court filings, prosecutors say that he and Westbrook targeted Bernstine and showed up to his job because they believed he would be there.
In October 2014, Westbrook — then just a teenager — was charged as an adult with attempted murder and gang enhancements for allegedly working with another Swerve Team member to shoot at four different people during a drive-by, court records show. He eventually pleaded no contest to assault with a firearm.
In that case, police testified that Westbrook was a Swerve Team member who’d fought alongside others in the gang at a youth boys’ ranch. After the shooting, an officer searched Westbrook’s car and found a New York Yankees cap, a common symbol among North Richmond residents who take it to mean “Young Narfer,” referencing the “Narf” slang term for the North Richmond.
The Swerve Team developed as an offshoot of an older North Richmond gang known as the Project Trojans. Its members originally called themselves “Trojans in Training,” but changed the gang’s name after the 2011 murder victim Ervin Colley Jr., who was shot and killed in North Richmond, prompting his friends to say they would “swerve for Erv.”
In 2017, a group of suspected Swerve Team members were rounded up in a case involving 16 shootings, three homicides, and several burglaries and home invasion robberies, including the nonfatal shooting of an Orinda school board member during a purse snatching.
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