Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 20, 1991                   TAG: 9103200389
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-1   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: DON PHILLIPS/ THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: DETROIT                                LENGTH: Medium

SOLDIER SURVIVED WAR TO DIE ON CITY STREET

But in the past few years, Conley has become a street of crack, crime and occasional bursts of gunfire. And at 2:15 a.m. Monday, the bullets killed Army Spec. Anthony Riggs, something that all of Iraq's Scud missiles could not do during his seven months with a Patriot missile battery in Saudi Arabia.

Riggs, 22, was putting the last load into a rental truck; he was moving his wife and 3-year-old daughter to a new apartment from the home of an aunt and a grandmother on Conley Street, where they had been awaiting his return from the Persian Gulf. Witnesses heard five rapid shots, and the sounds of a car screeching down the street. Riggs' car was stolen. His wife Toni found him dying in a gutter.

Ironically, letters from Riggs in Saudia Arabia began arriving within hours of his death.

"There's no way I'm going to die in this rotten country," he wrote his aunt, Marjorie Cato. "With the Lord's grace and his guidance, I'll walk American soil once again."

To his mother, he wrote, "We did nice in the war, don't you think? I'm going to come home and go to the School [his old high school] and I'm going to tell them [ROTC] about it. They should get a kick out of it, Mom."

Police have no suspects in his death.

Detroit, which is used to murders, was shocked by this one. Riggs' story was splashed across the front of the newspapers, and led every television newscast. Riggs's death became a symbol for the ills of Detroit.

His death was a tragic reminder of President Bush's words recently when he announced a new crime bill: "Our veterans deserve to come home to an America where it is safe to walk the streets."

Riggs' mother said her son's main passions were his wife and children and the military, where he hoped to make a career. "He was a family man and he loved his family," said Lessie Riggs by telephone from her home in Las Vegas.

Riggs was born in Las Vegas, and the family moved there again when their Los Angeles neighborhood began to deteriorate.

"At first, it was a nice neighborhood," said his mother. "Drugs kind of took over."

The same could be said of Conley Street.

"It just got this bad in the last three years," said Paulette Eubanks, next-door neighbor to the home where Riggs' family had been staying. She said two of the 20-plus houses in the 17000 block of Conley Street are crack houses.

Detroit Mayor Coleman Young bristles at criticism of his city, and its citizens complain that they are unfairly singled out for problems that are common to all big cities.

But the Riggs killing has struck a different chord.

"You knew it in your heart," said Detroit Free Press columnist Susan Watson in a front-page column Tuesday. "We may have won the war half a world away, but we are losing the one on the home front, the battle where the enemy often turns out to be that little neighborhood kid who grew up just down the street.

"You knew it would happen because you knew that after all these years, after all these senseless deaths, after all these funerals and all these tears, we still haven't summoned the will to stop these senseless killings."

Robert Trojanowicz, director of the Michigan State School of Criminology, agreed. "Where's the political will to turn it around?" he said. President Bush's crime program is "a well-intentioned attempt," he said. "But it puts the resources at the back end." Until someone deals with the root causes of poverty and hopelessness, nothing will work, he said.

That is easier said than done in Detroit, where white flight has left the city a mostly poor black island in a sea of mostly white affluent suburbia.

While the political wrangles continue, Detroit loses population. It now has around 1 million residents.

But three residents the city is not likely to lose, although they will leave Conley Street, are Riggs' wife and daughter, and next-door neighbor Eubanks.

Toni Riggs said in a brief interview that she and her daughter will move into the apartment that she and her husband were moving to, and she will go to Highland Park Community College.

"I have a home here," she said. "After everything is taken care of, I'm going to live in my home."

Eubanks said she will attempt to find a new home this summer, although she would prefer to stay on Conley Street.

"I hate to run away," she said. "It's not fair. Why should all of us move?"