Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, January 27, 1992 TAG: 9201270216
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BOB MANN STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
TEEN DECIDED IT WAS TIME TO GET OUT
Tim got caught up in the teen-age gun culture without really trying. When his friends started ending up dead, he found his way out.
The question put to Tim was blunt, but he is a young man accustomed to bluntness.
When did he decide to change his life, to sell his pistols, to stop hanging out with other teen-agers who - this day - still have their guns?
"When friends started getting killed, shot," was his answer.
"I wanted to see 19."
It is likely, now, that Tim will see 19 when he observes his birthday this summer.
Not long ago, he was not so sure.
Tim is a Roanoke teen-ager who lived in the world of drugs and guns for four years.
He grew up poor, in a tough part of town. He never met his father. He argued often with his mother and ended up in jail.
But the last time he was behind bars was eight months ago. Today he is the rare teen-ager with a lengthy police record "who decided to start staying away from trouble rather than looking for it."
He is also the rare teen-ager who, although reluctantly, agreed to talk about the world of guns and drugs that infests what appears to be a growing portion of Roanoke's youngsters.
But he spoke only under the condition that he not be identified in any way. That, he said, would endanger his life. Tim is not his real name.
Death on the streets of Roanoke is something he knows well.
Tim was a friend of James P. Ferrell, whose life ended from a pistol shot nearly two years ago at the Lansdowne housing complex. Ferrell was 22. He died over drugs.
"Was it true?" was Tim's first reaction when "people on the street, people in school" told him his friend had been killed by Harold Anderson.
Anderson, too, was a friend.
Harold was a neighborhood bad a--, but he had been my friend because we'd been in school together and we hung around together some.
Anderson told police he was "tired of hearing excuses" over a $50 drug debt that Ferrell owed him.
Tim says Ferrell had told Anderson he "was not going to give him s---." That bad debt, the street people told Tim, cost Ferrell his life.
Shortly after the killing, Anderson and another teen-ager were arguing over whose gun was "prettier."
Anderson later told police he had been given the gun by a 9-year-old boy.
Tim says the threat of others dying the same way is very much present today in the city's schools and on its streets.
When asked how many of his former friends had guns or took them to school, he replied:
"I can't count that high."
And he said guns are taken to Patrick Henry and William Fleming high schools. He attended Patrick Henry but quit, like many of his friends.
"There are `fieners' [street slang for drug addicts], and sometimes they will trade guns for drugs, and I've known them sometimes to even let drug dealers use their cars for a while" as payment.
He bought his first pistol when he was 14, a .32-caliber snubnose. He bought it off the street. He says he does not remember how much he paid for it.
"It is simple to get guns. You go to certain places and contact certain people and they contact someone and you can get anything."
The fate of Tim's pistols was less simple. He sold them both, for $40 each, to friends, also kids. Does he worry that they might be used to take a life?
"Not really, because I wouldn't have pulled the trigger."
Tim is slight, does not consider himself particularly tough, but one reason he bought pistols is the same reason other teen-agers do.
"If somebody tougher than you backs you into a corner, you can come out with a gun."
Tim says he never had to do that, that he was "smart. I avoided it."
Other friends did not.
They still do not.
"Pretty big guns are the most popular - the 9mms and .38s. Occasionally they will want a little gun," Tim says.
Some of the teen-agers with guns cruise the malls, particularly Valley View, Tim says.
"We used to go to Club 19 until two people were shot there," he said.
Tim said he never took either of his pistols to the club. "But I wanted to be in the crowd that did."
Tim guided a reporter to a section of Roanoke known for its drug trafficking and violence, up Patterson Avenue and down Rorer Avenue. He pointed out one crack house that he said had been boarded up by the city's vice officers.
He said that some of the area's most financially successful drug dealers were as young as 13.
Tim, in fact, spent his first night in jail at 14, for fighting. It was the hand-to-hand violence that, he says, bothered him almost as much as the guns.
"They [his friends] would just pull people over and beat them up. That wasn't right."
A girlfriend, he says, helped him change. "We started going out and she caught on to the things I was doing. She made me make some choices and to think about what I was doing and where my life was going, and it wasn't going nowhere."
Tim pondered for a moment the question of who had influenced his perspective of right and wrong.
He credited his parents.
But he continued to ponder the question as he cupped his barely whiskered chin in his left hand.
Then he offered another reason, a blunt reason, for turning around his life.
"Goin' to jail," he said.