Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, March 15, 1992 TAG: 9203150178
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: E1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
\ Along Lafayette Boulevard Northwest, homeowners normally feel proud of their narrow slice of Roanoke, an avenue of old brick homes and people who've known each other since grade school.
But the public servants, telephone company employees and other hard-working types who live there have watched a handful of drug dealers and gun-wielding young people come to dominate their community in the past couple of years.
Nine days ago, Terry Wayne Anderson, 20, of Christiansburg, drove onto their street and, according to police, was shot and killed in his truck during a dispute over drugs. A 15-year-old boy has been charged with capital murder in the shooting.
Last summer, another man was fatally shot about a block away.
Mary Terry, a church and community leader, tried to organize a meeting recently to talk about the crime. She set it for 7:30 one night, but people were reluctant to leave home after 5:30.
In a Saturday interview, she described how an elderly couple on Lafayette kept their porch light on for security reasons but turned it off when drug dealers began running their business in its glow.
The drug dealers got mad. "They actually told them to turn it back on or they'd burn the house down," Terry said. The couple switched the light on again.
There is no consensus among Lafayette residents about what to do. At least a few residents wonder if - notwithstanding the two killings - things are really as bad as the police and the news media make it out.
People lay blame for the crime in all directions: parents of the dealers, the police, the news media, the landlords renting to newcomers, and the neighbors themselves.
A good many people on the street believe police would quickly squash drug-peddling if it were done in predominantly white Southwest Roanoke rather than mostly black Northwest.
Some residents are afraid to talk. Others say flat-out that a small clan of drug peddlers rules the lives of the other 99 percent of people on the street. They are sick of drug customers - many of them white - driving in from out of town and from other sections of the city to pick up their dope.
The street has the misfortune of being a popular shortcut between downtown and northern suburbs. One neighborhood leader says 10,000 cars pass along the street every day.
Bobby Wilson, 46, a diesel mechanic, won't drive on Lafayette anymore, except to get to his house. He lives on the street a couple of blocks from where Anderson was shot March 6.
"You're scared somebody is going to shoot in your car," Wilson said. He wants to sell his house and move on.
His neighbor across the street just did that. "We never had no problem up here until the dope dealers," Wilson said.
Roanoke Police Sgt. Al Brown, who heads the city's crime prevention unit, grew up in the neighborhood. Asked what's wrong now, he said, neighbors "live in total fear. They say, `Oh Lord, if I say anything, they'll kill me.' I say, `They can't kill all of you.' "
Brown said people on Lafayette ought to lead "crack walks" - the nightly anti-drug patrols that citizens have been making in bigger cities.
"They're apathetic," he said. "If I lived next-door to a drug dealer, he wouldn't stay there. . . . You've got to point your finger and say, `That boy's dealing dope.' "
Lafayette resident Lee Graves, when told of Brown's remarks, said, "If I get the opportunity to testify against people, I'm going to testify."
Graves holds the parents of troublemakers primarily responsible, but he believes Roanoke police are slow to help his community. "They don't care," he said.
"If it was in Crystal Spring or Penn Forest," he said, referring to two affluent, mostly white communities in the Roanoke Valley, "it wouldn't be happening."
Graves wishes the city would put up posters warning against stopping and standing along Lafayette, as he says it has done in other areas where drugs are sold on the street.
A stronger police presence would help, according to Ron Hamad, who runs B&G Grocery Mart on Lafayette. "If there was a visible authority on the street, it would definitely discourage the dealing," he said, "but at this point they don't have too much discouragement."
Hamad was shot in the foot last year when he went outside his store to investigate reports that someone had broken the window of his truck.
Dalal Hamad, his wife, said police turn a cold ear to the couple's complaints. "They say, `You're doing business in the wrong part of town.' They have the wrong attitude."
Mary Terry leads Concerned Citizens of Roanoke, a group that's trying to return peace to Lafayette. She said laymen at her church, Ebenezer African Methodist Episcopal at Lafayette and Cove Road, get tired of picking up gun shells when they mow the church lawn.
Terry was named to a city curfew committee after she questioned why police weren't getting young people off the streets in accordance with the city's curfew law. People under 18 are not supposed to gather in public places after 10 p.m. If the law is vigorously enforced, she figured it could help Lafayette.
But, she said, police explained that they don't have the staff to maintain a constant presence there.
For a long time, Terry said, people were scared to call police. They feared that calling 911 would mean that a police car - lights flashing, sirens wailing - would screech to a halt at their doorstep, letting dealers know who'd called.
"Police came out and explained [that] just because you called 911, that didn't mean police were going to come to your house," Terry said.
It may take a combination of initiatives to make a difference on Lafayette - more police visits, more neighborhood resistance to drug dealing, more residents filing complaints, more activities for young people who hang out on the street.
In the summers, Terry said, sometimes as many as 100 young people gather near an abandoned house on Lafayette. But she said most of them are just kids with little to do. It's the minority - "the hard core," she said - that's bringing crime to Lafayette Boulevard.
by CNB