Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 10, 1993 TAG: 9301120123
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GREG SCHNEIDER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
EMPORIA: A MAGNET FOR GUN CRIME
BURGLARS pour into Russell C. Newsome's sporting goods shop like rain, and no amount of patching or sealing seems to stop them.A 2-inch steel door? They hacked it down. Iron bar? They drilled a hole and pried it off. Six break-ins last year, maybe 40 since Newsome opened his store 12 years ago.
The big attraction? Guns.
"They just pretty much put me out of business, really," Newsome said. That's because he doesn't deal in the currency of this gun trade: drugs.
About 90 minutes south of Richmond on I-95 and U.S. 58, Emporia is like a lake in the course of a polluted stream, contaminated by the interstate guns-and-drugs traffic that flows through.
As a result, this city, population 5,340, has the third-highest crime rate per capita in Virginia, after Richmond and Portsmouth, and just ahead of Norfolk.
The size of Emporia's police force - 19 members - means only two officers might be on patrol in any given shift. And they are required to wear bulletproof vests.
"It's big-city stuff, but it's a small-town police department," said Officer Craig Jarratt, 25.
The reason is a vicious cycle that works like this:
An Emporia native moves to New York or Washington and gets caught up in the drug trade. He buys drugs cheap in the city, brings them to Emporia and sells them at a profit. Then he gets some local relatives with clean records to buy cheap Virginia guns, and takes those back to the city to sell at an even bigger profit.
"They double their money twice," said Detective Gary Wright, who represents Emporia on a regional drug task force. "They can make $10,000 to $15,000 in one trip easily."
With their newfound riches, the criminals are getting snazzier weapons. "In the past, the average scumbag we dealt with on the street didn't have the money or the means to get guns. Most people had kitchen knives in their back pocket," Wright said. "Now they have a .25 automatic or a .380 automatic, stuff like that."
So far, that hasn't translated into a murder boom; Emporia averages about two killings a year. But with Jamaican drug dealers turning up now and then, and with gangs forming in some of the neighborhoods, police wonder how much worse it can get.
Wright can't see things getting better any time soon. The mix is too volatile: a small highway town with little employment beyond fast-food restaurants, three gun shops nearby, a ready market for drugs.
"As long as the law is the same about people buying guns, there's not much we can do with the guns end of it," Wright said. "The solution is not to allow even people with a clean record to go in a store and buy three of these, three of these and three of these right over the counter."
Newsome said he never sells multiple guns at one time.
Occasionally, he said, he gets what he thinks is a suspicious gun sale, but there's not much he can do about it.
"When a guy comes up in a car from New York and [sends] a local man in to buy a gun, you're pretty certain what's happening," he said. "What have I done? I sold the man a gun. If he met the requirements, I sold it to him. You can't stay in business if you refuse customers."