Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 24, 1993 TAG: 9301240136
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: D5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARGARET EDDS STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: RICHMOND LENGTH: Medium
150 WITNESSES DIDN'T SEE A THING
Isham Douglas Draughn II did not die alone.It is small consolation.
As of 14 days after the 24-year-old security guard was gunned down in a crowded McDonald's restaurant parking lot less than a mile from the state Capitol, no one had come forward to bear witness to the identity of his killer.
Police estimate that 150 people were on hand for the 2:30 a.m. shooting, the city's first recorded murder of 1993. If law enforcement officers and city officials could, many would gladly charge the lot with a non-existent crime - conspiracy of silence.
City Manager Robert Bobb, in frustration, has proposed a constitutionally questionable remedy: detaining potential witnesses to a murder for 48 hours.
And Police Lt. O.T. Clarke, chief of homicide in a city with the fourth-highest murder rate per capita in the nation, sighed last week in exasperation. "There's no way it could have happened and no one saw anything," he said.
What Bobb and Clarke might add is that, if silence about urban homicide were a crime, more than the McDonald's crowd would stand guilty.
What is known about the early morning of Jan. 10 is that it was like many others at the popular hangout on Broad Steet. For several years, since the restaurant began staying open almost around the clock, crowds of mostly black youths have congregated there into the wee hours on weekends.
Post-midnight, as teen-age curfews pass and the bars close, the crowd becomes older and rougher. In 1990, police answered five calls at the store. The figure jumped to 113 in 1991 and 130 in 1992. Neighbors complained, but McDonald's hired security guards and business remained brisk.
Last week, as the Sheriff's Department announced it would no longer send off-duty deputies to the site and a neighborhood association threatened a nuisance suit, the fast-food chain agreed to curtail hours to 11 p.m.
According to the association's president, a McDonald's official estimated during the negotiations that the company will lose about $500,000 annually because of the decision.
No one disputes that Ike Draughn, a retired Air Force man who lives in Arlington, and his ex-wife, Annie Draughn of Richmond, have lost more. The Draughns, who sat in the House of Delegates gallery on the opening night of the General Assembly at the invitation of Gov. Douglas Wilder, were there to bolster the governor's proposal for a one-a-month limit on the purchase of handguns.
Disproportionate numbers of the slain are black, as are most of their killers. And yet black political leaders - with some few exceptions such as Robert Bobb - have not brought the same outrage and vigor to their protest that surfaces when civil rights are violated.
The Ku Klux Klan at its height claimed fewer victims, and Bobb argues that law-abiding black men and women should take to the streets, the pulpits, and the airwaves with the same energy they unleashed during the 1960s.
Meanwhile, many whites believe they are immune from the violence, that murder and mayhem can somehow be contained by neighborhood or municipal boundaries. But just as drugs expanded from an inner-city to a suburban scourge, so instances of gun violence crop up with growing frequency in strip shopping centers and suburban schoolyards and housing developments.
However convinced whites may be that they are unaffected by the daily drumbeat of death, there also is a toll on psyche and spirit that comes from knowing people are being gunned down within miles of your doorstep.
The sealed mouths of 150 young people are a reminder to us all: It is past time for the compact of silence to be broken.
Keywords:
FATALITY