Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 22, 1995 TAG: 9501230002
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: D1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Loudon, Gilmer and Shenandoah avenues Northwest were the city's dumping ground - for its trash and its ne'er-do-wells.
"This neighborhood was all gone," Thornhill says.
Where kudzu once grew over abandoned cars and refrigerators, grass is trimmed and lots are clear. Where transients were enticed by dilapidated structures, families thrive in renovated homes.
After almost 15 years of tireless work by the community and police, Thornhill says, crime is under control in her neighborhood.
"If we had not taken a stand, it would have been pushed over, too," she adds.
Still, there's no time for rest. It takes dedicated people to keep a neighborhood strong, says Thornhill, 73, the mother of nine. She can often be seen walking the sparse but clean streets of Centre or Loudon, a glittering beret and fitted coat holding back the morning chill.
The battle - for now - has been won in her neighborhood. But in others around the city, there still is much work to be done.
"Idleness is the devil's workshop," she says.
\ Each week, residents of the Tin Bridge community in Lynchburg take back their neighborhood from the drug dealers.
They march past homes where rotting wooden steps lead up to front doors, where $20 can buy a rock of crack cocaine. The streets along their route, several blocks from the police station, are described as one of the city's five top open-air drug markets.
On this December night, about 40 people are on the march. Most are children who spend their afternoons and evenings in the community's Yoder Center - a safe haven where they can gather for a game of pickup basketball or art classes.
"We're tired and fed up," they shout, walking hand-in-hand. "Your time is running out. We're for real."
Along First Street, Bonnie Thompson opens the front door of her duplex. Posted on her porch is a "No Trespassing" sign. She watches, arms folded across her chest.
"What they're doing is great, but it ain't gonna stop them," she says. "Wait until 11 or 12, and they fill up the street out here. In the summertime, you can't even sit on your porch."
For one hour this night, though, the Tin Bridge neighborhood has won.
\ WHEN NEIGHBORHOOD ACTIVISTS in Roanoke and Lynchburg talk about fighting crime, they talk about resurrection - of their communities, of their pride.
Their model is the small-town America of days gone by, where people looked out for each other, where parents instilled values of right and wrong in their children, where neighbors believed in the future of their community.
Like Roanoke four years ago, Lynchburg is experiencing a surge of street violence, the result of a fledgling drug market emboldened by the huge profits that can be made from selling crack cocaine.
But in Roanoke, violent crime has dropped by almost a third since 1991. The city had four homicides in 1994 - the lowest number since Police Chief M. David Hooper came to his job 27 years ago.
When crack arrived, Roanoke learned that the old answers to the drug problem didn't work. Success in fighting crime, and the drug trade that causes it, takes cooperation - with other law enforcement agencies and with the community.
The city's Community Oriented Policing Effort was an outgrowth of that recognition. In 1991, COPE struck ground zero of the city's crack wars: the public housing projects.
Putting a human face on the Police Department was one of the unit's most successful efforts. The goal wasn't just to arrest people; it was also to solve problems, officers and residents say.
Some neighborhoods, such as Florine Thornhill's, won the fight without the aid of COPE. In the end, they, like the housing projects, beat the odds.
But combatting crime is like squeezing a water balloon: Put pressure in one area, and the action goes elsewhere.
While police in Roanoke have reined in most of the street dealers, others have camouflaged their operations, moving them indoors and to other, more vulnerable neighborhoods. People in Old Southwest and on Melrose Avenue Northwest say they continue to struggle with drug dealing, vagrants and the sound of gunshots in the distance.
"We're clearly in a lull, but I don't know whether we're in the eye of the hurricane or what," Roanoke Commonwealth's Attorney Donald Caldwell said.
"My biggest concern is that we might see a jump in crime toward the late 1990s, as the second baby boom hits its crime-committing years. ... Violent crime is going to a younger age, and that may be a harbinger of things to come."
An hour's drive away in Lynchburg, the struggle to gain control of the streets has just begun. People are still afraid - of going to night-time functions at downtown churches, of walking their neighborhood streets, of the city's young.
"Violence is the No.1 problem we face with the increased organization of the crack-cocaine business," Lynchburg Commonwealth's Attorney William Petty said.
"Well over 50 to 75 percent of the homicides are drug-related, where a dealer is getting even with someone else. We're seeing shootouts occur that we never saw before. The only thing that's kept the homicide rate even is luck and a lot of the guys are bad shots."
In Lynchburg, drug dealing is in your face, on the streets, at the corner. Police have just started to chip away at the problem.
In Roanoke, police have pushed the drug trade primarily behind closed doors. The industry has become slicker and, with each drug operation, the dealers become smarter.
'You live good.
But you don't live long.'
Cocoa. Coffee. Butter. Rock. Each street name for crack cocaine describes the slight difference in color that depends on how the crystallized product is cooked.
A smoke of the rock is good for a 3- to 5-minute high. In one night in a busy part of town, the average dealer can make several hundred dollars.
"Crack is easy to get, easy to conceal and easy to turn a profit," said former Roanoke Vice Lt. Steve Lugar, now head of the department's records division. "Crack is the drug of choice."
In Roanoke, crack hit the streets in the late 1980s. With it came street-level violence the likes of which had not been seen with marijuana or heroin. Sales of those drugs were more centralized. But the crack business spun a web of dealers, each with a small thread of the market.
Introduced to the Roanoke Valley by migrant Jamaican workers, who came to pick fruit in the surrounding counties, the drug was an easy sell, police say.
For 20 years, Timothy Wade took and sold drugs in Roanoke and Southside Virginia. He dabbled with marijuana, moved on to heroin, then cocaine - and finally crack.
Crack gives an "intensified urge to want more, then you're committed to do whatever you need to get it, and there comes the violence," Wade said in a telephone interview from the Buckingham Correctional Center in Dillwyn, where he is serving five years for firearms violations and malicious wounding.
At the height of his crack-selling career, he made $21,000 a month, he said. But Wade says he has turned his life around at the age of 39.
"With the drug life, there's no way you can win," he said. "If the police don't get you, someone will for the drugs you have. You live good. But you don't live long."
Crack gained a foothold in Roanoke in the predominantly black housing projects of the inner city. It soon became an equal opportunity alternative, producing a thriving market. Out-of-towners began trafficking the drug from New York City, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They challenged local entrepreneurs, and the turf wars brought violence.
The business flourishes because of aggressive sellers and eager, addicted buyers, many of whom are white.
"There is no question that the crack cocaine industry impacted the black community more, but the trade would not survive but for the white community," Caldwell said.
"It's a job opportunity that seems to be more attractive for young people who don't have many other options. And, particularly for young people in the black community, they've used this as an opportunity to get ahead."
By 1989, areas such as 11th Street, the Lincoln Terrace public housing project and Centre Avenue Northwest were open-air crack markets, overwhelming the area's residents and the city Police Department.
"It was out of hand," Lugar said. "The kinds of weapons we had to face changed with the crack market. They were more sophisticated, semiautomatic, large-caliber guns. And guns were being traded for dope."
Roanoke's answer was an all-out assault - enlisting the aid of federal, state and other local law-enforcement agencies. The result: 1989's Caribbean Sunset operation, in which more than 400 people were arrested on drug charges. The operation targeted low- to middle-end dealers. The prosecutions were federal, bringing mandatory, and often stiff, sentences.
It gradually cleared some of the city's worst drug areas and dried up some of the out-of-state drug sources.
The street violence ebbed, and the crack industry moved indoors, where it was harder to detect. Abandoned houses became places for users and dealers to meet.
As a result, drug investigators changed their tactics, using informants to infiltrate the crack market rather than large-scale shakedowns of street dealers, Vice Lt. Ron Carlisle said.
The continued pressure has restricted the sale of the drug, he said. That was apparent one night in December when informants were sent to purchase crack on Day and Marshall avenues Southwest and were unable to make a buy.
"When we can send three informants into a drug area and they can't make a drug buy, then I'd say we have an impact on the streets," Carlisle said.
Going to the source
It's 11 p.m. on a December night. Roanoke vice officers raid a duplex at 3710 Panorama Ave. N.W., looking for crack.
The search warrant details an earlier drug buy at the apartment. Inside, they find the alleged seller, Eric Williams, and visitor Frank Castillo of New York, both 21.
Tugging on rubber gloves, officers rummage through the home, even checking the suspects' shoes and socks.
They find 380 grams of crack, worth about $37,800 on the street, a digital scale, and close to $3,000 in cash. Police believe Castillo brought in the drugs from Norfolk. They also discover that he is wanted on a murder charge in Richmond. He and Williams are now in jail, awaiting trial on federal drug charges.
The bust is the second of the night. Earlier, vice officers staked out a suspected methamphetamine dealer on Chapman Avenue. Cliff Sexton was arrested after police watched him accepting a shipment of the drugs from an overnight parcel service. He is charged with intent to distribute morphine and methamphetamine. He was recently released from jail on bond.
Almost 10 hours later, information gathered at another arrest leads officers to the Innkeeper on Orange Avenue Northwest. There, they find Marcus L. Sumblin holding 450 hits of heroin and more than $16,000 in cash. The small packets, marked by a red-gun insignia and the words "Lethal Weapon," are wrapped in the pages of a Playboy magazine.
Sumblin, 27, of New York, is charged with possessing heroin with intent to distribute and possession of cocaine. In an adjoining room, vice officers arrest Sumblin's associate, Star E. Dent, 41, of Northwest Roanoke. She is charged with conspiracy to distribute heroin. Both suspects remain in jail.
In one night, officers take about $52,000 worth of drugs from Roanoke streets. In one night, they sever an artery of the city's drug market. The arrests set off a chain reaction of negotiations with federal authorities, giving police more leverage to bargain with suspects and work their way up the drug hierarchies. Federal authorities are handling both the crack and heroin cases.
"Our primary objective is getting to the main source," Vice Lt. Carlisle said.
But Roanoke police could do that only after ending the street violence.
In Lynchburg, the focus is where the problem has been most visible - on the street, with low-level dealers. But that's only moved the problem - not solved it, said Commonwealth's Attorney Petty.
City officials have continued to strengthen their partnership with the U.S. Attorney's office, which gives them more resources and the chance to seek stiffer penalties in federal court.
And the Police Department, which suffered from internal political problems in the past several years and a lack of leadership, recently hired a new police chief. Charles Bennett Jr., a former police officer from Richmond, has vowed to implement community policing throughout his force. He also believes that communities have to be responsible for themselves.
"We can't arrest our way out of this problem," Bennett said. "We'll continue to arrest the dope dealers and the buyers. But unless there's a strong community united ... don't say to the police, `Why aren't you dealing with the drug problem?' "
Much of the violence in Lynchburg is caused by turf battles between rival dealers who are trying to establish territories, Lynchburg Vice Cmdr. Wayne Cyrus said.
The city sits along U.S. 29, an emerging corridor for drug trafficking. Gang activity is being seen there, as well as in Charlottesville, farther up 29; in Danville; and less than an hour west, in Martinsville.
But not in Roanoke, said R. David Burch, Jr. head of the Roanoke FBI office - and law enforcement officials are at a loss to explain why. They speculate that traffickers think U.S. 29 is safer than Interstate 81 and that Roanoke's more established drug market is less open to new dealers.
Last spring, feuding drug dealers fired on each other in Lynchburg and shot at undercover agents along U.S. 29. Afterward, Lynchburg resident Jarrette N. Davis told police the battle began because he had robbed a street dealer of $1,500. Those involved in the gunfight were linked to drug gangs in Los Angeles.
In late September, an investigation led Lynchburg officers back to the scene where the springtime shootout began - 2110 Main St. - a decaying, drug-infested strip in the city's downtown.
Just before 9 p.m., officers in bullet-proof vests, riot helmets and fire-retardant ski masks burst through the front door. Eight children huddled on the floor in the middle of the tiny living room; several men stood in the background, their arms clasped in back of their heads.
Among those in the house was Jarrette Davis, at the time under federal drug indictment.
On this search, all Lynchburg vice officers found was a homemade crack pipe. There were no arrests.
Afterward, Davis's mother, Ida, took her own stand. She wrote a note and hung it on a tree. It read: "If you stop here, there is no drugs in this house or at this house so don't come to my door or stop in front of my house ... Notice to the public."
A month later, Jarrette Davis pleaded guilty to a separate incident in federal court: possession with intent to distribute one gram of cocaine and one gram of marijuana. He is in prison awaiting sentencing.
'I'm afraid of them'
Along Harrison, Washington and Madison streets are reminders of a gentler time in Lynchburg, when the James River was the thoroughfare of Central Virginia and the managers of the shipping companies retired to tidy, Victorian homes along these streets.
But over the years, the owners became landlords. And, the homes became rooming houses, havens for decay and drugs.
Like homeowners in Roanoke's evolving Old Southwest, urban pioneers in Lynchburg have laid their claim. They have begun to renovate the houses, turning some into Old World bed and breakfasts.
But taking back a neighborhood is sometimes a case of two steps forward and one step back. Next to some of the glorious, refurbished structures are boarded-up houses where groups of young men often linger at night. Their front porches, cracked stone walls and overgrown bushes become ready-made areas to stash drugs.
"There was a time when you could leave your door open, when you didn't have people walking through your yard," said Otis Rucker, who lives on Lynchburg's Fillmore Street, next door to the site of a drive-by shooting just last week.
A Lynchburg native, Rucker remembers making curfew as a teen-ager by the schedule of the nighttime Greyhound bus on Federal Street. It brought him home by 11 p.m. sharp.
But things have changed in his neighborhood, he said. He and his wife have crouched on their floor after being awakened by the sounds of gunshots. And Rucker has been approached by drug dealers as he brought his garbage can to the curb.
"A guy tried to sell me some drugs, and I said, `What do you think you're doing?' He said, `Trying to make a dollar,''' Rucker recalls. "When I go to my garbage can, I bring my .38 Magnum or my .32-caliber. I'm afraid of them ... If my kids were doing that stuff, I'd stop them."
A neighborhood doesn't fall overnight, said Police Chief Bennett. First, there's a broken window that nobody fixes. Then, there are the houses that become run-down, homeowners who move out and transients who move in. Soon, the few old-timers look around to see that their neighborhood has become crime-ridden.
Often, residents are scared into silence. And that, say community leaders, is where neighborhood participation and community policing come in.
In Lynchburg, community policing is handled in part by the department's street-crimes unit, called out when violence and drug activity get out of hand. Officers are relieved of their normal patrol duties and target high-crime areas, answering public disturbance calls, attending crime-watch meetings and giving neighborhoods the tools to combat crime.
Sometimes, however, neighbors don't want to help - as was the case one summer night when officers arrested a group of teen-agers after a car chase. Several residents standing on a nearby porch refused to talk to police, telling them only to get off their property.
'Total disrespect for life'
Roanokers Aubrey and Linda Hicks wanted the American dream - an affordable house, an investment in their future. After years of renting, they found what they were looking for on Roanoke's Day Avenue Southwest: a two-story, turn-of-the-century fixer-upper.
It was a new start for the Hickses and their two children, but after almost a year, they were ready to leave, in large part because of the crime.
"The biggest problem we're dealing with is drugs," Aubrey Hicks said. "The second biggest problem we deal with is people with no self-esteem or self-worth who consider themselves throw-aways. We had one man down the street who was shoving his wife out of a second-floor window ...
"And one afternoon, police found a man in an apartment down the street with a fifth of corn liquor between his legs and a cigarette burning his fingers. There was another man on the floor in a pool of blood. Two men had hit him over the head."
The atmosphere led the Hickses and other concerned residents in the area to form Amos 5:24 Outreach, named after a biblical passage that is a call for justice and right living. The group combats crime by helping neighbors in need.
"I think if we let up, things would just fester," said Linda Hicks, "because nobody cares and, where no one cares, there is no conscience."
Louis Timmons, pastor of Highland Park United Methodist Church, has helped spearhead the committee. He blames landlords who knowingly allow transients and drug dealers to stay in their rooming houses. He urges residents to hold their neighbors responsible for their actions. He talks of the chasm between the neighborhood's working-class residents and those who want to gentrify the area.
"Theologically, love don't mean diddly ... It's only rhetoric unless you're trying to bring dignity and decency to those streets," he said.
The most highly publicized murders in Roanoke over the past year occurred in Old Southwest.
The three people who authorities believe bludgeoned 44-year-old Virgie Green in October were thrown out of a Day Avenue house for smoking crack. Green later took them into her Woods Avenue house.
And the sensational slayings of five people, shot as they partied early New Year's Day in their carriage house apartment, occurred just off Highland Avenue.
The first hours of 1995 brought more slayings to the city than in the whole of 1994.
It is just one more example of how much work still needs to be done, Timmons has told his congregation.
Pastor Gregory Jackson tries to stir the same conscience at his church. A former heroin addict, Jackson talks with firsthand familiarity about the prison of drugs. Each week, he preaches his creed of hope and realism to his congregation on Melrose Avenue Northwest. He fears it falls mostly on deaf ears.
"Everyone wants to see it get better, but they want to see someone else do it," he said. "Even if you don't have drive-by shootings, people who live in the community are dealing with the atmosphere that drug trade brings - a total disrespect for life. It's growing and engulfing the young."
Jackson and others talk about the alienation of young people, their brashness about selling drugs and the need to help the isolated find a place in the community.
In the Hurt Park housing project, a 17-year-old with a fluorescent red wool cap pulled tight over his head walks with the fluid gait of a rapper. He wears the signature low-hanging pants with layers of boxers. He pulls his head into the collar of his oversized Tar Heels jacket like a turtle.
No teen-ager in Hurt Park has graduated from high school in the past three years. This teen, who agreed to speak only if his name was not used, said he is in the 10th grade when he should be in 12th.
He said he has an arrest record, for possessing marijuana. During the day, he often stays at home, out of the way of COPE, or rides a bus to one of the malls. He insists he doesn't use or deal crack, but neighbors think otherwise.
"Man, there's a whole lot of money you can make," he said. The dealers "want money fast. If you work, you've got to wait for that check. If you know what you're doing, who you're selling to, you don't get caught."
"Money is everything," he said. "People don't want a Hardee's job making $200 a week."
Straight talk
Carl Slaughter isn't swayed by the love of money. Some of his friends are drug dealers. He's not. He says he never will be.
His eyes are the color of sandlewood. He tosses a football around as he talks. At 14, Slaughter already has the thick, stocky build of a running back. Grass sticks to the back of his T-shirt, remnants from a tackle with friends.
"I ain't going the wrong way. .. I can wait for money. Money ain't important to me. My life is important to me. My mom and dad and my sisters are important."
Slaughter started coming to Lynchburg's Yoder Center four years ago, when he moved to the neighborhood. His younger sister was attracted by the toys, and he followed. Then he met Aubrey "Chub" Barbour - a man who changed his life, a man who gave him respect.
Barbour doles out love, discipline and a sense of security to the community's kids.
Here, children must say "excuse me" when they walk in front of someone.
Here, temptation is only a door away.
Beside the center is a two-story yellow home. Drive by at almost any hour, and you'll see several men on the porch. They walk up to passing cars, talk for a while, reach in their pockets and then return to the porch.
Slaughter counts six of his school friends as dealers.
"They tease me with their money and junk," he said. "Some make $100 to $150 a day. They don't use the crack, they just sell it ... I ain't got no time for that. If they get caught, all of their money will be gone. They be out there for nothing."
Four years from now, Slaughter would like to be in Indiana - South Bend, to be exact - playing football for his beloved Notre Dame University.
On another afternoon, as he walks by the yellow house next to the center, his friends shake hands with the men outside. Slaughter keeps on walking.
by CNB