Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 30, 1995 TAG: 9504280010
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP/STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
Don McFall has been manager of the Uni-Mart on Main Street in Wasena for only a couple of months, but already he thinks he's spotted drugs being ferried across Wasena Bridge from Old Southwest.
"Across the river is trouble, a lot of trouble, and they bring it to this side," he says, scoping out the market for drugs the way he does the one for tortilla chips. "Over on this side and the Raleigh Court area is where the money is."
So he'll pull the plug on store pay phones he says are used by crack lookouts. He yanked the cheap wine known as Mad Dog 20-20 off his refrigerator shelves to keep the sloppier alcoholics away. And he's helping police nab drug peddlers he's seen socializing on his parking lot.
"It sends the message out: 'I'm not a trashy store,''' explains McFall, whose short brown and gray beard obscures shrapnel scars from another war - in Southeast Asia.
Veterans of longer Roanoke drug wars may scoff, but war has been declared in Wasena.
|n n| A few blocks from McFall's store in the months before he arrived, a little green and white house on Kerns Avenue transformed quiet Wasena into drug-denouncing, City Council-confronting, tough-talking turf.
Some police officers see it as an overreaction. They say Wasena's drug troubles are under control and never were anywhere near as serious as the open-air crack markets that Melrose Avenue and other sections of Northwest Roanoke have endured for years.
"You go to Smalltown, U.S.A., you'll find crack," said Roanoke Vice Lt. Ron Carlisle. "It's not unique to Northwest Roanoke and it's not unique to Wasena." And yes, he said, "it's in South Roanoke" - Roanoke's most affluent neighborhood.
But to Wasena parents and grandparents, the raucous drug deals that went down outside the Kerns Avenue house and a more recent drug charge against the owner of a Main Street graphics shop seem like a wake-up call.
On spring evenings, young couples and elderly widows in the Wasena Neighborhood Forum Inc. huddle in living rooms or in the church hall under Wasena's landmark "JESUS SAVES" sign, plotting how to get the drugs and other crime off their streets before they take a firm hold.
Wasena isn't alone in its fear and frustration.
Members of an Old Southwest group called Amos 5:24 ("But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an everflowing stream") have been coming to Wasena's meetings. They're tired, too, of the foul-mouthed young people they say guzzle fifths of vodka, urinate on their shrubbery and have sex just feet away from old folks sitting on their porches.
Slowly, steadily, a citizens' uprising against drugs and crime is shaping up in Wasena and Old Southwest, and maybe beyond.
"It's not just our area. It's all over Roanoke," says Terri Beck, president of the Wasena group. "I think it's going to take all neighborhoods getting together."
Or, as her acquaintance from Old Southwest, Aubrey Hicks, put it: "If we all scream together, they're going to have to listen." "They," to him, are city bureaucrats he thinks aren't enforcing laws or seeking creative ways to lick crime.
At 7 p.m. May 25, Wasena is hosting a city-wide crime prevention meeting at Ghent Grace Brethren Church, 1511 Maiden Lane, S.W. - the church with the big red "JESUS SAVES" sign. They've invited neighborhood organizations from across the city, as well as representatives of the Roanoke Police Department, the Commonwealth's Attorney's office and the city-run Roanoke Neighborhood Partnership.
|n n| Wasena is an unlikely birthplace of an anti-crime movement. Until lately, members of the Wasena organization spent their meetings talking about dead trees, cookbook sales and its "Goblin Gallop" 5-K run in October.
This is no poor neighborhood. The median family income is $40,000. Almost everybody has a job. The 1990 census listed no one on public assistance. And Will Claytor, Roanoke director of real estate valuation, says property values are climbing 6 percent to 8 percent a year, above the city average. In recent years, young couples have poured into the old bungalows, doing repairs and renovations, and the average assessment of a Wasena home right now is about $58,000. Quite a few houses are valued at about $80,000.
Besides the cosmetic quaintness, neighbors are uncommonly friendly in Wasena. "People say it's nice. Well, it is," says Joe Nash, the Wasena organization's Crime Watch chairman. He wants to keep it that way.
But his family's two years on Kerns Avenue, he says, show what happens when just one house down the block starts drawing the drug trade. Two months ago, police charged two teen-age brothers with supplying crack and marijuana. Their addresses were in Old Southwest, but police say they hung out two doors from Nash, at 1210 Kerns, and they brought their drug customers with them.
For more than two years, Nash and others on the block say, young people drove in and out all night, their car stereos throbbing. "I mean, literally rattling the windows in the house - screaming, arguing - EVERY night!" Nash says.
This quickly wore thin among the hard-working, sleep-deprived people of Wasena. Some young visitors pounded on retirees' front doors in the middle of the night, demanding to know where the drugs were sold. Nash kept a diary of all he saw in a red book he still carries to meetings.
With five children of his own, Nash says he watched young people come back again and again to Kerns Avenue. "Kids you've seen before; they look like normal kids. A few weeks later, they look like death warmed over," losing weight and dragging around.
In January, police charged Jerome "Doobie" Jones, 18, and Eric "Nike" Jones, 20, with providing street dealers in both Old Southwest and Wasena with crack and marijuana. Police found $47,000 in a shoebox under one of their beds on Ferdinand Avenue Southwest.
"It hasn't been determined that they've sold out of the house [at 1210 Kerns] itself," says Carlisle, "but they appear to have conducted business outside the house. We're quite certain drug activity occurred there." He says the brothers had access to the house and ran up a $2,000 phone bill there.
Tammy Wooldridge, who has lived at 1210 Kerns for years, says Eric Jones was a friend of her teen-age son, but she tried to keep Jerome Jones away. She says she wasn't able to control what the two did on her street. "I wish I could control what went on outside our house, but I can't. We did chase a lot of kids out - my mom with her broom."
Last winter, the house was repossessed by her lender, who provided court evidence that a promissory note was long in default. Wooldridge filed a countersuit, but it was dismissed by a judge who ordered her to give up the house. Unless she appeals, her family will soon move off Kerns and into a Bedford County trailer.
"I just hate it," Wooldridge's mother, Sylvia Davis, said of all the uproar and publicity. "I don't believe in drugs."
Wooldridge's younger son, Shawn, 14, said the neighbors have it in for his family. He said their cats were shot with BB pellets, and one of them died.
Davis says she was unaware drugs were being sold in front of her house, and she wishes the neighbors had warned her. "These people have known us all these years. Why couldn't they tell us?"
Their neighbors say they did. They don't want to seem heartless, now that the family may be on the way out, but the neighbors are relieved. They express sympathy for Wooldridge's feeble stepgrandfather, Willie Lee Davis, a retired Norfolk and Western assistant foreman who's lived there 30 years and once tended roses in the now-bare yard. "They were eccentric, but lovable," said one neighbor.
But Nash and others say what they lived through on Kerns was pure hell: Visitors throwing rocks and breaking upstairs windows to rouse 1210's occupants and using language that Nash said startled even him - "and I've been in the Navy."
Terri Beck's daughter was baby-sitting in a house next-door to 1210 Kerns two years ago when bullets were fired into the house, one lodging in a bedroom wall where a young child normally would have been dressed in his pajamas at the time of the gunshots, had he and his sitter not been downstairs watching TV.
Nash says neighbors called 911 more than 100 times to report troubles on the block. They say they went to every agency they could think of for help - police, the courts, the Health Department, the Fire Department, social services, the mayor's office, the Drug Enforcement Administration. Beck praises police - "they have been absolutely great" - yet it took years to drive just one pair of alleged drug dealers out of Wasena.
Police say there seems to be no drug activity at the house now, and Wooldridge consented to two recent surprise searches that turned up nothing. The neighbors say it's quiet there now.
But they're not taking it easy. Not yet.
Over the winter, police charged that methamphetamine, cocaine, heroin and marijuana were being sold out of Benovie Graphics on Wasena's Main Street. Neighbors learned of the indictments from a news story last month and it made them all the more wary. They suspect, too, that drugs are being sold at two, maybe three, additional homes.
Late last month, 31 members of the neighborhood group, most of them quiet people who feel almost brazen taking a stand at City Hall, demanded that City Council rid their neighborhood of drugs, burglaries and petty crimes.
A couple of weeks later, the Wasena Neighborhood Forum met with police officers, Roanoke Public Safety Director Chip Snead and people from other city agencies. Wasena leaders asked for a monthly crime report and for help getting public information from court clerks. The group is waiting three weeks to see what the city does before making further demands.
With their activism, Wasena's leaders have enrolled in the most intensive civics course of their lives. They're learning how to gauge political motives, how to search public records, how to hook up with other Roanoke groups.
When they arrived at City Council that day, Terri Beck and Joe Nash said, Mayor David Bowers took some of them into his office and asked if they didn't want to talk their dissatisfactions out privately with him, rather than air them in public. She and the rest chose to go public.
Mariam Alam, new coordinator of the Roanoke Neighborhood Partnership who's helping Wasena research its problems, urged leaders at a recent meeting not to be confrontational with city leaders, not to put them on the defensive or make them look bad. "Don't burn bridges," she cautioned.
She questioned whether the group should welcome publicity. "Some of the stuff that came out of that [City Council] meeting, that came out in the paper, wasn't pretty." She warned it might make it seem Wasena is "going to drugs."
"It's done the opposite," Nash told her. He said people know now that Wasena won't stand for drugs. "People have called from all over Wasena, volunteering to work with us."
As city workers urge him to be patient and work through the system, Nash frets. "I'm afraid we'll get meetinged to death. What I want, I want action."
Police Lt. Carlisle gets frustrated, too. He says some of the houses Nash and others are worried about seem to be "party houses" - where there may be drinking, prostitution and drug use, but not drug dealing. Yet the neighborhood expects a full-blown raid. "They call down here and expect me to bust in there and tear their dresser drawers apart."
Contrary to the alarm among residents, Roanoke police Maj. Don Shields says Wasena is a safe place. With respect to drugs and crime in general, he said, "According to our records there hasn't been a marked increase in the Wasena area. In fact, there's been a decrease in burglaries" over the last couple of years.
Wasena is getting different signals from different people.
Aubrey Hicks from Old Southwest has warned Wasena leaders that if they aren't vigilant, drugs will take root there just as they have in his section of Day Avenue. "Wait till you have the everyday occurrences we have - we have people passing out on our property."
"The garbage of society has come to roost in Old Southwest," he said at a recent meeting. "It'd be nice to play Pied Piper and run all the riffraff over the bridge into Wasena," he said, but that would be wrong
Nash agreed it would be wrong, too, for Wasena merely to push drug dealers into some other neighborhood. "We want them to be where they're supposed to be - in jail."
Floyd Stanton takes the long view of this crisis atmosphere. At 82, he's been in his house at 1218 Kerns Ave. for 72 years. "When I was a child, the street out here was nothing but mud." All around his house, he said, "it was more or less farmland."
Along with Virginia Heights, Crystal Spring and Raleigh Court, Wasena was one of Roanoke's earliest suburbs. City histories say the first houses were built around 1913 - Stanton's went up in 1918 - and the city didn't annex Wasena until the 1920s.
Stanton, manager of the old American Theater downtown as a young man and then a Hercules Inc. supervisor at the Radford Army Ammunition Plant for the rest of his career, thinks Wasena's troubles won't last long. He's just two doors from the controversial Kerns house. Yet, he still goes out on his front porch and feeds the squirrels.
Terri Beck, the Wasena Neighborhood Forum's president, has lived in the neighborhood 11 years. She wants her four children to feel as safe as she did as a child in the Garden City area. "When I grew up," she said, stooping to pick up trash as she led a walking tour of Wasena, "I could run, play hide-and-seek, whatever. Well, I can't let my kids do that."
She hears too many tales about drugs and violence.
Her two older children heard rumblings on the street that someone might retaliate against Beck, and lately she's seen people drive slowly past her house, peering in her windows. It worries her, but she said she told her kids, "If I've passed on one thing to you all, it's standing up for what you believe in."
Wasena's troubles are not the worst in the city. Beck knows that.
"It's not just our area," she said. "It's all over Roanoke."
But Beck would like Wasena to be the catalyst that helps other neighborhoods get a handle on drugs. Maybe Wasena will be the one to drive drugs off the streets, make it so kids can play care-free again. "I'd love for us to be the first," she said.
Memo: ***CORRECTION***