ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Friday, March 7, 1997 TAG: 9703070030
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-12 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAURENCE HAMMACK STAFF WRITER
Cross-street rival charged with burning Corner Store.
When a rival convenience store set up shop across 13th Street from The Corner Store in Southwest Roanoke about five years ago, the most that Joseph Kirk was expecting was a price war.
That didn't concern Kirk, who has run The Corner Store for the past 11 years as more of a hobby than a business.
"I could care less about the competition," Kirk said Thursday afternoon, nodding toward the Speedway Market from his vantage point behind the cash register. "We like to make a profit, but it's not like we were aiming to get rich or anything. We just enjoyed it."
But the Speedway took business much more seriously, federal authorities alleged this week in indictments that accuse an organized crime family of using violence and arson to snuff out their competition.
Speedway owner Fahed Tawalbeh is charged with being involved in burning down The Corner Store two years ago because it was cutting into his business.
"They started out from day one telling everybody they were going to put us out of business," Kirk said. "At first, I thought they were talking about prices - that they would put us out of business price-wise.
"I had no idea what they really meant."
But shortly after the Speedway opened, Kirk arrived at work on several mornings to find rocks thrown through the front window of his store, a small concrete building at the corner of 13th and Chapman Avenue.
Kirk replaced the windows with shatterproof glass, but the harassment continued.
He started hearing the word on the street - brought to him by regular customers who stopped by for cigarettes, beer and other necessities, he said - that the owners of Speedway were planning to burn his store down. Some customers told him they had been offered money to do the job, Kirk said.
"We never put much stock into it, until it happened," he said.
Early on Jan. 13, 1995, before Kirk had opened the store, someone threw a Molotov cocktail through a back window, starting a fire that gutted the store and temporarily put Kirk out of business. A Molotov cocktail is a bottle filled with gasoline that's wrapped in a saturated rag or plugged with a wick, then ignited and hurled like a grenade.
Kirk immediately suspected his cross-street rivals. His hunch grew stronger when another fire broke out that night, killing a man and a woman who lived in an apartment next to his store.
Federal authorities now say that an organized crime family led by brothers Joseph Abed and Abed Jamil Abdeljalil - of which Tawalbeh was an associate - had the building torched because they suspected the man and woman had witnessed The Corner Store being set afire earlier that day. Killed in the blaze were Barbara Marie Hardy, 28, and her boyfriend, Michael Todd Thomas, 26.
"Everybody knew pretty much who had done it," Kirk said. When charges were made public Wednesday, "it wasn't a big surprise to anybody" in the neighborhood. "I'm just glad they finally put a stop to it," he said.
Tawalbeh still owns the Speedway building, but the business has been taken over by someone else since the fire, according to court testimony.
Although the fire gutted the store's interior and destroyed all its contents, Kirk rebuilt the store and opened back up several weeks later - unfazed by the rocks, threats and firebombs.
"It was kind of like watching a kid grow up," Kirk said of the 11 years he has invested in his store. "We were just too stubborn to stay out of the business."
LENGTH: Medium: 71 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: MJanel Rhoda. Joseph Kirk, owner of the Corner Store onby CNB13th Street and Salem Ave., says he's glad the people who burned his
store have been caught. color.