THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, November 26, 1995 TAG: 9511260071
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY JON FRANK, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH LENGTH: Long : 156 lines
The gunman slipped into the restaurant, dressed in black, undetected. It was too late for 20-year-old Michael McCormick.
As McCormick concentrated on supper and a game of dominoes, the hit man opened fire with an assault rifle. Moments later, McCormick lay dead on the floor of TJ's Restaurant, food and dominoes scattered about his body. Other customers cowered in corners.
It could have been an assassination portrayed in a gangster movie. Instead, it was real-life on Portsmouth's Lincoln Street, Nov. 17, 1995.
Brazen and cold-blooded, it was not atypical of the 37 homicides recorded so far in Portsmouth during 1995.
McCormick's killing tied the city's former high of 36, in 1992. Many that preceded it were similar: gunmen firing point-blank, often in public places and at night.
Two days later, on Nov. 19, the fatal shooting of Donald ``Red'' Lancaster on Afton Parkway broke the record. Lancaster was shot at about 1:30 a.m. in what his relatives described as a crack-cocaine house.
McCormick's and Lancaster's slayings were almost certainly drug-related, a motive that Portsmouth Police officially say accounts for about 20 percent of this year's homicides. Unofficially, though, drugs could account for up to 50 percent.
Portsmouth's drug violence in 1995 has so far been directed primarily at young black males. But nobody has been immune. Victims were young and old, male and female, black and white. Among those victimized by what police described as drug-driven violence were:
James L. Pope, 58. Pope was killed by a gunman who fired through the front door of Pope's home in an Allard Road subdivision. Friends and family speculate the gunman may have been trying to kill someone else in a dispute over drugs and mistook Pope for his target.
Efrem D. Garner, 22, of Brooklyn, N.Y. Garner was shot to death in the downtown tunnel during afternoon rush hour. Dozens of motorists saw two black males exit Garner's car and run out of the Portsmouth side of the tube. New York, police say, is the common point of origin for Portsmouth's supply of crack cocaine.
Craig M. Robertson, 20, of Suffolk. Robertson was fatally shot while trying to buy drugs at a residence in the 900 block of Chumley Road.
Jeanette Q. Lee, 32, of the Western Branch section of Chesapeake. Lee died after being shot while trying to buy crack cocaine in an area known to be an open-air drug market.
Crack cocaine and the violence associated with it are nothing new to the streets of Portsmouth. The impact has been felt for at least five years and can be easily seen in homicide totals and profiles.
They show that more homicides are being committed, the majority of them at night and with guns.
During the last half of the 1980s, there was an average of 19 homicides per year. For the first five years of this decade the average has been more than 28 per year.
Less than 10 percent of the city's 1995 murders occurred during daylight, according to a study conducted by the Portsmouth Police Department. More than 83 percent were committed by people using firearms.
But why did 1995 - which is still more than a month from completion - prove to be the bloodiest in Portsmouth's history?
Police say the reason could be tied to an increased law enforcement presence on city streets. It's making Portsmouth an uncomfortable place for the violence-prone drug trafficker, police say, and the heat is on in more ways than one.
Drug dealers are being forced from their old haunts and into new territory. The shifts are producing violent conflicts, police say.
``We are experiencing some turf wars,'' Police Chief Dennis A. Mook explained in a recent interview.
Part of it is the result of community policing, which the city is implementing under Mook's leadership. The program, among other things, puts beat cops in places where they haven't had a presence in many years.
``When we put in these community policing officers . . . you will have some of those people moving into other areas and causing conflicts,'' Mook said.
The FBI is also applying heat in the form of a violent-crimes task force created this fall. It is one of only two such FBI efforts in Virginia and the only one in Hampton Roads.
The FBI, along with a select number of Portsmouth police officers assigned to the task force, have targeted about 24 hard-core criminals, many of whom operate within the drug subculture that infests Portsmouth's six public housing communities.
The FBI is taking its investigations to a Norfolk federal grand jury in an effort to build ironclad cases that can be prosecuted in U.S. District Court, where parole is unknown and long sentences are the rule. It is a strategy designed to take Portsmouth's worst criminals off city streets and put them in federal prisons.
At the same time, the Portsmouth Police Department has started its own violent-crimes initiative. Begun in October, it coincided with Mook's reorganization of the department's homicide squad.
The moves have helped dramatically improve the city's homicide clearance rate, which stood at 40 percent in January for murders committed during 1994. The national average for that year was 64 percent.
So far this year, Portsmouth Police have made arrests in almost 70 percent of the city's slayings.
But no arrests have been made in at least 14 of this year's homicides. And in some instances, police have identified the killers and taken out warrants but have been unable to locate the suspects. In at least two other cases, charges were dropped after arrests were made.
To know that your loved one's killer could be walking the streets deepens the suffering for victims' families.
Gary Robertson of Suffolk said police are trying to find the suspect in his son Craig's killing: 18-year-old Corey Jackson. Jackson has been indicted by a grand jury but remains a fugitive.
``It is extremely frustrating,'' said Robertson, a 51-year-old contracts manager at Colonna's Shipyard Inc. in Norfolk.
Robertson realizes the nature of his son's death makes justice difficult.
``My son's death was definitely drug-related,'' he said. ``The person who killed him decided he was going to rob Craig instead of sell him drugs.''
Robertson, though, praised police for their investigation and efforts to arrest the suspect.
``I have no reason to believe that the Portsmouth police have not pursued him to the greatest extent possible,'' he said.
Not everyone is so sure the city's police department investigates drug murders with the same vigor devoted to other killings.
``Just because it is drug-related, they don't care,'' said Tamika Parker, the 21-year-old girlfriend of James Dildy, who was killed in an unsolved drug-related shooting in May. ``I don't think they have done anything at all.''
Mercury Morgan Jr., whose 19-year-old son was fatally shot Nov. 5, agrees.
``The police haven't told me nothing,'' said the 42-year-old Morgan. ``All I know is my son got killed.''
William Johnson, whose 23-year-old son Jermaine died during a robbery in August, initially had a similar complaint. Johnson said he wasn't convinced police were devoting enough time to finding his son's killer or killers. Plus, he said, they were not keeping his family informed about progress.
But after talking with homicide investigators, Johnson became convinced the Portsmouth Police are doing all they can in working through what is inherently a slow process.
``I think they are handling things in an excellent manner,'' Johnson said last week.
Gary Robertson said he is more concerned about what happens after his son's killer is caught than how long the capture takes.
He hopes the person responsible for his only son's death can be removed from society until there is virtually no chance that he will kill again.
``We are not hard-line vengeance,'' Robertson said. ``But we are looking for something that takes him off the streets for a long time. If he is let back out on the streets, in the business he is in, it is highly likely that he or someone else is going to be killed.'' ILLUSTRATION: Map
Numbers on map locate killings and correspond to victims at right.
Graphic
Photos
THE VICTIMS
[For complete graphic, please see microfilm]
KEYWORDS: MURDER CRIME PORTSMOUTH STATISTICS by CNB