THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Monday, February 5, 1996 TAG: 9602050024
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A3 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MATTHEW BOWERS, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 104 lines
The beleaguered blue-and-white Bel Aire Building on East Little Creek Road has been riddled with bullets.
Bombed.
Set afire.
Repeatedly invaded by protesters.
Constantly picketed.
All in the 22 years since the Hillcrest Clinic, a facility where abortions are performed, opened on its second floor and became the epicenter for the region's abortion protests.
A little more than a year ago, the three-story building's travails became national news. It was New Year's Eve 1994, a Saturday, when shortly before noon a gunman sprayed the building's rear glass doors with semiautomatic rifle fire, injuring no one but shaking up many.
The 22-year-old man arrested nearby and charged with the shooting - an apprentice hairdresser and outspoken abortion opponent from New Hampshire named John C. Salvi III - turned out to be wanted in connection with two shooting deaths the day before. Killed in the shootings were two workers at Boston-area aborton clinics that also perform abortions. Salvi's murder trial is scheduled to begin today in Massachusetts.
With this history, even a busy Navy payday seemed fairly tame at the Bel Aire last week, even though it caused an overflowing parking lot, bustling lobby and long lines in the Navy Federal Credit Union branch across the hall from the clinic.
Sailors, couples and mothers dragging little children flowed in and out of the credit union. Others lined up at the outside automatic-teller machine. Cars rolled through the NationsBank drive-through. Insurance customers thumbed through magazines in a ground-floor office. People were using pay phones in the building's tiny lobby.
Thirteen months earlier, the same lobby was filled with flying bullets and glass. Two armed security guards had to dive for cover, and slugs hit within yards of abortion protesters on the opposite side of the building.
Now, despite the building's outward appearance of normality, housing a well-known clinic where abortions are performed makes the place different from, say, the same building with an accountant's office. That difference shows.
Credit-union workers last week declined to be interviewed about the aftermath of the shootings. So did a worker in the jewelry store downstairs just off the targeted lobby. ``I don't want to get into that,'' said the woman behind the counter, a child on her hip and a baby's car seat on the desk behind her.
The building manager wouldn't give his first name, identifying himself only as Mr. Bradley. He also wouldn't give an exact number for the building's tenants, or their names. Still, he insisted the shooting wasn't a big concern.
``It hasn't affected the building at all,'' said Bradley in his office just off the bustling lobby. ``You are more at risk going to the U.S. Post Office or Burger King.''
The manager said he thought anti-abortion picketing had waned somewhat since the shooting.
Nevertheless, one or more armed guards sit in the lobby 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
``This has nothing to do with the abortion clinic - it has to do with having two banks and a jewelry store in the building,'' Bradley said, adding that there's never been an armed robbery there in the 15 years he's been the building manager.
The more than a year-old shooting affected credit-union customers in different ways.
``I heard nothing of it,'' said Steven J. Guidrey, a Navy radar specialist stationed in Norfolk. He said he doesn't watch much television, so didn't know about the shooting.
But another customer, retired sailor Patricia A. Jones, knew all about it, and such violent incidents don't make her happy coming to the credit-union branch, which is the most convenient one to her Hampton home.
``I don't think it's a safe place for a banking facility,'' said Jones , corralling her young son and daughter in front of an elevator.
After the shooting, national abortion-rights organizations helped Hillcrest conduct workshops for its staff on personal and clinic safety, and the clinic beefed up its physical security.
Now receptionists must buzz visitors inside, past locked outer glass doors. Where receptionists used to sit in the entry hall at an open desk, the hall is now walled off, and receptionists work behind an inch-thick, ticket-booth-like glass shield, buzzing clients into the clinic proper through a side door. Building manager Bradley said there were other security-related changes, but he didn't want to reveal them.
``Other than that, things are pretty much the same,'' said Suzette H. Caton, the clinic's director of community education and chief spokeswoman.
``The clients that we see - the numbers have remained pretty constant.''
Still, Caton wouldn't say how many patients - information often can be ammunition for the other side. She did say the staff remains committed to the services it provides, just as the protesters who still show up on the sidewalks outside a few days each week are committed to their beliefs.
``I think that, immediately following the incident, there was concern on the part of the staff, and some clients. Understandably,'' Caton said. ``But I certainly haven't heard anybody recently say they were afraid to be in the building.
``So we've kind of moved past that.'' But she quickly added, ``I don't think any of us here that day will forget it.''
KEYWORDS: HILLCREST CLINIC ABORTION SHOOTING by CNB