Black death
Homicides plague minority areas
By Mark Houser
TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Sunday, July 18, 2004
A wave of street killings is sweeping through
Pittsburgh's black neighborhoods, leaving a
trail of grieving families, overworked police
and bewildered community leaders.
The onslaught pushed the murder rate in
Pittsburgh last year to ninth-highest among
cities in the biggest U.S. metropolitan areas,
higher than in Miami and Los Angeles and
triple New York's rate.
One-fourth of Pittsburgh's population is
black, but 22 of the city's 25 homicide
victims this year have been black. Ten men
have been charged in 11 of the black
killings. All are black, though charges in one
case were dropped.
Sometimes the victims are innocents. Penn
Hills student Karis Adams, 14, died May 31
when gunmen peppered the car she was
riding in at a stop sign in the city's LincolnLemington neighborhood. A stray bullet
felled Gwendolyn Jones, 47, a mother of
five, in the city's Fairywood section that
same month.
Often the victims aren't innocents. Clayton
Wright, 19, was carrying about 30 packets of
crack cocaine when someone shot him off
his bike late May 17 in Hazelwood. Wright
had three outstanding arrest warrants for
drugs and burglary, court records show.
He also had a baby daughter, Nevaeh, or
"Heaven" spelled backward, Terri Wright
said as she caressed her son's body at the
funeral home. A snapshot of the baby
bouncing on her father's knee, with
grandmother beaming alongside, leaned on
Wright's coffin lid, next to a red "World's
Best Dad" ribbon.
Tim Stevens, head of the Pittsburgh branch
of the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, said he
has grown increasingly pessimistic about
halting black-on-black violence.
"Somehow we need to stop this, because
we're going to spin ourselves into an eternity
of devastation that will be so deep we will
never climb out of it," he said.
Adrienne Young founded Tree of Hope, a
group that helps families who have lost
loved ones to murder. Her son, Javon, was
a freshman at Carnegie Mellon University
when he died in 1994 during a robbery. He
had no police record and was an excellent
student, she said.
"There's lots of mothers out there who think
as long as their son is helping them pay the
light bill or make a car payment, or buy a
house -- and I know people like this -- that
whatever he's doing is all right, until he gets
killed," she said. "I say to them, 'Don't you
realize you were a part of your son's
demise?'"
Worse than expected
Murder in Pittsburgh and other American
cities peaked during the crack-fueled gang
wars of the early 1990s. By the mid-1990s,
the killings had begun a steady decline as
death and prison wore down the crack trade.
But the body count is creeping back up. The
increase here is due almost entirely to
murders of blacks, which have doubled in
Allegheny County since 2000.
Turf battles over cheap heroin spur many
killings, police and experts say.
Alfred Blumstein, a nationally recognized
crime expert and professor at Carnegie
Mellon University, is part of a research team
trying to determine which "root causes" are
consistent with high murder rates.
Looking at 67 U.S. cities of 250,000 or more
people, the research team used statistics
such as poverty, male unemployment, single
motherhood and race to predict expected
murder rates for each city.
They concluded Pittsburgh's 2002 murder
rate of 14 per 100,000 people was
significantly higher than it should have been.
Last year's rate shot up to 21 per 100,000.
Statistics can't describe the pain of Clifford
Wilson, 45, a Homewood resident for 35
years. His son, Preston Wilson, 19, was
gunned down in North Braddock in
September.
"When I was coming up as a kid, it was
nowhere like the way it is now," he said.
"There was unity in the community. There
were fights, but we settled them with our
fists. But then crack got in, and it just went
crazy."
Wilson said his son was a drug dealer and
gang member who lived on his own. The
teen had a metal rod in his hip from a
previous shooting and was on crutches
when he was killed.
"You have these young kids out here. ... I
don't know, they're just savages, man,"
Wilson said.
Stopping the violence
Pittsburgh City Councilman Sala Udin said
the rise in black murders cries out for a
unified plan of action.
"There's enough insufficiency to go around
across the board," Udin said. "There's a lot
more that could be done by communities, by
the education system, by the job system, by
families, by churches, by individuals who
should be responsible for their own
behavior. And there is a hell of a lot more
that could be done with a coordinated attack
by law enforcement."
Last month, the U.S. Department of Justice
announced it would send violent crime
impact teams from the Bureau of Alcohol,
Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to 15
cities, including Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh's team, which includes 14 federal
agents, five city police detectives and a
county sheriff's deputy, will spend the rest of
the year in Homewood, the North Side and
the Hill District. They have identified about
60 violent repeat offenders who will be
monitored closely, said Mary Beth
Buchanan, U.S. attorney for the Western
District of Pennsylvania.
It's the latest in a series of federal anti-crime
efforts. Buchanan's office this year has
distributed about $758,000 in federal money
to fight gun crime.
She also has stepped up firearms
prosecutions, combing through police arrest
records to find people eligible for stiffer
federal sentences.
In the first 10 months of the 2004 fiscal year,
her office -- armed with a new prosecutor
dedicated solely to gun crimes -- brought
indictments on federal gun charges against
94 people, already more than double last
year's total.
Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines for
illegal gun possession range from probation
to a prison sentence of at least three years
for people with a history of violent crime. In
contrast, the federal minimum sentence for
having a gun while selling drugs is five years
on top of the drug charge, and those with a
history of drug arrests get 15 years without
parole, even if they never drew the weapon.
Defense attorney Ralph Karsh said a young
man caught with a gun and crack cocaine
for the second time came to him shellshocked. He had been told the three-year
state sentence he expected is now
potentially 15 years in federal prison.
"I guess it all depends on your viewpoint, but
to me, that's absurd to do to a 19-year-old
kid," Karsh said. "... The belief is it will give
us some piece of mind, because that person
is gone. But someone can take his place on
the corner in five minutes."
The tactics signal a big strategy change. In
recent years, Pennsylvania's Western
District consistently has had among the
smallest caseloads of federal weapons
charges in the nation.
In fiscal 2003, 38 new defendants faced
weapons charges in the district. Alaska, with
one-sixth the population, had 34.
Buchanan said that until recently, her office
spent more time on narcotics investigations
and pursuing illegal gun sales.
The victims
A record 125 people were killed in Allegheny
County last year.
The fact is that most people in the region
have little to fear.
Only one in eight residents of Allegheny
County is black. But three in four of the
county's murder victims last year were
black, and the imbalance is growing.
Whites kill whites too, but the number of
white murders has changed little since 1990,
hovering at about 30 a year. Fewer than 10
percent of homicides last year involved
whites killing blacks, or vice versa.
And while murders of innocent bystanders
draw more attention, most black victims here
and across the nation are men in their late
teens or early 20s, usually involved in selling
drugs, shot by other young black men in
neighborhoods like Homewood, the Hill
District and the North Side.
About 70 percent of Pittsburgh murder
victims last year had criminal records,
according to police statistics. Those victims
averaged more than five arrests, mostly for
drugs.
"A lot of the killing now is because dealers
can't ask for police protection," said
Pittsburgh police Deputy Chief William
Mullen. "They're carrying a lot of valuable
heroin, so they're easy robbery targets."
Jason Perminter, 24, of Crafton, knows
about the dangers. Someone fatally shot his
brother, Justin Perminter, 18, on Federal
Street on the North Side two years ago.
Police said the slaying stemmed from a
drug-dealing turf dispute.
Jason Perminter was at the Allegheny
County Courthouse in May facing charges
as a heroin dealer. He said the drugs were
just for him.
"You gotta get the guns off the streets for
(the violence) to be stopped," Perminter said
as he headed for the courtroom.
Sure, he admitted, he had carried his own
unlicensed 9 mm pistol. But he said it was
stolen recently, and he doesn't want to risk
carrying another one because getting caught
now could mean federal time. So he takes
other precautions.
"I don't really go out into the street now, so
many people getting killed," Perminter said.
Arms race
Each year, city police seize more guns than
the last. In 2003 Pittsburgh cops made 472
arrests for gun violations, up 75 percent
from just three years earlier.
Detective Jason Snyder, 33, leads the city's
"impact squad," a four-member plainclothes
team that focuses on firearms and drug
arrests in the city's most dangerous
neighborhoods.
Snyder's team got off to a productive start in
2004. Arriving in Homewood just before
midnight on New Year's Eve, he and
Detective Ed Fallert, 37, chased down and
caught one man with an illegal gun. They
were waiting for the transport to take him in
for booking when the clock struck midnight.
"It just erupted. It was like Iraq," Snyder said
of the roar of celebratory gunfire. Before the
shift was up, Snyder and Fallert had two
more arrests.
Fallert, Snyder and Detective Mark Goob
said they get little help in the neighborhoods
they patrol.
"We're always wrong. We're always
'harassing' their son. We're not always out
there, policing that neighborhood to make it
better. We're harassing them," Snyder said.
Detective Dennis Logan, 43, who is black, is
the city's senior homicide investigator. He
grew up in the St. Clair Village projects. He
admired the local gang when he was a boy.
"I thought they were the cool guys. They had
a fancy car and all," Logan said.
Then one of them helped firebomb the
house of Logan's childhood sweetheart,
killing her and her older brother in retaliation
for a fight. Logan became a cop.
"I've been on the job long enough now that a
lot of people who didn't hear nothing, see
nothing, know nothing -- now I'm standing
over their son's body, and they're (asking),
'Why won't somebody come forward?'" he
said.
"And you almost want to say, 'Well,
remember I interviewed you last year? Now
you want everybody to come forth, but when
I talked to you last summer, you said, "I ain't
no snitch. I ain't got nothing to do with
that."'"
Sometimes witnesses are scared, Logan
said. Many times, they want vengeance and
prefer to take care of the matter themselves.
Homewood
In an infamous case from 2002, masked
men sprayed a Homewood sandwich shop
with gunfire, killing 8-year-old Taylor Coles,
her father and another man and wounding
her mother.
After neighbors and authorities responded
with indignation, the shootings subsided.
Only one more person was killed in
Homewood that year.
"After Taylor Coles got killed, there was a
community meeting, and 500 people came,"
said Valerie Dixon, of East Liberty, a victims
advocate for the county juvenile courts. Her
son was murdered in 2001.
"But by the 11th and 12th meeting, it was
20. After that, it was just the people who
organized the meeting," she said. "People
are not committed."
Last year, Homewood again was the most
violent neighborhood, with 11 slayings.
Seven other Homewood residents were
killed nearby.
Men argued loudly at a Homewood
barbershop recently about who's to blame.
One customer blamed the violence on a lack
of jobs, saying murders declined during the
economic boom years under Bill Clinton but
are rising under George W. Bush.
That set off Pete Glover, 46. He served time
in prison for simple assault. Now, he said,
he tries to talk sense to the young men who
come to take their turn in his barber chair.
"It's not a political thing, man. It's a
community thing. How can we direct
anything to the politicians when we can't
straighten out our own community right
here?" Glover said.
Even where employment opportunities exist,
the wages can't compete with the hundreds,
or thousands, of dollars to be made on a
good weekend selling heroin.
Philadelphia native Ron "Karim" Watson Jr.,
43, said he moved to Pittsburgh to turn his
life around after four years in prison for
armed robbery.
Watson said he makes a decent living now
as a crane operator. He goes to bars in
Homewood and elsewhere to recruit workers
for the union, with varying success.
"Some guys will pull out $2,000," he said.
"They say, 'This is my job.' I say to them,
'But you might not live to be 30.'"
Detective Logan, trying to coax statements
or confessions out of recalcitrant witnesses
or suspected killers day after day,
sometimes wonders what he is
accomplishing.
"There are so many people that I've
interviewed in the past that are either dead
now or in jail," he said.
"You saw it coming, but there's nothing you
can do about it, because there's nothing the
family can do about it. ... Once they get to a
certain stage of life, they're not going to
listen to anybody."