Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, February 3, 1993 TAG: 9302030155
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
FEARFUL, BULLET-PLAGUED NIGHTS RETURN AS OUTSIDERS DISRUPT NEIGHBORHOOD
Slowly, quietly, people along Glengary Avenue Northwest peeked out windows and called neighbors Tuesday to learn what the shooting had been all about."When a gun goes off, you hide your head," said a 70-year-old woman, at home with a broken hip.
She'd fallen asleep watching TV on her couch about 1:30 a.m. She awakened to hear what sounded like a young woman hollering and running across her yard, her clothing brushing against a window screen.
A few doors away, a bullet ripped through a front door and narrowly missed the heart of a young visitor. Shot in the chest as he sat in a gold armchair, 19-year-old Dennis Wayne Rivens was in "very serious" condition Tuesday night at Roanoke Memorial Hospital.
Police were investigating reports that the shooting followed an argument between one of the three young men arrested and his former girlfriend.
There have been two drug-related shooting deaths in Lansdowne Park in two years. But crime there along Salem Turnpike has never been anywhere close to the worst in Roanoke.
Now, though, teen-agers driving in with guns are turning it into a community of frightened stay-at-homes.
"Young teen-agers - they're our most dangerous commodity right now. They'll shoot somebody in a hot second," said Jamie Booker, president of Lansdowne Park's resident council.
Residents speak almost kindly of older drug dealers who drive in, do their business in their cars and leave after they've sold their wares.
Residents long for a community-oriented police unit, a popular Roanoke force credited with reducing crime elsewhere.
Maj. Jake Viar said there are only nine officers on the COPE force right now and everybody wants them. "We can cover just so much territory," he said.
A man in late middle-age and a young woman are among those living in the apartment in the 2700 block of Glengary where Rivens was wounded. They refused to give their names or be photographed Tuesday. "I ain't getting shot," said the woman.
Appearing to be in her late teens, she was highly conversant about guns. Three young guys had walked down her street "with a 38, a 380 and a 25" right before the shooting, she said.
Those numbers mean a .38-caliber revolver and .38- and .25-caliber automatic pistols.
She and the man examined five bullet marks on their front door Tuesday morning - four indentations in the metal of their screen door and a hole through the screen and the wooden door.
The man thought the hole could have been made by the .25, but the woman, irked at his lesser acquaintance with firepower, said no, it probably was a .38.
There was a hole, too, in a window screen. The woman said that her boyfriend had opened the curtain and put up the window. "They were trying to shoot him," she said, but he was unharmed.
A man living nearby said that before the shooting, he heard a loud argument in the street. "Somebody said, `Go on and do it! Go on and do it!' "
Charged with malicious wounding, shooting into an occupied dwelling and possession of a firearm in a felony were Jermaine Lamont Johnson, 19, of Rorer Avenue Southwest; Anthony Deron Waker, 23, of the same street; and Anthony Kasey, 19, of Loudon Avenue Northwest.
Stopping work Tuesday on a jigsaw puzzle picturing a mountain waterfall, Wanda Hurley, a 62-year-old resident of adjacent Milton Street, said she and her older neighbors are scared.
When she complains to other neighbors about gunshots, though, "They say they're not shooting at people, they're shooting squirrels. Then you pick up the paper and somebody's been shot in Lansdowne."
At least one pizza delivery company won't deliver to Hurley after dark.
A man said that the 2700 block of Glengary is the scene of some wild partying. "They get out smoking pot and drinking and they go a little bit nuts. Don't quote my name," he warned. "They'd be on me like a flea on dogs.
"Stuff's been going on like that for two or three months or more," he said, "and the Housing Authority won't do nothing about it."
Jamie Booker, 31, the resident council president, has lived at Lansdowne Park for most of the past 15 years.
It once was a quiet place, a racially mixed neighborhood where most people got along well.
"We're not all poor, bad, degraded citizens," Booker said. "Our friends are here. Some people feel safer here than about any other place in the city."
A couple of years ago, somebody started running guns out of an apartment. There was shooting almost every night and drug dealers hung out on every corner, she said. The people of Lansdowne and police drove many of them away.
Before things get that bad again, Booker needs help.
Block captains are being appointed for a new neighborhood watch. She needs neighbors to report crime.
She wants the city to send her a community-oriented police unit. Even a police officer driving through gets the kids off the streets.
She wants speed bumps for Lansdowne Park's streets.
And she wants the Roanoke Redevelopment and Housing Authority, her landlord, to do thorough checks on prospective residents. "If there's a murderer next door to me," she said, "I want to know about it."
With help, people could get back to nights without gunfire. "We know how good it can be," she said of life there, "and we know how bad it can be."
Staff writers Laurence Hammack and Ron Brown contributed information for this story