THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, October 29, 1995 TAG: 9510290048
SECTION: LOCAL PAGE: B1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY EARL SWIFT, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: NORFOLK LENGTH: Long : 142 lines
The beach begins just a few feet from Shirley Dean's Ocean View apartment buildings. Its sand, fine and near-white, spills over a low wall into Dean's parking lot, blows into tiny drifts against cars and apartments, cushions the feet of playing children. Beyond the wall, it gleams bright on its long descent to the water's edge.
Dean's buildings are wind-battered and ramshackle, the entries to some units reached only via odysseys on stair and catwalk. But until this year, tenants came and stayed, some for years, drawn by the sand and the water and the relative safety of the place. Trouble was rare here. Vacancies, few.
Then came a terrible Friday night in February. In the weeks that followed, Dean saw tenant after tenant move out. Newcomers shied away.
She discovered that some crimes produce a roster of victims, most of whom one never hears or reads about. Her apartment complex was among them.
The place was haunted by that February night. Its units stayed vacant, and Dean's income plummeted. And as weeks turned into months, the ghost refused to leave.
Last Tuesday, after an eight-month struggle to keep her business afloat, Dean filed for bankruptcy protection.
On the same day, Lamont Jacob Hines, a Norfolk 20-year-old, pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in the death of David A. Muse, who had lived in Dean's buildings.
Muse's was the farthest-flung of the property's 18 units, a full minute's walk across a driveway, up an outdoor staircase, along a catwalk and down an interior hallway from Dean's home and office.
Police say that at about 8:30 p.m. on Feb. 6, Hines and two 16-year-old friends stole along that route. When Muse answered their knocks, they strode into his apartment with guns drawn.
Muse, 53, and his girlfriend, Brenda, were entertaining three friends. Court papers say the intruders forced all of them onto the floor, then demanded money and drugs. Muse turned over about a pound of marijuana. His guests coughed up $180 in cash. The robbers fled.
Muse had been an easy mark - so easy that, police say, Hines and one of his teenage accomplices, Dameon Carter, returned for more on Feb. 17. This time, Muse put up a fight. While he struggled to keep them out of his apartment, one of the men fired four bullets through his door.
Dean says she was not told of the earlier robbery. ``We'd never even had a break-in here. We never had any trouble,'' she said. ``We had a few domestic disputes, the normal sort of stuff that you get, but that was about it.''
But there was no mistaking the sounds she heard as she watched TV that night. ``It sounded like champagne corks. For some reason, I knew what it was. I didn't exactly know who or where, but I knew.
``Then I heard a bunch of screaming.''
Muse died early the next morning, struck by two bullets. As upsetting as that was, a friend in the real estate business predicted that Dean had not yet begun to feel the shooting's after-effects. ``He told me,'' she said, `` `They'll all bail. You just wait.' ''
She didn't have to wait for long. Five days after the shooting, a tenant announced she was leaving. Others quickly followed.
``Especially some of the single women,'' said Dean, who works part-time as a real estate agent and shares one of the complex's units with her husband. ``What can you say? You can't tell them, `No.' If they wanted to leave, they wanted to leave.
``One gal, she had lived here a year and a half, two years, and she knew it wasn't our fault. But she left.''
It didn't help that Muse, a three-year resident, had been well-known to the other tenants - viewed, as one neighbor put it, as ``nobody to be afraid of,'' despite his apparent involvement in marijuana peddling.
A longtime tenant, Greg, described the exodus as ``an instant move for three or four'' of his neighbors. ``And the time of year it happened was the worst time of year it could have happened - winter, on the beach. People cleared out and not many were looking to move in.''
Dean's is not the first business to encounter the stigma that comes with a killing on the premises.
On Dec. 1, 1993, a masked gunman confronted Robert T. Baker and his girlfriend as the couple left Even Steven's, a Virginia Beach country-western nightclub.
Baker told the bandit he had no money. The stranger replied by shooting him in the chest, and Baker died at a hospital a little more than an hour later.
``I think it happened on a Wednesday, and of course we shut down that night,'' said Eric Stevens, the saloon's owner and an on-air mainstay at WCMS-FM. ``The following weekend, I guarantee we didn't do 25 percent of what we had been doing. It scared the hell out of me.
``I used to do a lot of business with ladies - groups of ladies coming out - because it was considered a safe place,'' he said. ``Not after that. It was a mess. Just a mess.''
Stevens hired security guards to patrol his parking lot. It made no difference. ``I couldn't beg people to come back in there,'' he said. ``That place had been open for 11 years, and suddenly, everybody was gone. And the business never came back. Never.''
Five months after the shooting, Stevens shut the nightclub down. His corporation declared bankruptcy. A new restaurant, the Still and Grill, opened in the same space a full year after Baker's death, but even today some of the stigma remains.
``I was in a restaurant the other night,'' Stevens said, ``and I mentioned the Still and Grill to a waitress, and she asked me where it was. And I said, `You remember where Even Steven's used to be?'
``And she said: `Oh, yeah - that's the place where that guy was shot.' ''
Some of Muse's former neighbors stayed put. ``I live here,'' Greg explained. ``I might be scared, but they're not going to run me off that easy. I like it here. In the seven years I'd lived here, we'd never had any trouble here.''
Still, Dean's situation grew dire. ``The place was more than half-empty, and the whole time we'd been here, I had never had more than one or two apartments unrented at a time,'' she said. ``I was struggling just to pay the water bill.''
In addition to the units emptied by fleeing tenants, she also had to contend with Muse's old apartment. The police had seized its front door as evidence. A bullet had punctured its refrigerator. Its entry was coated, floor to ceiling, with black fingerprint powder.
It would cost money and time to return it to money-making condition.
``It was a mess,'' she said. ``We were so discouraged we just left it.''
The epilogue to Muse's death will be written in coming months.
Lamont Hines faces sentencing early next year on the second-degree murder charge, as well as charges of armed burglary, possession of cocaine, use of a firearm and two counts of robbery.
Before then he is expected to testify against Dameon Carter, his alleged partner, who police say was recognized by a witness during the shooting and whom Hines has fingered as the trigger man.
In Ocean View, meanwhile, Dean's fortunes could worsen.
She financed her purchase of the apartments through their former owner, who she said was more understanding about her dilemma than a bank would have been.
Even so, he became impatient as Dean's struggle to make ends meet continued into the fall. This month, he put the apartments back on the market.
Whether she'll keep them remains to be seen.
``It's so upsetting,'' she said, shaking her head in her complex's parking lot, looking out onto the beach that doesn't seem the draw it once was.
``I'm not a screamer, or anything. But it gets you depressed.'' ILLUSTRATION: Color photo
HUY NGUYEN/The Virginian-Pilot
Shirley Dean, at a door that leads to the unit where David A. Muse
was fatally shot, says a friend warned her after the crime that her
tenants would leave. ``He told me, `They'll all bail. You just
wait.' ''
by CNB