When someone terrorizes your city street, who are you going to call?
Like most people, our neighbors last year called the police when a group of boys started causing trouble on our otherwise peaceful North St. Louis block.
The boys started fights, they fired guns at people and up in the air, they burglarized, robbed people and stole cars.
Their older sister, with whom they were living in the 4400 block of Ashland Street, was a loud mouth who defended them and sometimes started trouble herself.
So whenever they got violently out of control, we called the police. It often took them a long time to roll on the scene. The slow response heightened fear that one day the police would be too late and a life would be lost or severely damaged.
An increased patrol presence, based on call volume, would have been logically proactive, but that didn’t seem to happen either.
I hate guns, but started feeling that I needed to protect myself and my family, since it seemed the police department was failing to do so.
But buying a gun and taking the law into my own hands was out of the question. Instead, I told a police officer (who had responded, yet again) that we were scared that something bad was going to happen and I asked him if anything additional could be done.
He said to continue calling the police every time the youth did something and their house would soon be labeled a nuisance and they would be forced to vacate the premises.
We did keep calling, but the woman still lives there – after our worst fear came to life.
In October of last year, two brothers living with the woman broke into the home of the block’s eldest person. They robbed him, strangled him to death with telephone cord and took his car.
Mr. Ira Reese was 81-years-old and primarily stayed to himself.
When my neighbors and I walked outside the next morning to a crime scene, with police officers going in and out of Mr. Reese’s house, we already knew who was likely responsible. And we were right.
A week before, one of my neighbors had told a boy and a young man to get off Mr. Reese’s porch and stop cussing him. Now this neighbor led the police to the stolen car, parked at one of the boy’s mother’s house. Police found the boy there with the keys.
The young man was hiding in his sister’s apartment. Police already had talked to her, but it wasn’t until they finally listened to neighbors’ informed suspicions that they found the perpetrators.
James “JJ” Thomas, age 17, and 27-year-old Louis Wallace are now serving time for the 2nd degree murder of Mr. Reese, burglary and car theft.
Two days before their trial in February of this year, some of their acquaintances fired shots at the neighbor who had helped police bring the two brothers to justice for the heinous crime that we feel could have been prevented. One that day, they shot at this neighbor on three different occasions.
More shootings happened. Just last week, people who frequent the same house allegedly shot again at the helpful neighbor. That neighbor obviously feared for his life.
He now sits in police custody, charged with armed criminal action and assault, though no one was injured. He felt that the cops weren’t protecting him, though he had made pleas and told them about the situation.
Now, he’s in jail for trying to save his own life and Mr. Reece is dead. But the lady still occupies the house, and bad boys still frequent it.
“These are bogus charges,” this neighbor said, after calling this reporter yesterday.
“It’s in the computer that I’m a state witness, so they should have been protecting me, but when they came to my mother’s house they didn’t even take pictures (of the gunshots the boys allegedly had fired at his mother’s home),” he said.
“They have me in here because they’re trying to protect me and they should have been doing that before,” he said.
According the Victim Services Unit in the St. Louis Circuit Attorney’s Office, the neighbor (as a witness) is eligible for protective services.
Meanwhile, the woman still lives in the 4400 Block of Ashland. And neighbors don’t know when the boys will strike again or the degree of harm they might do.
Who can you call if they do?
The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department couldn’t verify whether or not the violence in the block had affected patrol or if the house is considered a nuisance by press time.