THEIR VIOLENT END

GREENSBORO -- The bullet ripped through Christopher Harmon's skull, leaving
him for dead on the cold asphalt outside the Enigma nightclub.

His death in late January touched the N.C. A&T community, where Harmon was a
20-year-old junior who dreamed of one day practicing law. Dozens of students
attended Harmon's funeral. A week later, hundreds of friends and family
members marched on the campus in Harmon's memory.

Even the city's most hardened homicide detectives described the shooting as
cold-blooded and senseless. But as for the nature of the killing, it was
business as usual.

Under scrutiny, Harmon's death falls into some familiar patterns for
Greensboro. Consider:

* Harmon was a black man killed by another black man -- a trend that hasn't
changed in more than a decade in Greensboro. Eleven of this year's 17
victims were black men. Since 1993, 60 percent of the city's homicide
victims -- and more than 70 percent of offenders -- were black men.

Those numbers are dramatically higher than across the state and nationwide,
where 40 percent of all homicide victims over the same period were black
men, and about half their killers were. But they are normal for the state's
largest cities.

* Like eight of this year's victims, Harmon was between 18 and 34 years old.
For the past decade in Greensboro, two-thirds of all adult victims didn't
reach their 35th birthday.

* And like most of the city's homicide victims, Harmon was killed by a gun.

Young. Black. Dead from gunfire. This is the profile of five of the city's
homicides this year and a majority of the 281 slayings since 1993.

The trend held true Thursday, when police found 26-year-old Tony Lamont
Wilkes dead behind a house on South English Street.

Hours earlier, witnesses said, Wilkes shot Reginald Graves outside the
Raleigh Street Pool Room. Graves, who is 27, was treated for multiple
gunshot wounds. Police have not made an arrest but said the shootings appear
related.

"I think probably it's typical," Greensboro police Capt. Gary Hastings said
about the city's most recent killing. "Based on the statistics, it would fit
with what we have seen."

Wilkes' death was the city's 17th homicide this year, after 31 last year.
The killings have become so common that, in some neighborhoods, they are
something of the mundane.

Bozi Baare, a 31-year-old immigrant from Niger, was gunned down last month
in his Lexus near Claremont Courts apartments in northeast Greensboro.
Residents seemed indifferent to the killing.

"Nobody cried, nobody screamed, everyone just stood around talking about
it," Greensboro homicide Detective David Spagnola said. "There's no social
shock. It's just so common."

The predictability of Greensboro's killings may help explain this. When
detectives are summoned to a crime, they know what they most likely will
find: drugs, guns and the vestige of short tempers.

Nearly a third of Greensboro's killings in the past decade have been
drug-related. Police statistics show that number has jumped to almost 40
percent in the past five years.

In the city's only drug-related homicide this year, 20-year-old Samir Habib
Spruiel was shot in a house on McConnell Road and died two days later.
Police attributed the shooting to a turf war between dealers, although no
arrest has been made.

Drugs are a big reason Greensboro has bucked a statewide trend of decreasing
homicides.

Across the state, homicides are down 30 percent from 1993. In Winston-Salem
they dropped 60 percent in that time; in Raleigh homicides decreased 25
percent.

But after a dip from 1998 to 2001, Greensboro suffered more homicides last
year than a decade ago. And the city is on track to reach the same number
this year. Greensboro's 17 homicides this year are almost three times as
many as Winston-Salem's six.

Ten of Greensboro's 31 homicide victims last year were killed during drug
disputes. In 2000, more than half of the city's homicides were drug-related.

Most drug-related homicides have more to do with money than drugs, said
Greensboro homicide Detective Norman Rankin.

"I haven't seen a murder where they went in and killed that person because
they wanted their drugs," Rankin said. "They want the money. They know the
drug dealers have the money."

Add the 9 percent of homicides that occur during a robbery, and money is the
underlying motive to four in 10 of the city's homicides over the past
decade.

The numbers help explain why a majority of Greensboro's homicides occur in
poor neighborhoods, where black people tend to make up a majority of the
population. According to the 2000 U.S. Census, 18 percent of the city's
blacks live in poverty, compared to 7 percent of whites.

Almost all of the city's other homicides have one thing in common: heated
arguments.

Those arguments are often with an "acquaintance," a term police use to
loosely describe anyone from a virtual stranger to a close friend. It's a
catch-all for any homicide that isn't the result a robbery gone bad or part
of a drug, gang or domestic dispute.

Police have investigated eight "acquaintance" killings this year -- one more
than all of 2002. Four of the victims knew their killers well.

Police have not determined the circumstance of three of this year's victims:
44-year-old Hazelene Harper-Fields, 39-year-old Darryl Cooper and Wilkes,
and they attribute gang activity to the death of 16-year-old Tyquarius
Legrand.

Arguments with acquaintances contributed to about 30 percent of Greensboro's
slayings in the past decade.

That's how police say 74-year-old Jasper Pressley died this year. Pressley
was found stabbed to death in his house in March. Police charged his friend
and handyman, 28-year-old Tony Lee Johnson, with killing Pressley after an
argument.

In another 20 percent of homicides, victims are related to their killers or
involved in an intimate relationship with them. These killings reached a
10-year high last year, when 12 people died in domestic disputes.

In January, 35-year-old Charles Cofield was stabbed to death by his
girlfriend in what was later ruled justifiable homicide. Constance Bryant,
who is 28, stabbed Cofield with a steak knife after he sprayed oven cleaner
in her face during a fight, police said.

The common thread for homicides in each of these scenarios is how quickly an
argument turns violent, said Saundra Westervelt, an associate professor of
sociology at UNCG.

"(Homicide is) something that arises out of the moment. It's not planned.
It's not premeditated. It's not schemed," Westervelt said. "It's 'I've got a
broken beer bottle in my hand, and I'm mad at you and going to do something
about it.'"

Rare is the homicide in Greensboro that is premeditated or a result of
random violence, Hastings said.

Eugene Gary and Damian Davis may have been exceptions this year.

Gary, a 74-year-old grandfather, was gunned down while sipping coffee on his
front porch near Warnersville Park in May. Police have charged Levar
Chawayne Johnson, 26, with the killing. Police have released few details in
the shooting except that they believe Johnson went to the house that morning
bent on killing someone.

Davis, a 24-year-old Guilford County jail guard, was found stabbed to death
in his apartment in March. Police said a former inmate of his, 19-year-old
Loronto Jennings, met Davis at his apartment with plans to kill the
unsuspecting guard.

A proliferation of guns in Greensboro -- especially in poor, urban areas
where black people make up the majority of the population - is stymieing
efforts to cut down on violent crime, according to police.

"Nobody gets beat up anymore. It's too easy to get a gun," Spagnola said.
"It's gotten to the point where I'm afraid to make a stop if I'm unarmed."

The year's seven stabbing victims make it an abnormal year for a city where
more than 70 percent of homicide victims are killed by guns.

Rankin points to a "five-to 10-minute window" during arguments in which
someone decides to use a gun in a fit of passion.

In poor neighborhoods where robberies and street-drug sales are more common,
more people are carrying guns and are likely to use them, he said.

"If I'm hanging out on the street corner with 10 friends and eight of them
have guns, I'm going to get a gun," Rankin said. "If I get in a fight with
one of those friends, what is the sure way I'm going to win? I'm going to
pull my gun."

Former Greensboro homicide Detective Bobby Edwards saw this scenario play
out on a horrifying scale in 1997 during one of the biggest rashes of
killings the city has seen in a decade.

Groups of men from several southeast neighborhoods gunned each other down in
ongoing disputes. In one month, five people were dead, and 11 more were
wounded between South Eugene Street and Freeman Mill Road.

"For two to three weeks there, it was chaos," Edwards said. "Every time we
turned around, they were just dropping left and right."

Most men had connections to drugs and were heavily armed, said Edwards, who
now works in the police department's special intelligence division.

Responding to an alarming number of killings at the hands of felons, the
Greensboro police Violent Crimes Task Force started tracking every gun
officers came across this year. Detectives trace the gun to its buyer and
enter ballistics information into a national database.

"We're finding that a lot of felons are finding guns on the street,"
Hastings said. "It's a problem that has always plagued us."

Sociologists cite a lack of role models and structured activities to keep
children away from drug-infested streets as a reason why more young, black
men choose to pick up guns rather than diplomas.

"They don't have the Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, trip to Spain during the
summer. They don't have ways in which to escape these situations that lead
to homicide," Westervelt said. "If you let the kids in the Boy Scouts loose
in the world without anything to do, they will find situations that lend
themselves to homicide."

When left to roam, men are more likely to be lured to dangerous
environments, Westervelt said, which may explain why women comprise only 17
percent of the city's homicide victims.

Deshante Brown's childhood environment had the biggest impact on the path he
chose.

Growing up in Hampton Homes, Brown said he wanted to be like older drug
dealers who wore gold jewelry and drove cars gleaming with chrome wheels.

He fired his first gun at 13 and started selling crack at 15 to afford new
shoes every few days and gold rings for every finger -- even though his
$8.50 an hour job as a restaurant chef covered most of his bills.

Today Brown shares a fate met by many dealers he grew up idolizing -- he is
not dead, but he is in jail.

A fistfight that turned into a shootout at Sussman Park in 1997 sealed
Brown's future. He gunned down 24-year-old Jeffrey Lamont Mahatha at the
corner of Florida Avenue and Randleman Road after Mahatha's gun jammed.
Brown was given a life sentence.

"Because I was around guns and drugs, that's what my lifestyle was. That's
what I was used to," Brown said. "If my mother had been a doctor or a
prominent lawyer or graduated college or had a master's, that's what I would
have strived for. If someone had said 'stay in school, you can be someone,'
I would have turned out different."

Rankin sees some merit to Brown's explanation. Growing up in the Ray Warren
Homes public housing community, Rankin was constantly pressured to join a
gang and hang out with drug dealers. To keep from trouble, Rankin, who is
black, found friends away from the public housing complex and sought out a
mentor in his dad's absence.

"I decided from an early age I didn't want to do that," Rankin said.

Rankin, named Greensboro's Officer of the Year in May, graduated from
Grimsley High School, where Brown dropped out in the ninth grade.

After a year pondering his life choices behind bars, Ronald Stewart Jr. says
Greensboro homicides mostly happen for two reasons.

"Pride is the biggest part," said Stewart, who is 21. "And nine times out of
10 drugs is involved -- whether they're dealing or taking them."

Stewart admits pride played a large role in landing him a 17-year sentence
for second-degree murder. When 30-year-old Timothy Jermaine Humphrey and
others beat up Stewart at the Mint Club last July, Stewart chased after
Humphrey in his Cadillac and shot out the driver's window, killing him.

"I didn't want to kill him," Stewart said. "I just wanted to let him know
you can't be doing that to me."

Stewart had a strict mother with a steady job at Moses Cone Hospital but
chose to sell drugs on the streets despite her lectures. Things might have
turned out differently, he said, if his dad had been around instead of
feeding a crack addiction.

Patricia McCall, sociology professor at N.C. State, said racism also seems
to play a role in the high number of black men killing each other. Racism
leads to deep-seeded feelings of resentment that can be manifested in
violence, she said.

Often that violence is directed at people closest to the person who feels
put down, rather than the root of the resentment, McCall said.

"You may not attack the person who turned you down for a job," McCall said.
"You may go out and take it out on someone in your family."

Westervelt notes the "dual burden" of being poor and black that can create
the deep emotions that spur homicide.

Brown and Stewart discount racism as a factor in homicides. Both dropped out
of high school in ninth grade to sell drugs and said they felt they could
have graduated high school to go onto steady jobs if they had chosen to.

"I could have been anything -- anything, if I set my mind to it," Brown
said. "I didn't set my mind to it. I was young and naive and lacking in
judgment."

But Chris Harmon was different.

Growing up in rural Jamesville, he lived 190 miles and a world away from
many of Greensboro's 164 black men who were killed in the past decade.

The A&T student went to a club like countless other college students in the
city Jan. 19 and left at closing time.

In the parking lot, an argument erupted between Harmon's friend and another
man. Harmon stepped between them. Several shots rang out. One hit Harmon in
the head.

"Chris Harmon should not have died," said Rankin, who investigated his
death. "A lot of them shouldn't have died."