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AVONDALE'S AGONY, CINCINNATI'S SHAME

Shooting Death Of Baseball Coach Galvanizes Efforts To Find Hope Amid
Violence That's Killed Seven Victims In Neighborhood This Year

AVONDALE - In a city that tallies at least 60 homicides a year, a few
stand out enough to make a neighborhood - and the city - take notice.

Cleveland Parker's death did.

The 57-year-old Avondale man died Tuesday when he was shot as he sat
on his couch, talking on the phone. Police say he was the random
victim of a drive-by shooting, killed by a bullet intended for
another tenant in the duplex.

With that shot, the dedicated and well-respected baseball coach
didn't just become Avondale's seventh homicide victim this year. He
became a symbol of the once-grand neighborhood's slide into violence,
a place where sitting on a living room couch at 7:20 p.m. can mean
being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

"There's just too much stuff going on around here. People are now
getting shot in the day, just like the other day. Cleveland Parker,
that was my friend," said Rayshawn Showes, 29, standing outside a
brick townhome where his children live on Burnet Avenue.

Showes lost another friend to violence this month.

Jemal A. Anderson, 29, died July 6 when a man shot him as he drove
his SUV near Martin Luther King Jr. Park. "That's how you know this
world is messed up. People are getting shot in broad daylight," he said.

The seven killings in Avondale so far this year are more than in any
other Cincinnati neighborhood - more than Over-the-Rhine, more than
the West End, one more than Bond Hill.

All but one of those homicides remain unsolved.

Carrie Stoney stands outside Networks Chicken Fish and More lifting a
forkful of cherry pie into her mouth. She watches unfazed as an old
man grabs a shovel and swings it at people who walk past his corner
spot at Burnet and Hearne avenues.

Such is life on one of the toughest street corners in the city,
Stoney says, where drugs are plentiful and so is the general feeling
of uneasiness.

"I keep out of it. I come out here for a bit. I go to my home and
shower and stay there," said Stoney, 57, a Networks employee. "The
way I was brought up, my momma said, 'Don't you mess with nobody and
don't get involved with nobody.' "

Stoney's approach is common here for many people - both young and old
- - who rush through daily errands to make it off the streets by
nightfall when the violence generally erupts.

"There's a lot of beefs out there. It could be over a girl. It could
be over a dude. It could be over scratching someone's car and it
could be over stepping on someone's gym shoes. This is 2005 and you
have got to play it safe out here," said Erica Webb, 26, who had just
gotten off a bus near the intersection of Rockdale Avenue and Reading Road.

Another Shooting

Just before 5 p.m. Friday a police cruiser flies down Burnet Avenue.

Reggie Scruggs, 49, grinds his teeth and he shakes his head.

"I bet there's been another shooting again," said Scruggs, who works
three jobs to make ends meet. "I just have this eerie feeling that
something very bad is going to happen."

There was another shooting.

Marvin "Big Will" Berry was shot in the abdomen after an apparent
break-in North Avondale.

"Why would they do that? These kids have gone crazy. I hope they find
them," said Carla Mooney, a childhood friend of Berry's who rushed
from work to the home Berry shares with his elderly mother.

Friday's shooting was the second time in a week a friend of Mooney's
has been shot.

As she talked her frustration was obvious. She apologized.

"Excuse me. I'm a Christian. But I just don't understand what has
happened," Mooney said. "With Cleveland, I was hurt. I was extremely
hurt. It's just so sad."

Many here say a few bad residents make life tough for so many more.

"I'd say 70 percent of the people here are good, hard-working people.
And the 30 percent, well they are the bottom of the barrel. There is
just no respect for life. I was born and raised in Avondale and you
know what really startles me a lot: (The people making the trouble)
are not scared to die, they are scared to live."

Children could play without worrying when Scruggs grew up. They cared
for their neighbors. They cared for one another.

"Now, I see 10-year-olds cussing like sailors. I see 12- and
13-year-olds selling drugs and carrying guns and they still got
Similac,baby formula on their breaths."

Solutions Hard To Find

As violence has crept into the neighborhood just northeast of
downtown, other long-time Avondale residents like Scruggs despair of
the crime and are just as confounded about the lack of solutions.

They're not alone.

Parker's death startled the city and reignited discussion about urban
violence last week - on talk radio, on the City Council campaign
trail and on the streets of Avondale.

"I don't know what it is," said Shanell Hill, 27. "Jealousy? They all
seem to hate each other instead of worrying about themselves. They
need to be working together to make it work and instead it's like
they want to be the last one standing."

"We passed along a lot of things, but we didn't pass along values and
discipline," said Adam Moore, 63, a retired butcher who grew up in
Avondale. "Our kids are out there now without any hope."

Lorean Woods, 67, retired and living in a seniors building on Reading
Road, said Congress should bring back the draft.

"Send them to Iraq and let them kill people over there," she said.

The Rev. Clarence Wallace said the issues are more complicated.

"We are dealing with a large concentration of guns and drugs matched
against a cadre of young blacks, facing unemployment, lack of
education, criminal records and no hope for the future," said
Wallace, 56, pastor of Carmel Presbyterian Church, Avondale.

"We are competing with the streets," he said. "I am not sure if the
church can reach that hardcore that needs to be reached."

Riots Marked Turning Point

Long-time Avondale residents remember when the intersection of
Rockdale and Reading - less than half a mile from Tuesday's drive-by
shooting of Parker - was a buzzing and thriving community with a
supermarket, a neighborhood theater, a clothing store, a furniture
store, restaurants, a pharmacy and several small businesses.

Even more so than Over-the-Rhine in 2001, Avondale became defined by
a turbulent period in its history: the spring riots of 1967 and 1968.

The arrest of a black man for loitering near the Abraham Lincoln
statue at Rockdale Avenue and Reading Road in June 1967 exploded in
widespread civil unrest, one of more than 100 riots that summer in
cities across the country.

Seven hundred Ohio National Guard officers were called in to restore
order. One person was killed, 63 injured and 404 people arrested.

Then, after the assassination of civil rights leader the Rev. Martin
Luther King Jr. in April 1968, Cincinnati was among more than 100
cities that experienced more urban violence.

Again the Ohio National Guard was summoned to Avondale, where two
people were killed and at least 220 were injured. Police arrested 260
people during two nights of violence.

Avondale was scarred by an estimated $3 million in property damage
from each riot. That was followed by decades of disinvestment and flight

For a proud and historic enclave that has been a center of worship
and learning - first Jewish synagogues, then black Baptist
congregations - the persistent and increasing violence has brought
with it a sense of hopelessness and frustration.

Showes used to be proud of the large "A 1" tattoo that covers most of
his forearm. The symbol once was a sign of unity for the young men
who grew up here. Now, the tattoo is a reminder of a neighborhood
crumbling because of crime and violence.

"Back then, we didn't fight with no guns. We'd fight and shake hands.
These days, they can't seem to fight without taking out their
pistols. This ain't no New York, this is Cincinnati."

When Bernadette Watson's family moved to Avondale in 1951, hers was
the first black family on the block. In fact, it was the first
non-Jewish family on the block.

But after the riots, the Orthodox Jews who had long populated
southern Avondale and the more liberal Reform Jews from the northern
part left for Roselawn, Amberley Village and Sycamore Township.

The massive exodus left Avondale without a stable base of homeowners
- - a problem exacerbated by the recent influx of subsidized housing,
Watson said. After the city tore down housing projects in the West
End, Avondale has trailed only Price Hill and Westwood in the
increase of federal Section 8 housing vouchers.

A Transient Society Hurts

Watson, a former Avondale Community Council president and now chief
of staff to Mayor Charlie Luken, doesn't like all the talk of a "turf
war" between young people in Avondale and Bond Hill.

Neither the young people shooting at each other - nor many of their
parents - own property in the neighborhood.

That's the problem.

"It's a transient society," she said.

A Place Of Contrasts

Avondale is one of those paradoxical Cincinnati neighborhoods where
the socioeconomic landscape changes from street to street, block to
block and house to house.

Last month, a 98-year-old, eight-bedroom mansion on South Fred
Shuttlesworth Circle sold for $319,000. Two doors down, an apartment
building sold for $92,000 less.

Avondale is one of six Uptown neighborhoods that make up Cincinnati's
second downtown, home to institutions like the Cincinnati Zoo and the
Urban League of Greater Cincinnati, the rebuilt and expanded Ronald
McDonald House, and the former Jewish and Bethesda Oak hospitals
which now serve as administrative headquarters for two large hospital groups.

Just across Avondale's border with Corryville along Erkenbrecher and
Burnet avenues, stands Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center,
one of the nation's most prominent pediatric centers. And right next
to Children's stands University Hospital and the University of
Cincinnati's medical research complex.

The neighborhood is also the birthplace of a conservative
crime-fighting institute, the Neighborhood Support Center, which uses
crime statistics to help neighborhoods fight drug dealing - and the
more liberal Community Problem Oriented Policing Center that came out
of the city's 2002 police reform accords.

The area also has one of the most active community councils in the city.

Cincinnati police officer Bryant Stewart called Avondale the toughest
beat in the District 4, which also includes Bond Hill, Roselawn, and
the neighborhoods north and east of downtown.

"But nothing's really changed. It's not that Avondale's gone buck
wild. It's summer, it's hot, people live in conditions where their
apartments are 110 degrees. So they come outside and problems start" he said.

Another factor, Stewart said, is that the people police arrest don't
stay in jail.

Denorris Houston, 19, who police say was the intended target of the
bullet that killed Cleveland Parker, was arrested after police found
five guns and four pounds of marijuana in his apartment. Parker lived
in the first-floor duplex unit; Houston rented the second-floor apartment.

Houston was out of jail hours after the shooting, after a bail
bondsman posted $50,000 in cash.

After his release, Houston said the gunmen shot at the wrong house
when they fired on the duplex in the 3400 block of Ridgeway.

Quick releases, Stewart said, put troublemakers back onto the same
streets to avenge old crimes and commit new ones.

A Call For Citizen Patrols

If crime in Avondale is up, it's not for a lack of civic capacity,
neighborhood leaders say.

"We care, but we do statistics. We love statistics," said Paul
McGhee, another former community council president who's running as
an independent for Cincinnati City Council. "You go to meetings, and
everybody talks. Then, we go to meetings to create another group so
we can have more meetings."

McGhee's solution is to have citizen groups to patrol the streets.

When a crowd of people go and stand where drug dealing is going on,
they move, he said. "It's like turning a light on. They go away."

The idea is echoed by Ozie Davis III, of the Avondale-based Local
Initiatives Support Corp.

The former Miami University football player said he has no problem
knocking on a neighbor's door and asking them to turn down the loud music.

"I'd never ask my wife" to knock on a neighbor's door, he offered.
"It's a frightening thing to do."

Uptown's Top Priority

Finding ways to support those volunteer efforts is the focus of the
Uptown Consortium, a group of institutions led by the University of
Cincinnati, the zoo and the hospitals.

"Avondale is our No. 1 priority," said consortium president Tony
Brown. "When you look at the crime data, nearly 45 percent of violent
crime in Uptown is in the Avondale community, and it's clustered in
just a few areas around Reading Road and Burnet Avenue - which also
happen to be very visible and highly trafficked."

But Brown said "lesser" crimes - car break-ins, thefts, vandalism and
drug dealing - make workers at Uptown hospitals and zoo visitors feel unsafe.

"When you look at thefts from autos and assaults, they don't get
reported in the media. But when they happen to students and visitors,
it makes the perception that the neighborhood is unsafe, and then the
word of mouth gets started," he said.

The group is hiring a full-time safety director, similar to Davis's
job with LISC, to coordinate neighborhood safety efforts concentrated
on statistically determined crime "hotspots." Investment in the
Burnet Avenue Redevelopment Plan - a multi-million-dollar makeover of
the business district at Avondale's western edge - will follow.

At the Cincinnati Zoo and Botanical Garden, attendance is down about
15 to 17 percent compared to last year - though zoo spokesman Chad
Yelton said that was more due to weather than anything else.

But crime had been a problem at the zoo. The zoo added police bike
patrols, cutting car break-ins from 40 at this time last year to two so far.

Even at Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center - in
Corryville, but just over the Avondale line - someone fired a bullet
through a seventh floor window in March of this year. No one was
injured in that as-yet-unsolved incident.

While the Uptown consortium is bringing more resources and more
energy to the community than Avondale has seen in decades, no one
sees a quick fix.

"It was a slow spiral downward, and it's going to be a slow spiral
upward," Watson said.