HE PLANNED TO MOVE OUT BUT THEN WAS KILLED

Victim Complained About Drug Dealers

OVER-THE-RHINE - He was days away from getting a new place to live,
from moving away from the corner where he repeatedly complained that
drug dealers made his life miserable.

Instead, Terrance Carlisle was shot to death Friday in his apartment
on the first floor of a 120-year-old brick building at McMicken Avenue
and Lang Street. It's a corner infested with drugs. In Carlisle's
front door, after the 10:30 a.m. shooting: three bullet holes.

Carlisle, 31, who was mentally ill, often complained to police about
drug dealers in the neighborhood. He told police that dealers would
invade his apartment and were sleeping inside. But when police came to
talk to him, he told officers that he let the drug dealers inside,
said Stephen Schubart, executive director of Sign of the Cross
housing, which owns the building.

Schubert said he knew that Carlisle's social worker had twice been
turned away by a suspected drug dealer, who stood at the door of
Carlisle's apartment with a pit bull.

Police won't say whether they have a motive or a suspect in the city's
12th killing of 2005. Nor will they disclose whether Carlisle's
complaints about drug dealers led to his death.

Part of the difficulty trying to help the mentally ill, Schubart said,
is that they are sometimes confused, and sometimes they unwittingly
help the very drug dealers who are taking advantage of them. They also
sell their victims' medication, he said, and trade it for street drugs.

Capt. James Whalen, District 1 commander, said he was unaware of any
history of complaints from Carlisle or about problems at the address.

But officers with Whalen's Violent Crimes Squad said the corner is one
of their drug hot spots.

Officers went to the area around Carlisle's apartment building about
10:30 a.m. Friday after getting a call that shots had been fired. But
police did not find any evidence of a shooting.

An hour later, another person called police to report that a man was
shot inside an apartment in the building. That's when officers found
Carlisle. He was dead.

Officials at Sign of the Cross housing were not certain of Carlisle's
diagnosis, but they and neighbors said he was lucid when he took his
medication.

But when he didn't, he would become confused and sometimes imagined
things that weren't real.

"It's almost like you could see this coming," said Leroy Owens, the
agency's director of programs and outreach.

Carlisle had been placed in the Sign of the Cross apartment by another
agency, Mercy Franciscan Home Development, Owens said. Officials at
Mercy Franciscan declined to discuss Carlisle, citing client
confidentiality.

Owens said Mercy Franciscan had located a new apartment for Carlisle -
"somewhere safer." He said Carlisle liked the place when he saw it,
but when Mercy went to move him, he didn't want to go.

Sharon Glenn, who lived above Carlisle in the building, said she last
saw him Sunday, when she took him a heaping plate of macaroni and
cheese, candied yams and fried chicken. He told her that he would "eat
on it for three days."

"He sure didn't bother nothing or nobody," she said. "He was a nice,
good boy."