Series: Part Five - Article Two

IN THE WRONG PLACE

Though Most Murder Victims Are Caught Up In The City's Drug Culture, Some
Are Bystanders Who No More Expected A Bullet Than A Lightening Bolt.

The only lesson Naomi Dyson could take away from her sister's death was
this: Don't run; drop.

In the Central City neighborhood where her family grew up, "they shoot all
the time, so we weren't going to let that stop us from going outside," she
said.

And so it was that Gladys Dyson, 18, still bubbly from attending her junior
prom a few weeks before, was walking with a friend on Washington Avenue on
the night of May 28 when she was struck by a stray bullet as men in two
cars roaring up the street fired at one another.

"She was running," recalled Naomi Dyson, 20. "If she had gotten down, she
would have been OK . . . Now if somebody's shooting, I just get down on the
ground."

As the number of homicides in New Orleans climbs to heights unseen in
nearly a decade, many of the fallen are people caught up in the drug trade
and the turf wars and crimes of vengeance that it creates. But some simply
took a wrong step in front of a bullet meant for someone else, forgot to
lock a door or opened one to the wrong person. They are the accidental
casualties, the innocent bystanders, people who probably had no more reason
to expect a bullet than a bolt of lightning.

Police say no more than 15 percent of the city's homicides claim truly
innocent victims, but these tragedies have a disproportionate effect on
community morale. While news of any killing raises fears, nothing so
threatens a neighborhood's sense of security than the slaughter of someone
seemingly on the right side of the law.

The Faubourg St. John neighborhood is still haunted by the September 2002
murder of Christopher Briede, who was herded at gunpoint back into his
LePage Street home one weekday morning as he left for work, then executed.

"You just don't feel safe walking out your door because you have no idea,"
said Marie Marcal, president of the nearby Esplanade Ridge and Treme Civic
Association, who was mugged around the time of the Briede murder. "As time
goes on, all it does is it makes you angry with people. You just don't want
to be around people you don't know."

Three people were booked in Gladys Dyson's murder. A jury acquitted Elwood
Pleasant, 22, in mid-January. Faced with presenting the same losing case to
a new jury, prosecutors on Jan. 28 dropped murder charges against
co-defendants Twdarryl Toney, 21, and Reginald Smith, 19.

Targeting A Trusting Soul

No suspect has been identified in the December homicide of Lillie McGee.
Had her killer not struck under cover of night, relatives say, kicking in
the door of her ground-floor Algiers apartment would have been unnecessary.

"In the daytime she would leave her door unlocked because it would take her
so long to get from the bedroom to the door when somebody knocked," said
her brother, Melvin Stokes.

A warm, perhaps too trusting 73-year-old slowed by arthritis, McGee had
watched drug traffic increase as more low-income families moved into the
New Orleans Towers apartment complex where she had lived for 20 years,
Stokes said.

Everybody in the building knew McGee. They would seek her out if they
needed anything, and she was always willing to let folks use her phone, her
brother said.

"We would tell her, 'Keep the door closed,' " Stokes said, but she never
listened. "She just didn't have that type of fear."

Nearly a month before the murder, while in town for Thanksgiving, McGee's
two sons persuaded her to leave New Orleans.

"They were ready to take her back with one of them," either to Houston or
Arizona, Stokes said. "She had packed her bags but she changed her mind.
She just didn't want to leave."

McGee was found dead on Christmas morning, stabbed in the back after an
apparent robbery.

No Safety From Iron Bars

Lionel Ifield, 71, was stabbed and beaten before his killer set Ifield's
9th Ward home on fire.

His closest friend finds solace in her belief that Ifield, an affable,
church-going widower, was unconscious by the time the fire started.

"It gives us comfort to know that, like the police said, they don't believe
he suffered," Julia Ewens said. "Maybe he didn't feel the fire burning,
because his hands were so badly burned. And on his back."

For Detectives Greg Hamilton and Claude Nixon, investigating Ifield's
murder was a change of pace.

"We had a bona fide citizen here, and we don't run into that too often,"
Hamilton said. "He was a very careful person. He took every precaution."

Ifield had lived at 1732 Mazant St. for decades. After a burglary about 20
years ago, he had an iron gate placed over the door and bars installed over
the windows, said Ifield's stepdaughter, Carol Collard.

"I used to joke with him . . . 'With those iron doors, you better hope
there's never a fire,' " she recalled.

As the years passed, the bars seemed more and more appropriate, said
Collard, who lives in Atlanta. Ifield added an alarm system five years ago.
"The neighborhood has declined since I grew up there," she said.

"We did say, 'Do you ever think about coming back and being close to the
family?' " recalled his daughter, Gilda Ifield-Webster, who lives outside
New York City, as do several of her siblings.

"But his life was very much with the church," she said. "So I didn't really
concentrate on that because I was secure enough that he had caring
neighbors. It didn't really lay heavy on my heart."

In the days after Ifield's Nov. 10 murder, relatives swooped into town as
police combed evidence for clues to the killer's identity.

Relatives suspected the assailant might have been someone Ifield knew well
enough to invite inside, and that made their grief more wrenching.

"I don't think anybody can know what it's like to be at a funeral burying
someone you love and feeling all that grief but also feeling fear that the
person that killed them could be in your midst," Collard said. "That's
nothing I'd ever wish on anyone else."

In the end, it was someone Ifield knew, but only vaguely, according to
police: a 29-year-old named Calvin Preyan with a history of drug and
robbery arrests going back a decade.

After the funeral, family members gathered at a New Orleans restaurant. One
of Ifield's daughters who lives in New York could not contain her rage.

"I hate this place!" she yelled, vowing never to return.

Mourning 'Over And Over'

Anger is a standard part of grieving, but for those who have lost a
relative or friend to violence, grieving can be more difficult and drawn
out, said Jackson Rainer, a Georgia psychologist who specializes in
bereavement and has counseled murder victims' families.

Police investigations and trials make it harder to heal, he said. "You
really can't say a full goodbye because you are dealing with the event of
the death over and over."

And unlike a death caused by a faceless disease, "there is an identifiable
perpetrator of a crime," and that "makes it much more protracted because it
cannot be resolved until there is some sense of justice and, oftentimes,
that never comes."

Shortly after his brother, Ronald, was shot and killed in September inside
the Irish Channel bar where he worked, Kenny Love thought of buying a gun.

"The first thought that came to mind was retaliation," he said.

Love turned to his church, because "when you pray, it's like problems
disintegrate," he said. Today, if given the choice, he said he would not
support the death penalty for his brother's killers.

McGee's brother agreed.

"I know it's just faith in Jesus Christ that helps us from feeling
bitterness and anger," Stokes said.

So Many Questions

Religious faith has not healed Jose Vazquez. He supported the death penalty
long before his son was murdered; if anything, he is more steadfast in his
support.

Criminals, he said, should be tried the same way they tried their victims.

Jose Vazquez Jr. was killed by a would-be thief at the family's Gentilly
seafood restaurant in July.

As a way of honoring his son, Vazquez has devoted his energy to keeping the
restaurant alive after Jose Vazquez Jr. was stabbed in a small side room
where the safe was kept.

"I don't believe in many things," he said, his voice cracking and eyes
beginning to water, "but maybe somewhere Jose is watching me take care of
the business that we made together."

Sometimes the day of his son's death plays over and over in his mind,
forcing him to ponder the what-ifs. If only he hadn't been such a
workaholic, if only he'd taken a vacation now and then. If only he'd heeded
his father's warning never to go into the restaurant alone at night. Would
he have died if he'd come in the front door instead of the back? And why
had he forgotten the .38-caliber handgun both father and son routinely carried?

They are questions that can never be answered, ensuring that a father's
anger will never be quelled.

Vazquez, who emigrated from Cuba 35 years ago, has channeled his anger at
the American legal system. The suspect booked in his son's death, Tyrone
Wells, 32, has a history of theft and drug arrests, though most of the
cases never made it to trial.

"Cuba has the worst government in the world, but they deal with the
criminal in the right way," Vazquez said. "The problem here is the
Constitution, it tries to help the criminal 100 percent."

Faith And Remembrance

To begin healing, Rainer said, families have to make sense of a senseless
loss, and religion is often the only answer.

Ewens calls herself Ifield's "sister in Christ" and, like him, was active
in the senior citizens program at Mount Zion United Methodist Church in
Central City. She said the Lord must have had a reason for taking her
friend away.

"I feel that no matter how brutal this person was, if it was not God's
will, Lionel would not have passed away," she said.

Margaret Qualls, whose son Garry Hayes was killed by a stray bullet at a
Mid-City coin laundry two days after Christmas, is similarly stoic. "If it
wasn't his time to go, he would be here now," she said. A 16-year-old, Geno
Oliver, has been booked with first-degree murder and armed robbery in
Hayes' death; police are still searching for two other suspects.

"I think his time was out because the good Lord is over all of us," Qualls
said.

That's a leap of faith Stokes cannot make.

"I don't believe it was God's will that this happened," he said of his
sister's Christmas stabbing. "I believe that somebody -- whoever it was --
went against God's will to do this."

God gives people choices, he said, "and regardless of what happens, you can
make a change. And when you can make a change, you can make a difference."

In the end, all relatives can do is remember. And remembering isn't easy.

Arlee Dyson tried to stop time the day her daughter was killed, refusing to
let anyone near the stove that Gladys had scoured that morning as a
surprise for her.

For three days, no one could use it. "Everyone had TV dinners and peanut
butter and jelly sandwiches," Dyson said.

Ifield's daughter, Ifield-Webster, said her husband took the loss
especially hard. It brought back the pain of Sept. 11, when he left his
office at American Building Maintenance in the World Trade Center an hour
before the first plane hit. He lost 24 co-workers in the disaster.

"Every time there's a death when he's connected to the person, it's like
he's reliving 9/11 all over again," Ifield-Webster said.

Qualls has removed the pictures of her son from the walls of her Uptown
home -- "Just for a while," she says -- until she is ready to put them up
again.

Hayes would knock on her door every day as he headed off to Mandina's,
where he was a cook. She knows he is not coming back, but seeing Hayes'
face in his identical twin, Terry Hayes, makes the reality more painful.

She knows in time it will get easier.

"It's hard for me just to look at his twin," Qualls said. "He asked me this
morning, 'If I come by real often, is it going to upset you?' " she
recalled. "And I said, 'No, honey.' "