BURNED BODY ID'D

Cops Believe It's Related To Drug Turf War

The drug turf war in Southwest Philadelphia is heating up.

Authorities yesterday identified the man whose body was found burning in a
park in Yeadon last Wednesday night as Thomas Miner, 22, of Thompson Street
near 26th.

Police were exploring whether it was Miner who hired another man - whose
body was found burning in a car at 15th and Tioga the night before - to
kill Leroy Scott, 31, last November.

Scott, of Alden Street near Chester Avenue, was shot once in the head on
Nov. 3 at 57th Street and Kingsessing Avenue.

Authorities have a suspect in that case but have not been able to find him.
The medical examiner's office is trying to obtain the dental records of the
suspect to see if he was the man found burning in the car on Jan. 25,
sources said.

The following night, Miner's body was torched in Cobbs Creek Park around 9
p.m.

C.B. Kimmins, head of Mantua Against Drugs, said torching bodies is a
trademark of Jamaican drug dealers.

"They're showing their disrespect by burning the bodies," he added. "They
don't just tie them up and shoot them. Burning the body is the ultimate
desecration."

Homicides and shootings have escalated in Southwest and West Philadelphia
in the last couple of months as a result of the drug war.

Various groups are fighting with each other over territory and are having
price wars to snatch business away from each other.

One of the turfs being fought over is at 57th Street and Kingsessing
Avenue, where Scott was murdered, sources said.

Kimmins attributes part of the increase of crime in the area to dealers who
were displaced by Operation Sunrise, a nearly two-year long effort by
police and other city agencies to clean up parts of Kensington and North
Philadelphia.

Kimmins said cops have been so successful at driving out drug dealers from
those areas that they've had to go to other parts of the city to make a
living.

And they're recruiting kids to work for them straight from the schools, he
said.

"We're really up against a monster right now because it's taking our good
kids away from and out of school, where they should be, and putting them on
the streets to be murderers," he said.

The kids, he said, see the drug dealers as role models.

"They think that's what they ought to be doing at their ages," he said.

In response to the upsurge in violence, Police Commissioner John Timoney
last month created a task force comprised of the SWAT team, canine,
narcotics and plainclothes officers to sweep the drug-plagued areas.
They've made a number of arrests.