Killers, gang bangers and drug dealers go for their guns

By T.J. MILLING
Copyright 1997 Houston Chronicle

Amphetamine dealer Dione Christine Allen leans out the passenger window of
a stolen Chevrolet El Camino and blasts away at pursuing police officers
with a .45caliber pistol.

Gang leader Anthony Shawn Medina drives through a south Houston
neighborhood and guns down a 9yearold boy and his 15yearold sister with
a Chinesemade assault rifle.

Crack dealer Charles Harold "Dinkie" Hughes bursts into a suburban home and
blows off half a woman's face with a 12 gauge shotgun.

If gun control laws aim to keep firearms from anyone, it is people like these.

Yet 34yearold murderer Evan Jean Lolless, serving a life term, says: "A
gun is as easy to get as a pack of cigarettes."

There is a gun for every man, woman and child in America, according to some
estimates, and the weapons all begin their journey at legal manufacturers.

As Hughes says, the local crack dealer doesn't own a forge. But sometime
after leaving Smith & Wesson or Colt or any of the many other gunmakers,
some of these firearms get diverted into the illicit underworld of
drivebys and drug deals. The street gun trade is inextricably tied to the
street drug trade, say Texas convicts.

Addicts burglarize homes and trade stolen guns for drugs. The dealer sells
the guns to the more brazen carjackers and robbers. A murder weapon dumped
in the bayou is quickly and easily replaced, and so the cycle continues.

"Guys don't steal VCRs no more, TVs no more," Hughes says in an interview
at the Texas prison system's Connally Unit in Kenedy. "First thing the
guy's going to do is look up under the bed, under the shelves. He's going
to look for a gun immediately."

That's it, just guns and jewelry. Everything revolves around he who is
selling crack. This crack dealer, all the guns are going to come to him.
He's going to distribute the guns how he feels."

He or she, that is.

Dione Christine Allen found herself in that powerful position at the tender
age of 13, though she dealt "crank" instead of crack. Crank is amphetamine,
also called crystal meth or speed. She traded $40 worth of speed for her
first gun, a .32caliber pistol.

Allen's mother had moved to Houston from Los Angeles to kick a heroin habit.

"When she stopped, I started," Allen said at the Mountainview Unit in
Gatesville, nine years into a 25year sentence. Allen ran away from home
and hooked up with her "father figure," Delbert Wise, a drug dealer with a
counterfeit federal firearms dealer permit and a great drug connection.

Wise stockpiled dozens of weapons from Uzi submachine guns to assault
rifles, all serial numbers obliterated, all bought with the same currency
crank. There were 28 guns in Wise's northeast Harris County home on Nov.
20, 1987. And the police were on to him. They arrested Allen that night as
she left the house, but they were too late for Wise.

Drug buddies Robert Allen Heavin and Terry Rhoades suspected Wise was an
informant. He wasn't, but they killed him anyway, with a shotgun, and then
set the house on fire. The 28 guns burned with it.

Allen was shown pictures of Wise's charred corpse, but the lesson was lost
on her.

A few months after getting out of juvenile detention, she was up to her old
antics and soon armed with the cannon of handguns, a .45caliber. She was
also 17 by then and an adult in the eyes of the law.

One of her clients owed her money. She robbed him of his Chevrolet El
Camino as payment. He reported it stolen. And Allen found herself at the
front end of a high speed chase through Spring Branch, blasting away at
pursuing police cars. The gun was thrown clear of the wreck that ended the
chase and never found. No one was seriously hurt, not even Allen. She was
charged only with attempted capital murder.

Anthony Shawn Medina was a better shot.

Medina had been practicing since early childhood, first with his uncle's
hunting rifles, later with numerous handguns and finally with a
semiautomatic SKS.

Russiandesigned, Chinesemade, the Samozaridnya Karabina Simonova fires a
7.62 mm round at 2,410 feet per second. In a test, the one Medina used
propelled a bullet through four andahalf Houston phone books, according
to prosecutor Steve Baldassano.

It made short work of David Rodriguez, 9, and his 15year old sister,
Diane, on New Year's Day 1996.

"The bullets really tore them up," Baldassano says. "There were chunks
missing."

Investigators found the gun buried with another assault rifle in a rural
area southwest of Houston. They were carefully wrapped in plastic to keep
them clean for future use, Baldassano says.

The SKS was the last in a string of weapons Medina owned throughout his
life. He got his first personal gun in 1989. Like Allen, he was 13 years
old. A friend gave him the old .38caliber revolver, worn tape on the butt,
rust on the barrel. But it worked, as some of Medina's gang rivals were
soon to find out.

"I shot it quite a bit," Medina relates in a death row interview at the
Ellis Unit in Huntsville. "People didn't always get along with me, so I may
have had an occasion where I had to defend myself."

Medina, too, says drug dealers were a major source of street weapons. He
says he also bought guns in pawn shops, but he often shopped in the
classified section of the newspaper. On any given day, dozens of guns are
advertised there, often for sale by private owners.

The gun then circulates until it ends up in a ditch or a police evidence
locker. "They seem to trickle down, you know, hand to hand to hand," Medina
says. "A lot of kids are out there firing guns that have been passed around
10 to 15 times. They don't know where it's coming from."

Ramiro "Lazy" Ruiz Jr. was one of those kids. He didn't know where the guns
came from. They were just always around. His mother kept a pistol in the
glove box. His dad had several stashed around the house. One of his earlier
memories is firing a 9 mm pistol into the air on the Fourth of July.

Ruiz's criminal career dates to elementary school and includes a dozen
arrests for robbery, assault and murder. He even boasted of shooting a wino
for kicks. "I see somebody I don't like, I just shoot 'em," he says in the
Clemens Unit near Brazoria. "I don't know how many people I've hit. I've
just shot at a bunch of people."

Like Medina, Ruiz was a gang member. A 1995 National Institute of Justice
survey of more than 8,000 arrestees in 11 major U.S. cities found admitted
gang membership shows a stronger relationship than drug dealing to gun
ownership and use in crimes. Twothirds of the gang members said they
carried a gun for protection, yet more than a third said it was OK to shoot
someone who disrespected them.

The last person on the street to disrespect Ruiz was John Escareno. All he
did was walk toward Ruiz's car, but that was enough to get his face
shredded with a 16gauge shotgun Ruiz had borrowed from a fellow gang member.

A month before his 18th birthday, Ruiz was sentenced to 75 years in prison
for murder. Seated on a bench in the prison visitation room, the 5foot4,
156pound teen is far from an imposing figure. But as fellow convict Dinkie
Hughes pointed out, a gun is the ultimate equalizer.

"The dude that's 150 pounds, nowadays everybody's terrified of him more
than anybody in the neighborhood," Hughes says.

Hughes, a stocky murderer serving a life sentence, started dealing crack in
the mid 1980s when he was barely a teen ager, and a gun was a tool of the
trade. He's been shot twice, stabbed once. He served time for cocaine
delivery, robbery and auto theft from 1991 until his parole in 1996. He was
only out a few weeks when, police say, he went on his rampage, shotgunning
the woman in a home invasion robbery and then using a pistol to kill a
woman in a robbery in a restaurant foyer.

Rifles with laser sights, machine pistols, even anti personnel hand
grenades are available, Hughes says.

Jose Miguel Vasquez, a murderer housed at the Garza Unit in Beeville, says
grenades go for $50 a piece.

The convicts scoff at the question of whether there was a way to keep guns
out of the wrong hands, their hands.

The NIJ study shows 56 percent of the arrestees simply paid cash for their
weapons. The rest begged, borrowed or stole to arm themselves.

"There's no stopping the flow of guns," Medina says. "They can make all the
laws they want to, but criminals don't have to obey laws."