S Street Rising

by Ruben Castaneda

  Lou had long wanted the homicide command. He had some new ideas and believed he could do some good there. And he didn’t need the chief and the mayor to bless him with a promotion in rank to get the position: Homicide was led by a captain. But it was a high-profile assignment, and he didn’t lobby or politick for it. Lou was all about doing the job. He was po-lice.

  “I knew I could have an impact in homicide, but there was nothing I could do about it,” Lou recalled. “All I could do was the best job I could in my assignment, and I enjoyed working in 1D. There was always something to do, if you wanted to work. It may sound strange, but it was fun.”

  Believing that his police career was probably maxed out, Lou was already preparing for life beyond the MPD. In 1988, he’d begun taking courses at Prince George’s Community College, in a Maryland suburb just outside D.C. He planned on finally obtaining his undergraduate degree and, eventually, a law degree.

  If he never got the chance to return to homicide, he’d have something to fall back on.

  In the meantime, Lou watched large swaths of the city fall apart. When he’d joined the police force, in the seventies, the situation in dozens of neighborhoods in the eastern half of the city was already dire. In some public housing complexes, the heat never worked in the winter and the air-conditioning never worked in the summer. Too many teenage girls became mothers. Too many young, able-bodied men loitered their days and nights away.

  Beginning in the mid-eighties, crack made everything worse. Addiction to the new drug ripped through the neighborhoods east of 16th. It was different from the drug dependency Lou had seen in the seventies.

  “Before, it was mostly men who were getting hooked on heroin and other drugs,” he recalled. “The moms were left to raise their kids by themselves. But with crack, lots of women became addicted, too. You began to see a lot of grandmothers taking care of young kids because their moms were addicted.”

  Some of the children left in the care of grandmothers—or the city—were infants. During the late eighties, “boarder babies”—newborns abandoned by mothers strung out on crack—were left by the dozens in D.C. hospitals. During the first eight months of 1989, forty-one such infants were born at Howard University Hospital, five blocks north of S Street. Those infants represented 15 percent of all babies born in the hospital during that period.

  Between the violence sparked by the drug trade and the social chaos wrought by crack addiction, it seemed to Lou that some sections of the city were on the edge of unraveling. “I felt really bad for the hardworking people who lived in those neighborhoods,” he said. “Some of them had their kids sleeping on mattresses on the floor to avoid stray gunfire. A lot of the parents wouldn’t let their kids go outside to play.”

  One night, he responded to a street where multiple gunshots had been reported. Lou and other officers found the body of a man in the backyard of a row house. Lou asked the homeowner, a woman, if she’d seen or heard anything unusual.

  No, the woman said.

  Lou pointed out that a man had been shot numerous times in her backyard.

  “Oh, we heard gunshots,” the woman replied. “But that’s not unusual around here.”

  Lou was sitting in an unmarked squad car near Potomac Gardens, the same treacherous public housing complex where, on Halloween 1989, I had seen Marion Barry do his ramshackle “I can do anything in the whole wide world!” rap with the project’s youngest residents. It was a mild night, and a big crowd was hanging out just outside the black iron bars surrounding the complex. Most of them were teenagers or young men.

  On this night, Lou had company: his pal Father Tony, a priest with the Oblates of Saint Francis de Sales. When Lou was a young officer in 5D, Tony had been interested in a career in law enforcement and joined the MPD’s reserves. He was assigned to 5D with Lou.

  But instead of becoming a cop, Tony became a priest and earned a doctorate in forensic psychology. He worked for the FBI in the behavioral sciences unit and carried a handgun. Father Tony remained friends with Lou and had been riding with him on occasion for years.

  Once, back when Lou worked in 3D, Father Tony was with him when he pulled up to the scene of a shooting. That night, Father Tony was wearing his collar. Lou and the clergyman stepped out of the car. Some kid took one look at Father Tony and said, “Man, don’t mess with that cop. He goes around with his own priest!”

  On this night, Father Tony wasn’t wearing his collar. Lou was in uniform, though, working as the night supervisor for 1D.

  A knot of four or five teenagers walked toward Lou’s car. He was parked with the driver’s side near the sidewalk, with the window down.

  Lou always kept the window down when he was on the street, so he could listen—and smell. He wanted to be able to hear if there was a commotion or gunfire. And he wanted to be able to smell gunpowder, marijuana, or PCP.

  The group of teenagers slowed as they got near Lou. None of them looked his way. They didn’t want to be seen talking to a cop. That could be fatal in this neighborhood.

  Just above a whisper, one said, “The nigga’s got a machine gun.”

  Without looking at the teens, Lou said, “Could you be more specific?”

  “The guy walking down the street with a hoodie,” one replied.

  “You should do something,” another said.

  Lou looked across the street and saw a kid in a hoodie, sixteen or seventeen, walking. The group of teenagers strolled past his sedan. Lou called for backup, hit the ignition, and rolled up on the sidewalk next to the hoodie kid. Then he jumped out of the car to confront him.

  The kid turned toward Lou, a big gun in his hand. Lou saw the barrel pointed at him. He drew his own weapon and fired.

  The nearby crowd scattered.

  The kid with the gun sprinted into an alley. Lou raced after him.

  The kid ran, turning toward Lou two, three times. Lou fired each time. The shots missed.

  The alley got dark. Lou lost sight of the kid but kept sprinting. Suddenly, he heard footsteps behind him.

  Oh, no, he thought. The dude.

  Lou believed the teenager had hidden in the alley, that he’d run past him, and that the gunman now had the drop on him.

  Quickly, Lou turned, ready to shoot it out. A wave of relief washed over him: It was Father Tony. The priest had followed him and the gunman into the alley. The kid was gone. But at least he hadn’t shot anyone.

  “If anything had happened to Father Tony,” Lou remembered, “I would have had some explaining to do.”

  Backup arrived. An officer found a large gun in the alley—not a machine gun, but a .38 or a .44 Magnum.

  Another routine night.

  One of my best sources, a detective in 4D, called me on the night of July 9, 1991. It had been a slow night. It may sound sick, but the truth is, for a crime reporter, life is boring unless something terrible has happened. I wasn’t just hooked on crack and booze—I was also an adrenaline junkie. On this night, I was about to get a big hit.

  “I got a story for you,” the source said. He told me that a woman had been shot in the head and killed while driving on North Capitol Street. Her eight-year-old boy, who was riding in the car, had been grazed by a bullet but wasn’t seriously injured.

  “How’d this happen?” I asked.

  “Damn gangster thugs,” my source replied. He’d always been even-keeled, but now he was angry. Two local gangs had been feuding. The woman and her son had almost certainly been hit by stray bullets fired by the neighborhood gangsters, the detective said.

  The woman’s name was Marcia Williams. She had been driving to her home in suburban Prince George’s County when she was killed. She had three kids.

  By the early nineties, Lou had spent most of his career policing streets in the eastern half of the city, in such combat zones as Potomac Gardens, the corner of 18th and D Streets Northeast in Capitol Hill, and the corner of 5th and O Streets Northwest in Shaw.

  The vast majority of killings and nonfatal shootings
in those areas didn’t get much, if any, press attention, unless multiple people were murdered or the victims were very young. Most attacks garnered a minute or two on the local news or a brief in the Post.

  Now and then, the killing of a “civilian” like Williams generated a flurry of press attention. I wrote a story for the next day’s paper, and local TV news covered the killing. The uproar over Williams’s death was such that Chief Fulwood held a news conference a day or two after the shooting.

  A reporter told the chief that merchants in the area where Williams was shot had praised the chief’s anti-crime efforts but wondered whether the tragedy might have been averted if there had been a more “persistent” police presence. An exasperated Fulwood noted that Williams was shot on a busy street, that young men nearby “had their firearms and decided to use them.” The police, Fulwood maintained, are not “Houdinis.”

  “We’re not miracle workers,” Fulwood said. “I wish we were.”

  Killings like that, in which the victim was a law-abiding person who had nothing to do with drugs or gangs, briefly generated public outrage. The vast majority of the city’s crack-era homicide victims lived lives that put them in harm’s way: They sold drugs or ran with a gang or stole from a drug dealer.

  Or they smoked crack and picked up strawberries.

  On a warm spring afternoon in 1991, I knocked back a few drinks and woozily paged Champagne. She didn’t answer, so I got into my car and cruised the neighborhood.

  Three blocks from my apartment, on the edge of downtown, I saw a young woman sitting on the concrete steps leading to the side entrance of a hotel bar on Thomas Circle. She was wearing running shorts and a tube top. The young woman had blue eyes, shiny blonde hair, and perfectly toned legs. She was licking an ice cream cone.

  The girl was in the badlands inhabited by Champagne and other strawberries. I didn’t think that was a coincidence. I was drunk and looking for action. I pulled over, jumped out of my car, and sat next to her.

  “Hi. What’s your name?” I asked.

  The girl licked a glaze of ice cream from her upper lip.

  “Carrie,” she said with a smile.

  “Nice to meet you. What are you up to today?”

  Carrie licked her cone. “Working at the moment. You want some company?”

  “Do you party?”

  “Sure.”

  “I know a place to get three rocks for fifty. If we split them, would you do me?”

  Carrie stood and tossed the cone into a nearby trash can.

  “Let’s go,” she said.

  I drove us to S Street and handed her the cash. Carrie got out and calmly made the buy.

  For a few weeks, I hooked up with her as often as I did with Champagne. Carrie had a sweet demeanor. She said she was from Arkansas. I missed her when she disappeared late that summer.

  Two days before Thanksgiving 1991, I was walking home from my late shift when I ran into Carrie for the first time in months. She was wearing tight jeans and a black leather jacket. Carrie looked as if she’d put on a couple of pounds, which had gone mostly to her boobs and butt. She looked great. The sight of her snapped my libido to attention.

  “Hi, Carrie. Good to see you again. Where have you been?”

  “Went away for a minute, but now I’m back. How have you been?”

  Pretty miserable, actually. But things are looking up now. “Wanna go?” I asked.

  She smiled. “I’d love to, but right now I’m waiting on my ride. It’ll be here any minute.”

  “When can I see you?”

  A sedan rolled up and stopped at the curb.

  “My ride’s here,” Carrie said. “How about tomorrow? I’ve got my own place now—you can come by whenever.”

  She gave me an address on 9th Street Northwest and hopped into the car. Her place was just two blocks from my copping zone on S Street. Convenient.

  A few hours after I ran into Carrie, I walked to the newspaper to work a day shift, which the other night reporter and I got to do every other Tuesday. After work I went home and quickly knocked down two rum and Cokes. As I poured a third, I thought about Carrie. I’d volunteered to work on Thanksgiving. That would mean a nice holiday bonus. I could afford to see her. And she had her own place, which meant I wouldn’t have to bring her to my apartment. That was good; lately, every time I lit up my crack pipe, I became paranoid that the cops or feds were watching me.

  I reached into my bag and grabbed the notebook with Carrie’s address in it. Minutes later, I pulled over and sized up the building: brick, three stories, black iron bars on the ground-floor windows, a heavy steel door, two blocks west of S Street.

  Someone had tampered the lock to the steel door. One strong tug opened it. I stepped into a grim-looking three-story apartment building and hesitated at the foot of the stairs. I reached into my pocket and double-checked the notebook page. Carrie had scribbled “Apt. 32.” She was on the top floor.

  The scent of urine hit me just before I reached the first landing. A rat the size of a small raccoon appeared at the edge of the second. It jumped down and scurried by me, slaloming past the discarded condoms and hypodermic needles littering the stairs. I soldiered on.

  Apartment 32 was a few feet to the right of the staircase. I raised my fist and hesitated.

  Bad things happened in joints like this.

  An image popped into my head: Carrie smiling, taking her top off, then leaning toward me as I lit up a crack pipe and moved it to my lips.

  Aw, the hell with it. I gave the door two quick, firm knocks.

  Nothing.

  Come on, Carrie.

  I gave the door another rap.

  The door swung open. For a heartbeat, the doorway was empty. Suddenly a large man with a wild, uncombed Afro popped out from behind the door. He was wearing a wifebeater and old jeans.

  “What you want?” His eyes were bloodshot. His expression was suspicious. He was north of six feet tall and weighed at least 220 pounds. I was five feet eight, 150.

  My eyes went to the plastic number on the door.

  “Maybe I’m in the wrong place,” I said. “I’m looking for Carrie.”

  Big Man’s expression softened.

  “Oh, you know Carrie? She inside, in the bathroom. Come on in.” He stepped back and waved his arm like a used-car salesman beckoning a mark.

  The apartment was empty save for a wooden desk against the near wall, to my right, and a worn beige sofa in the middle of the living room, fifteen feet in. The hardwood floor was scuffed and dirty. The place smelled of takeout french fries.

  My gut told me something was wrong. But my mental image of Carrie overruled my instinct. I stepped forward.

  With lightning quickness, Big Man grabbed my shirt collar, yanked me into the apartment, and slammed the door shut. He gripped the epaulets of my trench coat and pinned me against the door while calling out, “Slick!”

  Like an apparition, a thin older man with short salt-and-pepper hair silently rose from behind the sofa.

  “Get the thing, Slick, get the thing!” Big Man called out. The thing—a gun or a knife. A gun would be quick. A knife could mean torture.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I croaked.

  Big Man didn’t respond. Slick shuffled toward the desk.

  “You don’t have to do this,” I repeated, my voice cracking. “It’s not worth it. I’m not worth it.”

  Big Man remained silent. Slick closed in on the desk. My eyes swept the apartment.

  There was a window five feet behind the sofa. If I could break free, I could sprint to the window and … what? Crash through the glass and swan-dive three stories to the asphalt?

  Slick opened the desk drawer, reached in, and pulled out a handgun. It looked small; it might have been a .22.

  Slick turned and stepped toward Big Man and me.

  My fear flipped to panic. I went from pleasantly drunk to sober in a heartbeat. I had to get away now.

  I rotated my right shoulder backwards, wre
sted my right arm free, and balled my hand into a fist. As best I could, I reared my arm back and slugged Big Man squarely on the chin. But I had no leverage, I was unable to move my body forward to generate power; the punch was all arm.

  Big Man took it like a pro. He didn’t budge. He didn’t blink.

  Uh-oh.

  His beefy left hand went to my throat. The viselike grip said, That’s enough. I realized he could snap my windpipe without breaking a sweat.

  Slick shuffled behind Big Man, who took his right hand off my shoulder and reached behind his back, like a relay runner getting ready for the handoff of the baton. Slick placed the gun in Big Man’s palm.

  Big Man raised the gun and pointed it between my eyes, two inches from my face.

  I thought of my parents, my sister, and my brothers in California getting the news. Would one of my homicide detective sources catch my case? Would Phil Dixon let my death be noted by a news brief buried inside the Metro section, or would he assemble a squad of reporters to find out how I ended up dead inside a combat-zone apartment building? Phil was a consummate pro. He would go after the story, bless him. Damn him.

  My will to fight left like an exhaled breath. I was exhausted, defeated. I hung my head, stared at the floor, and waited for the darkness.

  Whack!

  Big Man slammed the gun against my left ear. Shock waves of pain radiated through my skull. I looked up. The pistol was back in my face. “I want answers—now! Who are you?” Big Man demanded, fury in his eyes.

  A light went on inside my throbbing head: Here I am in my work getup—decent trousers, dress shirt, trench coat. Big Man’s probably high and paranoid; he must think I’m a cop or a fed.