The following diary was also written as the cover story for the new issue of Pressure Magazine, a recent upstart that focuses on Cleveland city life, arts/culture, etc. I finished it over a month ago, and ironically, the magazine published yesterday, the same day of the school shooting at SuccessTech Academy in downtown Cleveland by a 14-year-old student. Four people were injured; everyone survived but the boy; he committed suicide when he realized the police were coming at him.
And my story certainly remains relevant in looking into yesterday's events.
WELCOME TO CLEVELAND, THE MURDER CAPITAL OF THE WORLD
Sure, there's always Baghdad and Philadelphia, but a bizarre and bloody summer crime-spree has earned Cleveland a picture on the poster of rising urban violence in America's big cities.
This is how it started:
June 15-Jesse Marie Davis of Canton is reported missing to police by her mother, Patty Porter. Flags go up since Davis is 8-months pregnant and we've seen this kind of thing happen around here before (Teresa Andrews). Davis' two-year-old son is found alone in her home, and FoxNews reports that "Investigators said the toddler told them 'Mommy was crying. Mommy broke the table. Mommy's in rug.'" Police find Davis's body a week later and charge her boyfriend/father of her son and unborn daughter, Bobby Cutts, Jr., with two counts of murder. They also charge Myisha Ferrell, a childhood friend of Cutts, with helping him to dispose of the body. Cutts is a police officer for the city of Canton, who has been married to Kelly Cutts for six years and has one daughter with her. He also has an older daughter from a previous relationship.
The little boy, Blake, is now in custody of Porter, his maternal grandmother. Trials for Ferrell and Cutts are to start in mid-September. Defense attorneys are expected to ask for a change of venue for the trials because of the high emotion generated in Stark County over the case. A motive has not been made public, nor a specific cause of death.
July 4-Cleveland fireman Terrence Hough, Jr. either "snaps" or just decides he's had enough of the ruckus going on at the neighbor's property. Hough and the wife have called the police numerous times on those damn kids for carrying on and having big drug parties and all that, but apparently the trouble continues. The fireworks, on July 4 no less, are just more than our friendly fireman could handle (maybe he was on his sleeping shift?), so he grabs his gun and walks over to the neighbor's yard and starts shooting the people standing in the driveway. When he's done, Jacob Feichtner, Bruce Anderson, and Katherine Rosby are dead and one other person is injured but survives. Hough makes a comment to the dead and dying something to the effect of "Now, you'll stop!" Another neighbor comes out with his own weapon and holds Hough at gunpoint until the police arrive.
Hough is the guy who put us on the map and stole the media spotlight from Canton's Finest, Mr. Cutts. They're talking about this nut as far away as England and Australia....see if you can find the story online at an Asian news website, it would be cool to see what "Cleveland" spells like in Far East alphabets. Everybody knows about our boy Terry and wonders what kind of animals they are in that United States.
Hough's defense is trying to claim that he "snapped" because a temporary insanity plea may spare him the death penalty and get him in a mental lockdown and not a regular prison, whereas a straight-up murder conviction could put him on Death Row. .
Also July 4-West Sixth Street in the Warehouse District downtown is always a hotspot on summer holidays for getting drunk and getting a little action, but getting gunned down usually isn't high on the list. Calvin Hall, of Twinsburg, died after he was shot in the head outside in the street near the Spy Bar. A fight, maybe several, broke out in front of the bar and someone pulled out a gun and started shooting. Four people were hit, but only Hall died of his injuries.
Police Lieutenant Thomas Stacho told Channel 3 News, "There were about 100 people there when officers pulled up, and none of them were willing to come forward with information..." Neither a suspect nor a motive has yet been determined, and no one knows whether the people involved were even patrons of Spy Bar.
July 7-Saturday morning on "lucky 7-7-7", turned out to be the worst day of their lives for Robert Shawn Joslin and his family of Lakewood. Joslin's girlfriend, Shannon Anderson, is also the estranged wife of Nathaniel Williams, Jr. of Cleveland. Anderson had been living with the Joslin family for a couple months after filing domestic violence charges against her husband. Williams started harassing his wife and Shawn, showing up at the McDonald's on Sloane Ave. where Joslin worked and sending threatening text messages regularly. That morning, Williams showed up at McDonald's and started crap with Joslin, who called the police and told them to come get Williams out of the store. Within minutes the argument escalated and Lakewood police started receiving frantic calls from customers at McDonald's reporting a shooting. Joslin had been shot in the head in the entranceway to the restaurant. Williams then ran out the door through a plaza parking lot and onto the railroad tracks between West Clifton and Webb where he eventually surrendered to police.
This shocked the hell out of whole city. No one in Lakewood is naive enough to believe it couldn't happen there, but Lakewood prides itself on the fact that it doesn't happen there. It was a punch in the gut to an urban city where everybody knows each other like it's a small town, even the mayor of Lakewood knew this kid. Having this labeled a "crime of passion" because of the love triangle leaves the city with little recourse to "prevent" such crime.
The beat the band, the girlfriend is pregnant. DNA tests to be performed in early-to-mid-September will determine who the father is, but we kinda already know, don't we?.
Also July 7-A fight breaks out among a group of young men over a girl at the pool at Kerruish Park on Cleveland's East Side. Someone pulls a gun and two little boys, ages 6 and 2, are accidentally shot while caught in the melee. Deshaun Martin, 18, and Darnell Jackson, 24, were arrested for the shooting. Jackson had the sense to turn himself in later, probably after finding out he'd shot two babies. Both boys survived, having been hit in less-life-threatening areas of the body.
July 9-A 21-year-old college student, Synethia Mays, is riding an RTA bus into town near E. 131st and Miles on the city's East side. A man later identified as Eric Warren is also on the bus with a McDonald's cup containing sulfuric acid. He drops the cup on Mays, spraying the acid all over the girl's body and face and runs off the bus. Cleveland Police caught up with Warren at University Hospitals where he'd shown up to get treatment for minor burns on himself. Another passenger and the bus driver were also treated for minor burns, and the girl has now gone home from the hospital and is recovering. A motive has not yet been made public.
July 10-A man shows up at the home of Cleveland police officer Rex Mehaffey and tells him that his estranged wife is cheating on him. Mehaffey confronts his wife near the intersection of Triskett and Warren Roads in Cleveland, just south of Lakewood. She called 911 when he started chasing her down Triskett and fired two gunshots into her car window. When officers arrived to intervene, Mehaffey stopped his car and shot himself. The wife survived the shots fired at her; Mehaffey did not survive the self-inflicted shot.
According to a story in The Plain Dealer, the Mehaffeys were getting a divorce and "Fellow officers, who did not want to be named, said that Mehaffey frequently talked about his wife and how much he loved her."
July 20-Grady Smith II of Slavic Village had just informed his co-workers at the Menorah Park Center in Beachwood that is wife, Janeen, was pregnant. Within hours, he was shot in the face and killed in his own driveway near E. 65th and Roland while messing around with his car. Police have no suspects and no motive. Janeen Newell has no husband and her baby has no father.
July 29-People who know the Messina family of South Euclid are saying the relationship between Richard Messina and his 18-year-old daughter, Tabitha, was "explosive". Police records show 68 different complaints made about the Messina family in the last two years. The complaints will end now that Richard and his girlfriend, Sandra Cover, are dead and Richard's daughter and 19-year-old boyfriend Carlos Christopher are being charged with double-murder. Police in North Carolina arrested the two on the run and shipped them back to Ohio, where they have now plead not guilty to charges of aggravated murder.
Rick Messina, Richard's son and Tabitha's brother, described his sister to Channel 3 News as "violent and self-absorbed", rebelling against her father in every way possible by hanging in bad crowds and getting in trouble. Tabitha's choice of lifestyle was the source of much of the in-family arguing.
And the hits just keep on comin'....
August 4-Virginia DiGiorgio of Brecksville was crossing the street near Euclid Ave. and E. 14th St. with her husband on their way to see the Lion King at Playhouse Square. A 13-year-old boy driving a stolen car struck and killed DiGiorgio and then crashed the car on 14th. Three of the boys were caught and a fourth turned himself in the following day.
The Plain Dealer reports, "None of the teens in the car that struck her have criminal backgrounds."
August 7-A 70-year-old man from Cleveland, Jimmie Lauback, was arrested for shooting and killing 47-year-old nurse Debra Cofield inside her apartment complex at the 3300 block of Euclid Avenue. No motive has yet been made public.
Great. Now even the elderly are out there kickin' ass.....
What the fuck is going on here? Is everybody in this city completely crazy?
It's not the heat. This is not New York, not 1977, and it is not that damn hot.
It's not a "race" thing, either. The UK is having the same problem with strange, senseless violent crime coming from a white underclass. The first idiot to throw race around should keep in mind the most senseless of these crimes was the July 4 slaughter by Hough, who is as white as he is wacked. We're back to the old stereotyped argument 'How many black serial killers can you name?'.
Cleveland is not alone; many of America's big cities are seeing violent crime rates skyrocket this year to the highest numbers in a decade. Philadelphia earned itself the nickname "Killadelphia" after 4 months of one new murder every day. The execution-style shootings of three young, successful college students in Newark, New Jersey, has the entire nation up in arms looking for solutions and battling the feeling of hopelessness.
It's the economy, stupid. It's not the whole reason, but it's where the whole reason starts. It has been a known fact for many years that crime rates rise with economic suffering. Cleveland has earned the title of "America's Poorest Big City" two of the last five years. If you've been downtown at all in the last seven years, you've watched it happen right in front of your eyes.We've shared the title interchangeably with Detroit as of late, and this year we rank No. 4 alongside Buffalo, Detroit and Cincinnati. It looks like the whole Midwest is dying....
Financial problems are one of the biggest stresses a human being knows; having money versus not having it determines so much of our lives: where and how we live, how our family lives, the kind of education we get, the medical care we have access to, how we spend holidays, what kind of social lives we have. When all that changes, or simply doesn't exist, everything about life loses value. Things that weren't stressful before like getting the car fixed or getting the kid braces are suddenly huge life-problems when the money just isn't there. An overall rise in stress levels leads to people being more likely to "snap" or do something stupid because they're just not thinking right.
When the economy is bad, not only are the people poor, but the city is, too. Population declines, unemployed residents and departing businesses leave cities with large losses in tax income, transportation revenue, and shopping/tourism investments. Urban businesses are highly dependent on one another; when one goes, they all go. Much of Cleveland's nightlife based near the sports facilities couldn't stay open if it weren't for the attendants of those events. Sales tax monies don't come in if people aren't buying in the stores, and soon the stores don't exist to sell anything. Small businesses and corporate offices that move out of downtown take employees, clients, contract employment, sellable products and expensive business lunches right out of the city with them that same day.
A poor city responds the same way an individual does when the incomes goes south; we cut out what we have to. Every part of the budget takes a hit, including the police force, firefighters, crime prevention programs, after-school security and activities, and services for the mentally ill, all of which play an interconnecting role in determining who kills and who doesn't.
Services for the mentally ill are the next step back in the cause of the violent crime problem. Poorly-financed services for the mentally ill mean fewer caseworkers, less ability to enforce and monitor treatment, and less treatment available overall. Many of these people end up homeless and on the streets in large proportions because there is no person or organization able to take care of them.
But more often than lack of money, it is missed warning signs that most often allow for violent crimes to occur by mentally ill people. The pieces of who these people are have not been put together except in hindsight. The Virginia Tech shooter had been in and out of hospitals and courtrooms enough to clearly show he should not be allowed to own a gun, but the gun shop owner who sold the boy his weapons did so because a background check didn't tell him he shouldn't. Timothy Halton, Jr., the man who killed a Cleveland Heights police officer back in May, had a history of mental illness and violence against police officers, but was released from probation two years early and was not taking medication when he shot the officer. The man is so far gone he has been deemed in court unfit to stand trial.
As a result of Halton's actions, State Rep. Tom Patton of Strongsville has introduced a bill to the Ohio Senate that would allow courts to hospitalize people who do not follow court-ordered treatment. As a result of Cho Seung Hui's actions in Virginia, the federal government is revisiting background check laws to force states to update the National Instant Criminal Background Check database regularly and include names of the mentally ill on exclusion lists.
Yeah no shit.....hindsight's real fucking 20/20, isn't it? The families of Officer West and those killed in Virginia would have to agree....
Which brings us back further yet to the same argument we've been having since modern-man figured out guns and crazy people don't mix well: where does the right of the individual end and the safety of the masses begin when all of America is fundamentally offered the freedom to bear arms?
The NRA and other well-known gun-advocates like the political Libertarian Party are made up of ordinary citizens, 99.9 4/5% of whom will never commit a crime with their weapons, never own a weapon illegally, and can save lives by having a gun on them when it is needed to serve its purpose. Banning assault weapons/machine guns has nothing to do with them, but they bitch and lobby against those laws anyway.
The men who wrote the Constitution intended for the right to bear arms as a citizen's defense against a hostile government, to protect personal property and to allow for the killing of animals for sport and food, which was very common back in the day, and anyone with half a brain knows that a machine gun that can mow down fifteen people in five seconds is not needed to be successful in such situations. Why would a hunter shoot a deer with an assault rifle, you get bullets in the meat! You don't want to use an AK-47 on a burglar, you might riddle your whole house and half your family with bullets in the process. So what's the NRA's problem?
Location, location, location. Look at the list of folks that belong to and support the NRA; there are a lot of good old boys from rural spots, where guns are as prevalent and widely-used as Starbucks stores are in the cities. They are religious, laid-back, family-oriented folks who live in towns where everybody knows each other and putting a gun in the hands of a teenage son is a bonding experience, not a fast track to a drive-by. These people don't live in or near big cities, most never will and they don't understand the differences in the 'gun culture' between urban and rural America. However, they have the money and influence invested in our politicians, and with that have earned the right to make decisions for parts of America they've never seen and know very little about based on what is best for themselves. They mean no ill intention, really, they just have no idea how their rules actually translate when they leave the cornfields and hit the concrete.
Which is exactly what's happening here in Ohio. The city of Cleveland filed a lawsuit this past march to challenge state gun laws that override a city's right to create and maintain it's own gun laws. Gun advocates started crying immediately that citizens' rights would be impeded, though the assault weapons ban Mayor Jackson is so adamant about needing in Cleveland has nothing to do with legal gun-owners or their personal weapons. Cleveland police have confiscated grenade launchers out of this city for Christ's sake, what exactly is the NRA trying to protect here?
And that battle brings us back even further to the absolute root of the problem: how society as a whole chooses to deal with its problems by killing one another rather than searching for reasonable solutions. It's the same concept as children fighting over toys. The adult who knows better comes along and takes the toys away from the children because if they can't play nice with them, nobody gets to play with them, and next time those kids will think twice about being selfish. Logistically it would be impossible to ban all weapons physically, so the only real solution is to implement change as part of a societal shift in thinking, similar to making children understand that sharing the toys works out a little better for everybody so they don't fight.
Violence and murder is a way of pussying out on trying to find real solutions to our problems; pointing a gun in someone's face or going homicidal when emotions run too high is the same thing as saying we don't have the smarts or the strength to resolve our conflicts appropriately, that we're too weak, too ignorant and too fucked-up to face significant life challenges. On top of our own personal short-comings, we have no money, no resources or knowledge to deal with the mentally ill who commit crime, and we let people who don't understand the gun problems in poor, urban areas decide how we should be battling it. Sounds like it's time for a citywide gut-check....