LIFE 0N THE DIRTY 30

Winter is here.

Now East 30th Street near Globe Avenue in South Lorain looks much
like it did when Brenda first saw her new house that March nearly
three years ago.

Harmless enough.

Brenda, who did not want to use her real name for this story, and her
family liked the new home enough to leave their 138-acre farm in
Kentucky to move north. She got a job at a nearby Wal-Mart. As the
city thawed, Brenda and her family were ready to start their new
life.

But they weren't ready for South Lorain.

Shortly after they moved in, a man was stabbed to death barely 500
feet from their house. A couple months later, they were the mistaken
target of a drive-by shooting.

It was only the beginning.

Over the next two and a half years, Brenda's home would be within a
mile of two more murders, including one just a few houses away in
August, when a teenage girl was killed by a gunman who apparently
shot at the wrong home.

And those are just the murders. In late October, a young man was shot
at nearby Lincoln Elementary. Just this month, in separate incidents
a block away, a man's throat was slashed and a woman was shot.

During the summer months, Brenda, like many of her neighbors, hears
gunshots almost daily.

Brenda's home sits near the intersection of East 30th and Globe,
which is a hub of drug activity in the city. In fact, many
neighborhood residents call it the ''Dirty 30.''

In September, Lorain police arrested a woman they referred to as an
''integral'' player in the city's drug trade. The woman was allegedly
dealing drugs out of her store on nearby Pearl Avenue.

By now, Brenda realizes how much the snow was covering in
2003.

''We were shown a lot of bad houses,'' said Brenda. ''And this one
was halfway decent. It needed some work, but it was in our price
range. And it seemed like a nice neighborhood.

''But we learned a lot by buying this house. We learned you need to
go to the police station and ask what kind of crime area it is.''

Asking around could not have given Brenda an idea of what was to
come. Nobody was ready for this.

Lorain had two murders in 2002 and none in 2001. But since then there
have been 17 murders in the city, including 12 over a one-year period
between 2004 and 2005.

In the one-block area around East 30th, there were four murders
between October 2002 and August 2005. Nearly all of the violence in
the area stems from drugs, police say.

The result has been a fractured neighborhood filled with ''For Sale''
signs and residents who feel they are held hostage because they don't
have the means to leave.

''We've lost a sense of neighborhood,'' said the Rev. Bill Thaden of
Sacred Heart Chapel. ''It's just, OThis is where I live.'''

These are things Lorain Police Chief Cel Rivera pointed out in
October to people assembled in the cafeteria of General Johnnie
Wilson Middle School in Lorain. The event was the third community
forum on violence held by the police department since early May,
shortly after the city had two murders within a week.

To show the scope of the city's problem, Rivera weaved his way
through all the people affected by just one act of violence. From the
victim, to the doctors, to the police, to the detectives, to the
victim's family, to the family of the man arrested.

In wrapping up, Rivera may have been talking in general terms, but he
perfectly described the East 30th area of South Lorain.

''Then to the neighborhood that loses its sense of security, to the
person who can't sell his house, to the business that has to close
down,'' said Rivera, ''to the public official who has to work very
hard to bring new jobs and economic development to the city.''

South Lorain used to be a vibrant part of the city, complete with
thriving businesses and neighborhoods. Today, things are much different.

''Every time we hear there's a shooting in Lorain,'' said Thaden, ''I
pray we're not going to be seeing East 31st or 30th or 29th.''

Many point the finger at the urban renewal project nearly 40 years
ago. It targeted the triangular area between Fulton Road, East 28th
Street and Pearl Avenue for low-income housing units. Along the way,
the steel mills that propped up much of the city, especially
businesses in South Lorain, started shutting down.

South Lorain began seeing more violence in the 1970s. In the 1980s
and early 1990s, Lorain began swarming with gangs, the most powerful
of which was based in South Lorain.

Today, gang and drug activity continue to have a steady pulse in the
area. In fact, many see the ''Dirty 30'' as the heart of the beast.

Earlier this year, police stopped someone for a traffic violation
near East 30th and Globe. While the officers dealt with the driver, a
relative of his walked toward them.

The officers told him to get lost.

''You don't know!'' he shouted. ''This is the Million Dollar
Block!

''This is the Million Dollar Block, baby! I'm going to get
mine!''

Sometimes, the Million Dollar Block spills over into Sheila
Brenes-Gonzalez's parking lot.

When she looks out a window of her Lorain Metropolitan Housing
Authority apartment on East 30th, she often sees people loitering
near her building. Sometimes they even sit on her car.

It wasn't always like this.

Sheila has seen the area change. She grew up in South Lorain and
moved back to the area four years ago.

''You could play outside and not be afraid,'' she said of her
childhood. ''Now I feel like I'm in a nightmare.

''This community has lost its reputation. You can have a good
reputation, but once you lose it, it's hard to build it back up.
That's what's happened around here. Everything is leaving, shutting
down.''

A 24-year-old single mother, Sheila has had bullets ricochet off the
bricks of her apartment.

Over the summer, she sat on her front step with her 6-year-old
daughter, Shakayzha, when somebody began shooting from a car on East
30th. She often sees drugs changing hands near her apartment, between
people who don't even live in the building.

Sheila is fed up with the police. She says the city needs a
substation in the area and more patrols. Also, she's critical of city
politicians who she says ask for her vote around election time then
seem to disappear.

''When you're in low-income housing you are categorized as poverty,''
she said. ''They don't care about you. They think you're nothing.

''People see (the Lorain Metropolitan Housing Authority) as a
dead-end. I see it as a stepping stone.''

She wants to take that next step sometime in the next few months.
Unfortunately, she's currently looking for work because her last
employer shut down.

''But I'd rather pay $500 a month for a place to live, and
struggle,'' she said, ''than get government assistance and be
miserable and live in fear.''

After a murder on the other side of Globe this summer, Shakayzha
wouldn't sleep or even walk into the kitchen alone. She's too afraid
to ride her brand-new bike.

Sheila said she constantly worries that a stray bullet will rip
through her apartment, perhaps coming through the upstairs front
window and into Shakayzha's tiny bedroom.

''She's petrified,'' said Sheila.

Living in South Lorain has made Shakayzha alert to what's going on
around her. Sheila said her daughter is too traumatized to hang
around with the wrong people.

In that respect, Shakayzha is already ahead of where her mother was
at that age.

''As a child growing up around here, you'd hear about somebody
getting shot,'' said Sheila. ''But I've never been around it to see
it and hear it like this.''

On Aug. 23, everybody on East 30th Street got an up-close reminder
that innocence is no shield against violence.

Fifteen-year-old Samarrie Soler was in her living room, watching
television with her family just before midnight, when a bullet went
through a couch on the porch and an open screen window before killing
her.

Casings found on the porch indicated there were several rounds shot
at the house.

When 19-year-old Adrian Lindsey, another South Lorain resident, was
arrested the next day, it became apparent Lindsey had mistaken
Soler's home for another, police said.

In the aftermath of the shooting, area residents gathered for a vigil
in Soler's honor.

They also expressed fear and frustration over their neighborhood:

- -- ''If I had a place to go, I'd go, but it's tough right now. It's
not safe anymore.''

- -- ''If it ain't killing, it's drugs.''

- -- ''You hear shots every day. You don't want to live here.''

Some residents called for action. Something, they said, had to be
done.

Rivera agreed, but as he looked around the vigil that day, he had to
shake his head. He wondered how they could truly do something to help
the situation when some of them had drug dealers in their own homes.

But he didn't say that. Instead, Rivera urged the neighborhood not to
give up. Don't tolerate it. Keep calling the police when you hear
gunshots, he said.

In October, Terry DeWitt did just that.

He was sitting in the living room of his East 31st Street home
watching television when he and his wife heard a gunshot. Then DeWitt
heard someone yelling from nearby Lincoln Elementary.

''The guy was yelling that he'd been shot,'' said DeWitt, who called
911. A woman in the neighborhood did the same and, when police
arrived, she was able to give a description of the shooter.

DeWitt, who works for Ford, has lived in the same home for 28 years.
After raising two daughters in the neighborhood, DeWitt is on the
verge of retirement and has no plans to move.

But he admits his neighborhood has seen better days.

''It was pretty decent when I bought the house,'' he said. ''It was a
lot cleaner. The homes were kept up and the yards were nice.

''Now it's kind of run down. We hear a lot of gunshots, mostly in the
summer. And we see a lot of drug activity, guys who look like they're
in gangs. There's just a lot of stuff going around out here.''

The police know their target, and this year they added a couple of
weapons in hopes of hitting it more often.

In terms of arrests, it seems to be working.

After the creation of the Lorain County Strike Force and Lorain's
Street Crimes Unit, nearly 1,000 arrests were made this year in an
attempt to crack down on crime and violence in the city.

''Things have really slowed down for us, to tell you the truth,''
said Rivera. ''There was so much going on in April and May that we
anticipated a really rough summer. We had (Soler's shooting) in
August, but, overall, the number of shootings kind of slowed down
for us.''

That includes drug activity in South Lorain. Some officers feel the
arrest of Margarita Davila in September had something to do with
that. Davila's South Lorain home was raided and police seized two
kilograms of cocaine. She was allegedly selling drugs out of her
home and her store on Pearl Avenue.

But such progress means little to Brenda.

She lives her life behind closed drapes. Her son-in-law is afraid to
walk the dog. He makes sure his window is locked each night before he
goes to bed.

Brenda wants to leave Lorain behind. In fact, she's felt that way
since summer 2003, a few months after she bought the house.

That's when she was awakened by gunshots and shattered windows at 4
a.m. Someone had driven by and shot out her front windows, both
upstairs and downstairs, with birdshot.

''We didn't even know anybody at the time,'' she said. ''The police
said it was probably somebody who just got out of jail and didn't
know new people lived here. They said this used to be a drug house.''

Brenda was ready to move back to the country, but her 80-year-old
father-in-law said he wasn't moving again until they took him out of
the house in a casket.

He died in January.

The house has been on the market since April.