“now we have someone sacrificing small animals for the dead”

“Dear PoPville,

Like South Shaw wasn’t having a bad enough summer…

…now we have someone sacrificing small animals for the dead. Someone has started leaving dead animals at the makeshift memorial on O St NW between 6th and 7th St. This block is just as bad if not worse than the intersection of 7th and P, with rampant drug use every single evening on both the north and south ends of the street. The Kennedy Rec center outside the basketball court is a hotbed for groups of young men to stand around, sexually harass women, and smoke drugs in plain view of the police.

On top of the regular unsettling behavior on this block, we now have the dead animals. The memorial is for Tamara Gliss, who was killed in a shooting on Memorial Day. For the longest time, the memorial was a collection of stuffed animals and a growing number of empty booze bottles. The bottles reached a quantity of about 50 when DPW finally had to come clean them up during the last major storm because a tree fell on the memorial and there was broken glass everywhere. The squirrel showed up three days ago. It was fully intact and looked like it had been hit with a BB gun. Today, a crow was there. This is so disturbing. I called the police, who can’t do anything because a crime is not actively happening. I sat on hold with DPW for 20 minutes before hanging up and reporting it as “dead animal cleanup” on the app, but that hardly addresses the major issue (and in my experience the app takes weeks to actually get a response). Someone in Shaw is purposely killing animals to leave at this makeshift memorial, which is super disturbing behavior. It’s been well over a month, and now another memorial for another person has popped up on the north end of the street near the basketball court. The city needs to clean up both of these before anything else escalates the situation.

I understand wanting to do something nice to acknowledge the untimely death of a friend, but these memorials are filled with people’s garbage and now are being treated as an excuse to kill local wildlife. The memorials are on public property and should be removed, but one has been there for a month and a half and the other for over 2 weeks.”

WARNING: Very disturbing photo of dead animals after the jump.