Crime

“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. (more…)

Photo by PoPville flickr user Josh Bassett

A resident writes:

“One of our Marion St street neighbors was just verbally and physically assaulted, and had her life threatened at the bus stop. The regular there with the incredibly droopy face and glassy eyes (Tony?) grabbed her and threatened to cut her throat. She is still very shaken up, but I got her to tell me what happened, and the police response was even more shocking than the assault.

One officer told her “he didn’t mean it”. Another officer told her she should walk on the other side of the street. And another officer told her that she should have stayed at the scene. Each of these so obviously ridiculous for so many reasons. With two drug-crazed stabbings in DC last week, one of which happened two blocks away, why shouldn’t she – and more importantly why shouldn’t the police – take this threat seriously? And why would she want to stay at the scene where a f*cking lunatic on drugs is grabbing her and threatening her? And why should we not be able to use that side of the street, just so it can be used for illegal activities? What if she wants to ride the bus?

I personally get along with the guys there usually, we say hi, they pet my dog and they know exactly how many days old my son is. I try to be neighborly with them. But that doesn’t excuse this type of behavior. They are not all innocent local old-timers that we should feel sorry about displacing. At least some (probably most) of them are on drugs and/or are selling drugs. I watch then from my window as they sneak around the concrete wall for quick hits off the crack pipe. It can’t be allowed to continue. Why is nothing happening after so many complaints? If this had happened to my wife while she was walking with our newborn son, we’d have one less person at that bus stop to worry about. The cops should not let it come to that though.”