Spate of homicides puts Columbus in ‘season of unrest’

It started as just a normal day at Truth Spring Academy.

Children were learning, teachers were teaching, and everything seemed fine.

Then a friend called Carrie Strickland, the school’s board chair, informing her about a shooting not far from the school’s Fifth Avenue location. Strickland soon learned that the suspect had fled the scene, running down the block and into nearby apartments, prompting a standoff with police.

“We shut the whole school down to keep everybody inside,” said Strickland, whose husband pastors the nearby Highland Community Church located a few doors from their home. “As time went on, you could tell more and more people were finding out about it, because the crowd started to gather, and it just got crazier and people were just everywhere.”

That was Tuesday, after the fatal shooting of Tamir Harris, who became the city’s latest homicide victim in a year rife with gun violence on the streets of Columbus. It was the third homicide in three days, leaving some neighborhoods on high alert and many Columbus residents outraged.

The Columbus Police Department’s list of homicides shows 20 killings this year. Muscogee County Coroner Buddy Bryan puts the number at 25, which is one homicide short of the 26 homicides his office recorded in 2016. Nine of those homicides remain unsolved.

The discrepancy between the two numbers is due to how the deaths are tallied. Bryan does not differentiate between a homicide that police consider a murder and one they categorize as manslaughter or a justifiable shooting. A homicide is a homicide, to the coroner, whether or not it results in a criminal case.

What’s not debatable is the impact that violence is having on neighborhoods like North Highland, which remain stumped by two perpetual questions: Why is there so much violence? And what can be done about it?

Strickland pondered such questions on Thursday while sitting in her Fifth Avenue home. During an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, she recalled moving into the neighborhood in 2005, after her husband, Rob, was called to serve as pastor of Highland Community Church.

Initially, Strickland was reluctant to leave the comfort of her middle class life, she said. But God changed her heart, and now she considers it home. She and her husband have been able to build a successful ministry by befriending people in the neighborhood, and she believes things have improved. Yet, crime remains a persistent menace.

“Like seasons of life, there are seasons in a neighborhood,” she said. “There are seasons of calm and then you have seasons of unrest, and I would say that this would be a season of unrest for North Highland.

“For the most part, people in this neighborhood generally respect the work that we do here and crime doesn’t happen a lot in this area around Fifth Avenue, but we’ve had several thefts,” she said. “We’ve had car break-ins. So there was already a stirring of unrest around, and on Tuesday it just culminated to a peak of just chaos at that point.”

In response to the shooting, Strickland posted a blog on the Truth Spring website making a declaration based on Isaiah 60:18:

“I publicly declare Promise #9 over the North Highland community today: Violence and destruction will be removed from North Highland and in its place will be salvation and praise,” she wrote.

Shortly after Strickland spoke to the Ledger-Enquirer, members of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance gathered down the street to denounce the violence. They said the recent killings are a “spiritual problem” requiring intervention from God. They called on families to return to church and for congregations to pray for community healing.

The Rev. Johnny Flakes III, pastor of Fourth Street Missionary Baptist Church, stood among the clergy. In an interview with the Ledger-Enquirer, he said it’s time for adults to connect with youths caught up in a life of crime — most of them young, black men on the margins of society.

“Instead of coming up with what we think is the best solution, we really do have to do something different in terms of listening as opposed to talking,” he said. “We’ll be looking for opportunities for us to come together, seeking to understand first, as opposed to being understood.”

Mayor Teresa Tomlinson, the city’s public safety director, said law enforcement officials continue to fight crime through the police force, intelligence-led policing, neighborhood associations and community partners.

“Murder and violent crime shakes the core sense of security for all citizens,” she said in a written statement to the Ledger-Enquirer, “though the murders we have in Columbus are remarkably similar and isolated to certain activities and groups of people involved in those activities.”

Tomlinson said recent homicides are similar in that:

• The suspect and the victim are known to one another.

• They involve gun violence, which results in simple disputes, perceived slights or jealousies, becoming deadly.

•They typically involve people engaged in risk-based lives or hanging out with those that do, including drugs, house parties and being involved in crime.

• They happen in clusters related to retaliation or other factors that could be curbed by witnesses working with law enforcement — fighting the anti-snitch culture.

City Crime Prevention Director Seth Brown said his office is trying to curb crime through a grant program that pumps about $700,000 into the community annually.

“Most of the programs that we have, about 70 percent goes toward juvenile funding — and that’s mainly middle school and below,” he said. “And almost every one of those programs has a component to it that deals with conflict resolution through a non-violent effort, trying to teach the kids that violence is never a way to solve a disagreement between each other.

“I don’t know how many kids will be impacted by it, but thousands of kids go through these programs, and I can’t help but think that that will turn the tide eventually,” he said, “because that’s what we’re seeing, we’re seeing that a lot of these situations are being solved with a gun. Two people have a disagreement, something happens, and they feel like a resolution can come from a barrel. It’s sad, it really is.”

Brown said he has been meeting with pastors in the wake of recent homicides, trying to help them mobilize their neighborhoods to stem the violence.

“Tragic events like this cause the church to stand up, and I really feel like they’re key to this, like they can reach the people that I probably can’t,” he said. “People listen to their ministers more than they listen to me. ... So, I’m hoping enlisting their help would, hopefully, put a dent in this and wake up some of the neighborhoods and create some activism.”

But some in the community say it will take more than programs to really make a difference. They say the solution requires a personal investment in the lives of young men existing without a sense of identity or purpose. In the process, they develop their own code of conduct to survive.

Eugene Thomas is a former Columbus drug dealer and gang member who spent 21 years in prison for a voluntary manslaughter conviction. He’s now back in the community trying to deter others from a life of crime, and he says it’s important to understand their mentality.

“There’s a whole subculture out there that nobody knows about,” he said. “We could look at it and say it’s black-on-black crime, or it’s drug-related, but it’s deeper than that. Some of the killings are revenge killings, which is something real popular now.

“... The majority of the killings are cats that knew each other, cats that have had run-ins and who’ve been gunning for each other,” he said. “... If a guy robs you, you want to get him back, so that’s revenge. If a guy disrespects you, you want to get him back, so that’s revenge. If a guy kills your partner, you want to get him back, so that’s revenge.”

Thomas said revenge gives them “a sense of accomplishment, equaling things out, a sense of dishing out what you’ve received, a sense of closure.”

“It gives the sense of something being just,” he said. “And most people, they stand real firm when they’re right and they’re justified, even if it’s something illegitimate or something illegal.

“A lot of transgressions in the street life, we don’t hear about,” he said. “On the news, we just hear that a murder took place. And it’s almost always as if the person who was killed was 100 percent innocent. ... But a lot of times these guys have violated codes in the streets. They’ve robbed people or disrespected people and this is what happens.”

Some of the cases have multiple murder defendants because the killings are gang-related, Thomas said, and gangs today are all about making money.

“You’re seeing people who are not afraid to kill and people not afraid to be associated with killing,” he said. “And in some cases people have to be associated with killers because they know too much and now they got to be involved.

“Then you look at all the different drugs that people are on,” he said. “I mean, there are so many different types of drugs out here. And they’re mixing this stuff. They might smoke some potent refer and they might smoke some Molly. They might take some pain pills, and then they might drink some Lean, or they might drink some alcohol. And all of that stuff just throws your body into confusion. So now you turn into this impulsive creature. You can’t rationalize, you’re just moving off of what you feel.”

Thomas is part of a group called the People’s Party for Independence that’s trying to reverse that trend in crime-ridden Columbus neighborhoods.

Dantrell Atajwe, chairman of the PPI organization, said many of the recent killings stem from poverty and socioeconomic isolation. He said members of PPI work with residents to help keep their neighborhoods clean, safe and organized.

“A lot of the youth of Columbus, Ga., are living in areas with a 40 percent or more poverty level,” he said. “Most of the killings going on in the city are being done by 18- to 25-year-olds. They’re doing it because all of them don’t come from a two-family home. Some of them haven’t eaten in two days. A lot of them don’t have anything to rely on. So anytime they feel disrespected or threatened, the first thing they do is turn to violence, and the violence tends to lead to death.

“A lot of the black youth don’t know how to talk to the mayor because they can’t articulate it,” he continued. “But if they could, they’d say, ‘I’m hungry and we want better paying jobs.’ When you’ve got a young man that’s 17 and he’s got two kids, he can’t get a job making $7 and his check is only $150 a week. That’s tough on that young brother.”

Atajwe said his organization is working to develop thriving communities where the residents own, operate and control the homes, businesses and land in the area. Members are currently trying to raise $20,000 to build a community center that has computers, books and sports equipment for local youth.

“We want to start a garden initiative to help them learn how to feed themselves and grow food and be able to do something different,” he said. “We want to provide educational programs, psychological programs, on-the-job training, resume-building — all these programs so that our youth can feel equal, because most of the killing is in the black community. We have to deal with that, and not be afraid to say this is a black issue.

“… But we have been taught to not trust each other, and also there’s a generational gap,” he said. “The younger generation doesn’t listen to the older generation because of the time change. … Now, you have all these kids running around and they’re in charge of the community, and the old people don’t even want to come outside.”

This story was originally published August 26, 2017 at 10:00 PM with the headline "Spate of homicides puts Columbus in ‘season of unrest’."