One mile in St. Louis: Death comes too often on stretch of North Grand

On a rainy night in late October, blue and red police lights reflected off slick pavement on North Grand Boulevard.

St. Louis homicide detectives in trench coats inspected a car peppered with bullet holes. Locals huddled nearby in front of a Family Dollar store under hoods and umbrellas with cellphones held out to record.

“Check on y’all people,” one woman repeated, scanning the scene with her phone.

Bystanders saw two young children taken away from the car. Inside, a 21-year-old father was shot dead.

It was the latest homicide scene along one mile of North Grand — from Sullivan Avenue through West Florissant Avenue — where 46 people have been killed since 2010, including six this year, according to a Post-Dispatch review of St. Louis police records.

The dead range in age from 16 to 69. They were shot outside bars, in homes, in cars, at work. Some were killed in front of children and parents. All but one was Black.

The mile is an artery of life through north St. Louis, dotted with dollar stores, churches, chop suey joints and pawn shops. At night, neighborhood bars fill with regulars. Some afternoons an outdoor roller rink in nearby Fairground Park comes to life with families skating to a DJ.

But this area also has among the greatest concentration of gun violence in America.

It touches three of St. Louis’ 20 neighborhoods that accounted for more than 25% of all homicides in Missouri in 2019, despite making up less than 1.5% of the state population, according to FBI data. It’s a hot spot in a city that in 2019 had the top homicide rate among large U.S. cities for the sixth year running. If you take into account the larger metro area, St. Louis still ranked fifth in the U.S. in 2018.

And this year, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the epidemic of gun violence is getting worse here, along with other large U.S. cities. St. Louis is on pace this year to have its highest murder rate on record.

To understand the impact of the staggering concentration of deadly shootings, the Post-Dispatch spent weeks along North Grand interviewing dozens of those who work, live, pray and still mourn loved ones on this one mile. Their stories are part of the Missouri Gun Violence Project, a partnership with The Star looking at the causes, consequences and possible solutions to gun violence in St. Louis and the state.

1 corner, 4 dead

On a recent afternoon, Kae Chris was just finishing work on a car at Young Auto Repair.

“Look at this,” the mechanic, wearing a Detroit Lions winter hat, said as he ran his hands over the back of a gray sedan. “Used to be 11 bullet holes here.”

A few feet away from the airbrushed entrance sign to the shop, another car sits on the wide sidewalk. Chris lifts up its plastic cover to show at least five bullet holes on the passenger side.

“I get at least six or seven cars that have been shot up every month,” he says. “We’re not in Afghanistan. There’s no war going on, but if you count up the body count on the north side you might think there was.”

The auto shop sits on the southern edge of the mile in the 3100 block of North Grand. Three or four men can be spotted outside most days chatting in chairs on the sidewalk. Next door is Bing Lau Chop Suey, one of four Chinese food spots along this mile where the local classic St. Paul sandwich — egg foo young between two slices of white bread — sells for $3.50.

Four people have been killed on this corner this year.

The most recent fatal gunshots went off just before 2 p.m. July 21.

Donisha Calhoun was scrolling social media that afternoon when she spotted pictures of a man in a red track suit crumpled on the sidewalk next to Bing Lau.

Hours later, she realized it was her brother, Robert Clemons Jr., called Lil’ Rob or Reezy by the family.

Clemons, 28, of Overland, often visited the neighborhood where his mother still lives. He was shot walking out of Bing Lau with his lunch in hand, Calhoun said.

Clemons studied heating and air conditioning repair and had worked in maintenance for the St. Louis Public Library system. He was a hugger and a people person, his sister said. He left behind a wife and three sons, ages 7, 5 and 3.

Calhoun has few answers about who killed her brother. The family put out a $5,000 reward through Crimestoppers for tips, but no one has been arrested.

Calhoun fears witnesses are too scared of retaliation to speak to police.

“St. Louis has always been a place of walking on egg shells,” she said, adding that she also lost an uncle to gun violence in the city in 2006.

Calhoun’s husband, Jesse Calhoun, said the death put the whole family on edge.

“Rob wasn’t a street person, so this came out of nowhere,” he said. “His kids are terrorized. My oldest nephew will say to me now, ‘I want to get tougher before I get grown because I don’t want to get shot like my daddy got shot.’ He asks me, ‘Uncle, will you protect me when I get big?’”

A mass shooting

About a month before Clemons’ death, on June 13, Ashlei McCrary was out with friends and her boyfriend of two years, Willie Jackson III, at the Bad Habitz Social Club on North Grand.

The couple were regulars at the private club in the same building as Bing Lau and Young Auto Repair. The bar would let patrons smoke and keep drinking past the city’s closing time, she said.

“Everybody knew each other there, but that night it was packed,” she said. “There were people I’d never seen before.”

Jackson went outside about 3 a.m. to get his girlfriend a hot dog from a man barbecuing. A few minutes later, she heard the shots.

“All you heard was gunshots and people screaming and knocking over furniture and everyone ran to where I was at the back of the club,” she said. She hid under a bench until the gunfire stopped.

Afterward, Jackson wasn’t answering his phone. McCrary went outside to a chaotic scene of people rushing to their cars.

“I looked across the street and saw his shoes,” she said. She was overtaken by grief and police held her in a patrol vehicle for a short time because she wouldn’t stop yelling, asking why he was left to die.

Five others were seriously injured in the mass shooting outside the club on North Grand that night, including another of McCrary’s friends, Daniel Cameron, 36, who also died of his injuries.

Later that month, David Boxley, 30, was arrested and charged with first-degree murder in Jackson’s death. He was identified through videos recorded at the scene that were posted to social media, McCrary and charging documents say.

Witnesses told police that Boxley and Jackson got into an argument and Boxley raised “a rifle-styled firearm” and shot him.

Not long after the shooting, McCrary decided to move out of her home in St. Louis’ Baden neighborhood after stray bullets came uncomfortably close to her young son’s bedroom.

“You know you’re numb when you walk into your front door and hear gunshots and you don’t jump. You don’t flinch. You just walk into your house,” she said. “I had to get out.”

McCrary moved all of Jackson’s clothes with her to her new home in north St. Louis County.

“I just can’t let go yet,” she said, holding back tears.

Less than a week after Jackson was killed, two others were shot on the same block. One of the victims, Jason Petty, 44, was found dead in a car just before 3 a.m. on June 19. No arrest has been made in that case.

Bad Habitz was shut down by the city for liquor violations this summer, according to city records.

For Chris, the mechanic on the corner, the episodes of violence are recurring so often around him that he doesn’t want to bring his 15-year-old son to the shop to help anymore.

“It’s not safe,” he said, recalling another case when 17-year-old Armond Latimore was killed on the same corner one afternoon in 2018 after picking up food at Bing Lau. The day he was killed Latimore posted to social media, “... I’m just glad I can say I made it to see 17.”

“The leadership are making it worse,” Chris said before stopping to greet a neighborhood fixture, Robert Wallace, 85. The man was dressed in an all-white suit and a red tie as he drove down the sidewalk in a motorized wheelchair blaring smooth jazz from a speaker.

Chris said he blamed some of the rising violence on the law passed by the Missouri Legislature in 2016 that allows people with no criminal record to carry concealed weapons without having a permit or weapons training. The law also has been a common target for city leaders, including Mayor Lyda Krewson, who believes it’s contributed to violent crime in the city.

“The problem is that every 17- or 20-year-old got a gun,” Chris said. “And now with the new laws it’s so easy. Next thing you know, the kid is doing life and somebody is dead.”

Once, a ballpark ...

Just south of Young Auto Repair and Bing Lau, sits the Herbert Hoover campus of the Boys & Girls Club of Greater St. Louis, a haven for young people in the neighborhood since 1967.

The building occupies the site of Sportsman’s Park, former home to the St. Louis Browns and 46 years of the St. Louis Cardinals. The ballpark hosted legends like Babe Ruth, Satchel Paige and Stan Musial until the team moved to Busch Stadium downtown in 1966 and the land was donated to the club.

About 1,000 children and teenagers attend events each day at the club, which has nine locations, according to the organization’s president, Flint Fowler.

Fowler said the club’s after-school programs, career classes, summer camps and sports provide a positive outlet and alternative to violence in the area, where disinvestment began before the location opened in the late 1960s.

The club is in the Jeff-Vander-Lou neighborhood, named for Jeff-Vander-Lou Inc., a nonprofit founded in 1964 by Macler Shepard, owner of an upholstery shop in the neighborhood. He named his nonprofit for the area’s major cross streets Jefferson, Vandeventer and St. Louis avenues.

Shepard rehabilitated the area then known as Yeatman after growing frustrated seeing factories shutter and banks refusing loans for housing repairs around him.

Jeff-Vander-Lou Inc. renovated 623 housing units, led a restoration of famous ragtime composer Scott Joplin’s house on the edge of the neighborhood and wooed businesses, including Brown Shoe Co., which opened a $22 million plant there in 1970, employing nearly 300 at its peak.

The project in its first 10 years noticeably boosted incomes, according to a 1979 story by The Associated Press.

In 1984, the neighborhood was dealt a major economic blow when the Carter Carburetor plant closed after some 60 years. The factory at one point employed 3,000 workers and its closure left a toxic Superfund site behind until cleanup began in 2013.

The Brown Shoe plant closed in 1995 and the area continued to bleed residents.

Research by St. Louis University sociologist Christopher Prener found the neighborhood population went from about 40,000 residents in 1950, the year the city’s population peaked, to about 5,500 people in 2017 — the largest numerical loss of any St. Louis neighborhood in that time, the Post-Dispatch reported last year.

Today, 98% of remaining residents are Black. More than a third fall below the federal poverty line. The average per capita income in the area is about $15,000.

Jeff-Vander-Lou also has the city’s second highest number of vacant and abandoned properties among city neighborhoods at 1,688, according to the St. Louis Vacancy Collaborative.

The problems are interconnected with crime, but Fowler, head of the Boys & Girls Club, says his organization is one of many working to improve the area.

The club is invested in remaining an anchor in Jeff-Vander-Lou, announcing this year that it will redevelop the old Carter Carburetor site into a golf course, driving range and putt-putt green.

“Turning around that sense of abandonment can go a long way,” Fowler said.

Just down the street from the club is Mission: St. Louis, a nonprofit in an 84,000-square-foot building erected in 1918 that was once home to the North Side YMCA. The organization’s services include workforce readiness, job training and youth educational programs.

“When you have employment, you have more purpose in life, especially if it’s employment that’s a livable wage, a career that’s going some place,” said Liz Hopson, a spokeswoman for Mission: St. Louis.

The nonprofit’s 2016 move to North Grand from a wealthier area, the Grove, was driven in part to be closer to the people it serves, Hopson said. The unemployment rate in ZIP codes around North Grand range from 15% to 22%, compared with 8% in the city as a whole, according to 2018 census data.

‘The devil can’t have it’

Down North Grand, past Natural Bridge Avenue, Fae McFadden, 66, lets some land she owns be used for a small playground and regular food giveaways organized by volunteer groups.

McFadden first lived in the neighborhood in the early 1970s as a college sophomore, the summer she met her husband, Larry. He grew up in the area, near the once-segregated 132 acres of Fairground Park.

She’s had to face gun violence that victimized her own family in Fairground, with both her niece and nephew killed in the city in recent years, but said she wouldn’t leave. When she hears about trouble, she instead prays over the houses affected on walks around Fairground Park.

“Somebody has to be a light,” she said. “I raised my five kids here, and the devil can’t have it.”

McFadden works as a real estate agent buying up properties in north St. Louis and North County and hopes the $1.7 billion project building a new campus for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency about 1.5 miles away will turn around the neighborhood economy.

City leaders expect the high-tech venture on the eastern edge of Jeff-Vander-Lou to bring more than 3,000 jobs and hope it will attract more development on the north side. Crews broke ground in November 2019. It’s on track to open by 2025.

For now, though, people continue to struggle financially and the food giveaways are more popular than ever during the pandemic, McFadden said.

Across the street from McFadden’s plot, more than a dozen cars were waiting for another food line that afternoon organized by Ward 3 Alderman Brandon Bosley.

Bosley was elected in 2017 to the post held before him by his father, Freeman Bosley Sr., for about 30 years. Brandon Bosley’s brother, Freeman Bosley Jr., was elected the first Black mayor of St. Louis from 1993 to 1997.

Bosley believes the entrenched poverty plays into the violence.

“People have nothing, but at the same time there’s this pressure in the culture here. You have to have the nice car, the shoes. That is how you show you are a success,” Bosley said.

There needs to be more dynamic policing, Bosley argues.

“People feel like they can get away with it,” he said. “And a lot of the time they’re right.”

There’s about a 40% clearance rate among the 46 murder cases along the mile since 2010, according to police data and coverage by the Post-Dispatch.

That’s slightly below the clearance rate for the city as a whole last year, with 47% of 2019 homicides cleared as of this month, short of the national homicide clearance rate of about 60%.

‘Land of opportunity’

On July 3, Bander Abdel-Majed, 18, was working at his uncle’s convenience store, 99 Plus, at 4145 North Grand, and went to take out the trash when a man shot and killed him.

The shooting was one of several targeted at the businesses that still provide needed services to the neighborhood.

The teenager’s family believes a customer got angry about being thrown out of the store for unruly behavior and the shooter sought to retaliate.

Abdel-Majed immigrated to the U.S. with his family from Jordan when he was about 6 or 7 years old, his cousin and close friend Moe Abdel-aal said.

“Our dads came here to start businesses, back then it was seen as the land of opportunity,” Abdel-aal said. “We both were in the stores from when we were little kids. A lot of people in that neighborhood watched us grow up.”

Abdel-Majed graduated from Parkway South High School a couple months before his death. He worked hard to save up and buy a Ford Fusion and had dreams of becoming an entrepreneur one day, his cousin said.

“Honestly whenever we wake up and go to work we know what we’re dealing with,” said Abdel-aal who still works at a convenience store nearby on Natural Bridge Avenue. “You know working out there might get you killed.”

James E. Chaney, 54, was charged in late July with first-degree murder and armed criminal action in the case.

A couple years earlier, a store clerk at the Dollar General down the road from 99 Plus on North Grand, Robert Woods, 42, was shot to death.

Woods was shot when he confronted a robber in the store in November 2018, police said at the time. The robber ran from the scene and has never been arrested.

Woods was killed four years after he entered the Salvation Army Adult Rehabilitation Center in the Central West End where he recovered from a heroin addiction. He then worked for two years helping others in the program, said Jamarcus Smith, a close friend and former co-worker.

“He was a big man, over 6 feet, so he just had that presence,” Smith said.

Woods eventually transferred to the Salvation Army retail stores before taking the job at Dollar General when offered a raise. He visited his friends at the center and shared the story of his success often, Smith said while sitting in his office where he still keeps a Bible verse from Woods’ funeral near his desk.

“It was devastating,” Smith said of the death. “In this work, you have several instances where people do die from addiction, but he was clean and sober for years. He did everything right and then his life was taken by way of a gun.”

‘Black Cheers’

Other businesses along North Grand do what they can to cut down on crime, like the Zodiac Lounge at 3517 North Grand Boulevard, where bartenders won’t serve anyone younger than 35.

Ken Casey, 51, has helped run the decades-old bar for about three years.

“It’s like the Black Cheers,” Casey said. “Everybody knows each other. To me, it’s home.”

Zodiac’s age restriction helps keep the peace inside and the “riff raff” out, he said.

Casey said he lives around the corner and sometimes works as bouncer. He used to carry a pistol but stopped because he feels safe in his neighborhood and “didn’t want to hurt nobody.”

Further north on Grand, Lee Phung, 51, and his wife have owned the Egg Roll Kitchen for 21 years. In years past, he’d often hear gunfire when night fell, but he has grown accustomed to hearing it “at all hours of the day.”

He and his wife stood behind their takeout counter about a decade ago when a gunmen robbed them of $100. He didn’t report it to police because he thought they had more important things to do.

“I didn’t think it was that big a deal,” Phung said. “I was just glad I was safe and he didn’t shoot.”

Phung, of Manchester, said business is down in recent years and the coronavirus pandemic made things worse. But he says he’s staying put, despite the crime.

“I’m 51 years old,” he said. “What else can I do?”

‘Focus on the damn violence’

The concentration of violence on North Grand and other areas of St. Louis is typical of urban crime around the country, said Thomas Abt, senior fellow at the Council on Criminal Justice and author of “Bleeding Out: The Devastating Consequences of Urban Violence and a Bold New Plan for Peace in the Streets.”

Abt argues that urban violence is surprisingly “sticky,” concentrated in a very small number of people and blocks.

“We see this so frequently researchers call it the Law of Crime Concentration,” Abt told the Post-Dispatch. “In the vast majority of cities, less than 5% of areas make up the majority of serious violent crime.”

Abt argues people too often believe that crime is rampant in a particular neighborhood, when in actuality it happens in small pockets.

Even on the mile of North Grand, two concentrated clusters of homicides make up nearly half of the total since 2010: The block with Bing Lau and Young Auto Repair, where 14 people were killed, and another near apartment complexes in the 4000 block of Peck Avenue less than a block off Grand, where eight died.

Abt argues the concentrated nature of the crime necessitates a concentrated approach to prevention focused on narrow locations and groups of people.

“There is a lot of focus when you talk about crime or curing poverty or inequality and I support those for other reasons, but those will take decades to improve,” he said. “They’re not targeted enough. You have to address violence directly. To save lives right now, focus on the damn violence.”

‘Lucky to be alive’

On that late October night, when North Grand saw yet another death, Mario Thomas was among those standing in the rain across from the Family Dollar watching the scene.

Thomas, 44, has lived in the neighborhood all his life. He’ll never forget getting picked up from fourth grade and hearing his uncle had been shot and killed. He got into gang life himself in his 20s and was shot in the elbow, he said.

“I’m lucky to be alive,” he said looking at the police investigating the shooting. “So many of the people I went to high school with, so many of my friends are gone.”

Over at the car, police soon identified the man killed as Preston Bell, 21, father to a 1-year-old girl named Promyse.

Bell kept to himself for the most part and was close with his mother as the youngest of four boys, according to his cousin, Trevonte Brock.

An hour after the shooting, officers rolled up the yellow police tape and the flashing vehicles pulled away, one by one.

Traffic quickly resumed on North Grand, Thomas turned away to go home and members of Bell’s family received a devastating call.

This story was originally published November 13, 2020 at 2:08 PM.