Ruben Castaneda - S Street Rising: Crack, Murder, and Redemption in D.C.

For Mom and Pop, who raised a survivor

Contents

The Show

I should have gotten out of the car already. I should have been working the crowd, scribbling notes on the mayhem while looking for someone to interview.

But I couldnt bring myself to get out of my beat-up Ford Escort, pulled up to the curb near the intersection of 5th and O Streets Northwest.

It was the afternoon of December 20, 1990. I was a twenty-nine-year-old night police reporter for the Washington Post . Id joined the paper fifteen months earlier and was anxious to make my mark, willing to do whatever the bosses asked. I routinely raced to combat zones to cover drug-crew shootings, even if the trips didnt yield many bylined stories. Single or even double gangster killings were usually relegated to the briefs column. But this assignment was different: five kids shot in a drive-by as they were walking home from school just before Christmas. Other Post reporters were at the scene, and chances were good that one of us was going to get our name on the front page.

Marked Metropolitan Police Department cruisers, lights flashing, were parked at odd angles in the intersection. Two TV camera jockeys recorded the aftermath of the attack. A group of spectators was clustered behind the bright yellow crime-scene tape, gawking at the bloody clothes and shell casings scattered on the street and sidewalk. Your typical crime scene, in other wordsbut one that looked as dangerous to me as a snipers alley. One of those spectators could recognize me, pick me off as I stepped out of the car. For the moment, doing my job wasnt important. Staying safe was.

There were men and women of all ages in the crowd, along with some school-age boys and girls. I locked in on the faces of the teenage males and young men. I had to be sure that none of them knew meknew about me, that is.

The shooting had taken place just four blocks from S Street Northwest, where once, sometimes twice, a week I drove my girl Champagne to make crack buys. Champagne was a strawberrya streetwalker who traded sex for drugs.

All the S Street slingers knew Champagne. And all of them knew me and my car, at least by sight. Id become such a regular customer that some dealers called out, Hey, amigo! whenever they saw me.

Most of the S Street dealers no doubt lived in the neighborhood. What if some of them were among the rubberneckers behind the yellow tape? Would they say anything if they saw me approach a cop with my notebook out? Would one of them try to shake me down in exchange for his silence? Would he tell his bosswhoever he wasthe dealer who was running the street? If the S Street kingpin found out that one of his loyal customers was a Washington Post reporter, what would he do with that unlikely nugget? Would he use the information as a bargaining chip if the cops tried to take him down?

If the story of my tawdry double life leaked, local TV news would be all over it. It could be weirdly ironic enough for the national networks, too. Post executive editor Ben Bradlee would probably summon me to his glass-walled office and furiously curse at me before firing me, I imagined.

I sighed, disappointed with myself for not having come up with a good, or at least plausible, excuse to dodge the assignment, after an editor had called me at home and asked me to clock in early.

I usually thrived at crime scenes. My street instincts were good. Most reporters went straight for whatever police or fire officials happened to be on hand. I worked the edges, talking to the people others overlooked. Civilian witnesses were my priority. Id talk to them before they vanished or were scooped up by the cops. Id usually speak with police later, since they werent going anywhere.

A few months earlier, Id covered a killing at a blue-collar apartment complex near the Maryland state line. A man had been fatally stabbed inside one of the units. Outside the building, a police commander talked to a couple of detectives. Thirty feet away, a cluster of Latino men and women watched the police in silence.

I wandered over and talked to them in Spanish. A couple of the men described what had happened. Two guys had been arguing. One of them pulled out a knife. He stabbed the victim and ran. They gave me the name of the culprit. When a detective headed toward the building, I cut him off and asked if he had a suspect.

No, he said.

Would you like one?

That detective turned into a good source.

But this afternoon, my instincts were useless. I sat in my car and stared hard at one of the spectators. He was wearing a black knit cap and appeared to be in his early twenties. He looked vaguely familiar. Where had I seen him?

I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose. I couldnt stay in the car forever.

Had I smoked myself into a corner? Was I about to become an embarrassing footnote in the national crack epidemic?

At the time, no U.S. metropolis was getting hit harder by crack than D.C. In the eastern half of the city, bodies were dropping nightly in violence propelled by crack turf wars. Washington became known not simply as the nations capital but as its murder capital. A local TV station devoted a half hour to the carnage every night with a program called City Under Siege . A few months earlier, Mayor Marion Barry had been convicted of crack possession following an FBI sting at the Vista Hotel, downtown, an arrest that stunned the city and made screaming headlines around the world.

The Post had gone into overdrive after the Barry bust. Reporters were assigned to keep an eye on the disgraced mayor or his house around the clock. My colleagues downed coffee to make it through their late-night Barry watches, but when it was my turn, I took a couple of hits of crack. The irony of riding a crack high while conducting surveillance on a mayor whod been busted for possessing the same substance was lost on me.

The possibility of being outed by the S Street slingers while working this scene was not. Earlier in the year, Id covered a quadruple murder on the very corner where Champagne and I made our buys. But that was on a freezing, snowy night, not an overcast afternoon, and any slingers whod been out scattered when the gunplay began and stayed away when the cops swarmed onto the block.

The man in the black cap wandered away from the knot of gawkers, affording me a better view. It came to me: He resembled one of the guys I played pickup hoops with at the downtown YMCA. I wasnt sure if he was the basketball player, but I was relieved: I hadnt seen him on S Street.

One deep breath later, I slipped my press credentials around my neck and got out of the car.

Immediately, I spotted a police commander wearing a white shirt inside the crime scene. Uniformed officers and sergeants wore blue shirts; MPD commanders of the rank of lieutenant or higher wore white. Cops, criminals, firefighters, and reporters referred to them as white shirts. Hands in his jacket pockets, the commander was speaking with some onlookers on the other side of the tape. That was unusualmost police officials didnt talk to civilians on the street.

I wandered over, planted myself among the spectators, and waited. From the gold bars on the shoulders of his jacket I could tell he was a captain.

A few minutes later, as he retreated from the crowd, I stepped up to the tape and called out, Captain! half-expecting him to ignore me. But he turned, walked over, and met me at the tape. I read the nameplate on his jacket: HENNESSY .

I introduced myself as a Post reporter, asked if he could help me with what had happened, and prepared for the verbal stiff-arm. Most of the white shirts Id encountered on the street ran from indifferent to hostile.