01:00 AM EST on Sunday, December 20, 2009
By W. Zachary Malinowski
Journal Staff Writer
Eugene Briggs, 28, was shot and killed Wednesday.
PROVIDENCE — The peaceful holiday season has been anything but tranquil in the state’s largest city.
An unusually violent year was punctuated last week with an explosion of violence that left two people dead, three officers wounded in a drug raid and two other young men hospitalized with gunshot wounds.
The recent carnage has spiked the murder rate in Providence to 22, its highest level in four years and a significant jump from last year’s total of 13 homicides.
“There are too many shootings and too much violence,” said Police Chief Dean M. Esserman. “It’s hard to tell what we have prevented, but we haven’t prevented enough.”
The jump in murders has also been accompanied by a steady climb in shootings over the past five years. Police Department statistics show that through Thursday 83 people had been shot in the city, 5 more than last year and the most since 2003, when 92 people were victims of gunfire.
The surge in murders gives Providence the dubious distinction of having one of the highest murder rates in New England for cities with populations topping 100,000. Hartford, the poor and depressed capital of Connecticut, has 31 murders and 167 shootings so far this year, while New Haven has had 13 murders and 142 shootings. Meanwhile, Bridgeport, the largest city in Connecticut with 139,000 residents, has dropped to 12 murders and 76 shootings, its lowest totals in recent memory.
Nearby, Worcester, Mass., which is about the same size as Providence with a population of 175,000, has had just 6 murders this year and a total of 12 in the past two years.
Boston, with some 600,000 residents, has had 42 homicides so far this year, versus 63 in 2008.
Assistant Bridgeport Police Chief Lynn Kerwin attributes the drop in murders in her city to increased cooperation with federal agencies, such as Alcohol Tobacco Firearms & Explosives, Drug Enforcement Administration and the FBI. Federal laws allow the local police to take advantage of federal racketeering laws that can send players in criminal organizations to prison for a long time.
A few years ago, she said, the city topped out at 63 murders.
“It seems we’ve been pretty successful keeping a lid on things,” Kerwin said.
Providence is really a city of two worlds. The fashionable East Side, home of Brown University, the Rhode Island School of Design and many stately homes, has recorded no murders this year. The same can’t be said for downtown, where two weeks ago two Boston men were shot to death and a third man wounded when the police say a gunman walked up to their car as they waited in traffic by the J. Joseph Garrahy Courthouse on Dorrance Street soon after the area’s clubs had closed. The police have not publicly discussed a motive for the bloodshed.
The vast majority of the murders take place on the west side of Route 95 in neighborhoods such as Washington Park, Elmwood, South Providence and the West End. Many of the areas are among the poorest in the city.
The most recent homicide was Wednesday night. Eugene Briggs, 28, had stepped out onto the porch of his Elmwood home for a smoke when he was shot to death. The motive is unclear. That morning, a 16-year-old Hartford neighborhood boy who was shot, along with a brother, on Dec. 13 after leaving a birthday party they had crashed in Elmwood, died at Rhode Island Hospital. A 20-year-old North Providence man surrendered Friday in connection with the shooting.
Five of the slaying victims were women. The oldest was a 56-year-old man and the youngest, the 16-year-old boy.
There is no real pattern to the violence. In other cities, such as Baltimore and Washington, D.C., a sudden surge in murders can be attributed to warring drug gangs. That’s not the case in Providence.
Most killers know their victims well.
“The violence is not stranger-to-stranger,” Esserman said. “It’s intimate. Most of the violence is relationship driven.”
Cmdr. Paul J. Kennedy, deputy police chief, attributes much of the bloodshed to economic conditions and unemployment. The state had a 12.7-percent unemployment rate in November, the second highest in the nation behind Michigan .
“I think there are a lot of stresses that come into play that are difficult to define,” he said.
The 2000 Census ranked Providence as the third poorest city in the United States for youth under the age of 18, and as a result, its teenagers are at greater risk of being victims of violent crime, studies show. Only Brownsville, Texas, and Hartford were ranked lower.
Kennedy believes economic stresses have been a contributing factor in eight domestic homicides this year. There were none in 2008. This year’s first murder, on Feb. 2, was a domestic case involving an Army soldier, Richard Reyes-Tavares, on leave. He fatally shot his girlfriend, Betsy Rodriguez, while they sat in a Chevy Trailblazer in the West End.
On May 14, the city experienced one of its more brutal acts of domestic violence. Herbert Byrd was arrested for strangling his estranged girlfriend, Linda Encarnacao, and stabbing her more than two dozen times. He left her dying and unconscious on the floor of her Reservoir Triangle apartment that he set on fire.
Encarnacao had two young children, including one that Byrd had fathered. He pleaded no contest to first-degree murder and arson charges and has been sentenced to life imprisonment.
Kennedy said that it’s nearly impossible for the police to control crimes of passion, and, if anything, he said that 2008 was an anomaly because there were no reported domestic murders.
“How do you predict this?” he said. “How do you prevent them?”
So far, the police have made 12 arrests in the 22 murders and a grand jury is reviewing evidence in another case that may soon lead to a murder indictment, said Detective Capt. James Desmarais. The clearance rate is 55 percent, just under the national rate of 62 percent recorded by the Justice Department’s Uniform Crime Reporting Program.
The police say the constant back-and-forth between rival gangs or groups of warring youths is also driving the violence. Several nights a week, gang members are involved in drive-by shootings in which they cruise past an enemy’s home and open fire.
Usually, no one is struck, but sometimes the gunplay turns fatal.
In March, Angelo J. Camarena, 17, a known associate of Members of Pine, a South Side gang, was shot dead at a backyard party on Friendship Street. Five days later, Edwin Dilone, 17, an associate of C-Block, another South Side gang, was shot and critically wounded in retribution for Camarena’s slaying.
Dilone survived the shooting.
Two weeks later, Dominque Gay, 22, was ambushed and fatally shot near Roger Williams Park. Investigators said that Gay was a member or close associate of the Goonies, a relatively new street gang based in Smith Hill and Manton.
Stolen, borrowed and legally owned handguns were used in most of the murders. In recent years, the Providence police have been aggressive in taking illegally held guns off the street and having felons in possession of firearms charged with federal crimes.
Oftentimes, the police said, the legal owner of a gun isn’t aware it has been stolen — or never bothers to report to the police that the weapon is missing.
This year, the Providence police have recovered 123 illegally held guns, up from 94 in 2008. Kennedy conceded that more gun seizures means there are more illegal weapons on the street.
Three of the murders have stumped investigators: a slaying in June in Federal Hill and the downtown double homicide.
On June 12, Charles T. Joiner Jr., 27, was walking two women to their apartment door on Federal Hill when a gunman fired a single shot and killed him. The police believe that he was the victim of an attempted robbery.
On Dec. 6, David E. Thomas, 22, and Domingo Ortiz, 21, were killed, while a third Boston man in the car, Dwaynne Thomas, was wounded in the Dorrance Street shooting.The Providence police have been working with the Boston Police Department in an attempt to determine whether the men had a run-in with someone at a downtown nightclub, or whether the killer followed them from Massachusetts.
Every day, Esserman and Kennedy talk about what the department can do to reduce the number of murders and shootings. Esserman, the father of three children, finds it particularly disturbing that the killers and victims are getting younger. He blames much of the violent behavior on what they experience or witness at home.
“Our young are finding that violence is a response to conflicts,” he said. “And, almost always, the weapon of death is a gun.”
Esserman makes it a practice of rushing to the hospital whenever anyone suffers from what appears to be a life-threatening gunshot wound. This year, he has worn a path between police headquarters and Rhode Island Hospital.
On Tuesday afternoon, Esserman raced to the hospital after Javon Parrott, 18, was shot while he walked on Taylor Street in South Providence. He hugged the teenager’s mother and approached Parrott, who was being wheeled on a gurney from the trauma unit to the operating room.
“I told them that I love them and everything is going to be OK,” Esserman said.
The next day, two young men were charged in connection with the shooting. One of them, Carron Smith, 23, was arrested five years ago for shooting a teenager at the Davey Lopes Recreation Center in South Providence.
BY THE NUMBERS
Homicide rate climbing again
The annual number of murders in Providence since 2000.30
200023
200123
200220
2003 18
2004 23
2005 11
2006 14
2007 13
200822
2009
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