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On June 12 at 3 a.m. a 13-year-old beat a man to death with a steel pipe.
The neighbors say they saw it coming, and they tried to stop it. For a year they called every government agency they knew of to tell them the young boy was violent and out of control. He was throwing rocks at people and cars. One person he hit had to go to the hospital. He was influencing other kids in the neighborhood. They were breaking into garages, stealing bikes, threatening other children. His behavior was so violent it intimidated longtime residents. Two wonderful and loving neighbors sold their homes and moved.
The violence seemed to escalate at the beginning of June, so Amy Blumenshine organized a community meeting to let neighbors meet with the mother of the child and express their concerns. Amy is a longtime organizer in the West Powderhorn area. She was the primary force behind organizing the ArtStop at 32nd and Chicago that turned a vacant lot into a “People’s Park.”
The June 4 meeting had a full agenda. There was to be a discussion about the traffic barricades at Lake Street on 10th Avenue that the city is talking about removing while turning 10th Avenue into a one-way street. There was to be discussion of suspected drug dealing at two houses on the 800 block of 33rd Street, just across from the elementary school. The property manager for one of these houses came to the meeting and tried to intimidate Amy and the group by shouting and not sitting down. Amy didn’t let it bother her. There was suspected illegal and inappropriate rental on the 3200 block of Chicago, and “suspected specific youths from the 3200 and 3300 blocks of Elliot involved in rock throwing and, bike theft, window smashing and garage break-ins.” About 40 neighbors came.
Carla Nielsen, the Community Crime Prevention Specialist for the neighborhood, didn’t come. A police officer from the precinct came and told the meeting not to expect more police presence. Two officers from the precinct graffiti task force came to talk about the recent Mexican gang graffiti contest in the neighborhood. They told the group to clean up the graffiti and don’t bother calling them; their tape machine is full, and they said there was nothing they could do to help.
City Council Member Robert Lilligren wasn’t there, and there was no one there from his office.
County Commissioner Peter McLaughlin wasn’t there, and there was no one there from his office.
There was no one there from Hennepin/Powderhorn Partners, a street-level outreach center that is supposed to make Hennepin County services like Children, Families and Adult Services and Community Corrections more accessible to the Powderhorn neighborhood. They had been contacted over a year ago, and two weeks before the murder a neighbor had called the office to complain about the boy and try to get the proper agencies involved. The agencies would not share information and would not cooperate in supporting community pressure on the child’s family. Calls to the Hennepin/Powderhorn Partners office on Friday afternoon at 2:30 for this article were answered by a machine that said office hours on Friday were from 8 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
When the tragedy occurred on June 12, Amy met with some of the neighbors to talk about holding a press conference and bringing some attention to the issue of governmental neglect. One neighbor wanted to put pressure on the landlord to evict all the tenants from the building, to get the rest of the trouble out of the neighborhood. But Amy was concerned that the people wouldn’t have any other place to go. She felt that with enough love and attention those remaining troubled families could be saved. Taking Amy’s experience as a Lutheran missionary to Nicaragua for a year into account, the dissenting neighbor complained Amy was “more Christian than Jesus Christ.” Jesus in Acts of the Apostles says if a person is acting badly in a community, then someone should talk to him. If that doesn’t work then the community should get together and talk to him. If that doesn’t work, then they should treat him as a stranger. This generally meant exile or banishment in ancient times and internal exile or a prison sentence in modern times. But Amy continued to believe all the remaining tenants, including the boy’s mother, were capable of redemption. She just wanted the government to labor a little more actively in the vineyard.
At the press conference the next day at the ArtStop, Amy lit a candle to remember the man who had been killed and for all the other victims of violence in the neighborhood. She said, “Neighbors tried for over a year to get help and intervention for a youth, most recently by calling a community meeting regarding his behavior.”
Florence Hill, a neighbor, said, “We have no reason to believe that any school, county or police staff responded to our cries for help. This boy was escalating his aggression and we tried to get help for him and his family. He and his buddies had been terrorizing children, elderly neighbors, and their immediate neighbors. Most recently, this community is finding their calls to 911 are not responded to, their complaints against problem properties not recorded, and neither their CCP/SAFE police officer nor their council member returning their calls. All signs showed that this family was in need of help and that this child was really hurting—and hurting others. As citizens we have no way of holding accountable the people we pay (as taxpayers) to respond to these problems. There are other families that are headed in this same track. How can we get them help before another life is lost? Where are the services for inner-city families before the undertaker or the prison?”
Vanessa Stephens, a mother of young children, said, “As neighbors, we work hard, giving of our own time, to make this neighborhood a good place to raise families. We have a gem of a community; we deserve basic services to protect it. What could be a higher priority for public funds? This is the second murder here this year. We have watched this behavior escalate and have tried for over a year to get intervention for the family involved and have gotten no response from law enforcement, the landlord, social services or our city council member. This is a great neighborhood with caring residents who work together for change; our efforts deserve more support.”
Amy ended the news conference by asking, “Do people know these cries for help are not being responded to?”
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