Neighbors Organize to Fight Pushers

The arrest of a man who shot a woman he said was selling drugs in front of his Pacoima home Sunday sparked a rally of frustrated neighbors who promised to join together against the drug peddlers plaguing their streets.

The rally, at the intersection of Montford Street and Welk Avenue in a neighborhood just southeast of the Simi Valley and Foothill freeways interchange, was punctuated by the vows of residents to take back control of their streets--and the sound of gunshots.

Los Angeles police said the gunfire--several shots from just a block away--injured no one and was possibly an act of defiance from the very people the residents were uniting to oppose.

The neighborhood rally was organized after Joseph C. Grant, 52, who lives at the Montford and Welk intersection, was arrested on suspicion of assault with a deadly weapon.

Police said Grant came out of his home about 11 a.m. and told a woman who had been stopping cars in front of his home to move on. When she refused to move, Grant went back into his home, got a small-caliber handgun, came back out and fired at the woman, police said.

“He kept saying, ‘Don’t sell your dope in front of my house,’ and when she didn’t stop, he did something about it,” said Officer Verne Allen.

Struck in Shoulder

Police said that a 28-year-old Pacoima woman was struck in the shoulder by the bullet and only slightly injured. She was not arrested because police said they had no evidence against her. Grant, a former truck driver living on a disability pension, was arrested, but released Sunday on $2,000 bail.

Grant attended the neighborhood meeting Sunday evening. He said the drug peddlers run a 24-hour-a-day business on the street outside his home and that he fired his gun that morning out of frustration. Grant, who added that his home and car repeatedly have been vandalized by the drug peddlers, said he had only meant to scare the woman away from his home.

“They’ve pushed it and pushed it,” he said. “I can’t sleep and I can’t eat. They are always out there. Something had to give. I felt I had to protect my home and family.”

Grant said that, on several occasions, he had taken the gun outside and fired into the air to disperse groups of street peddlers at his curb. But Sunday he didn’t fire into the air, he said.

“This time I wanted to really scare them,” he said. “So I aimed over this one that was squatting down. But just when I fired, she stood up. I didn’t even know it was a woman until then. It hit her in the shoulder.”

About 40 of Grant’s neighbors attended the street meeting, along with Sgt. Gary Merrifield of the Police Department’s crime prevention unit. The residents said Grant’s action was a symptom of the neighborhood’s growing frustration.

“This is getting crazy,” said Jerry Carter, a 27-year resident of the street. “It is an epidemic. You come out of your house and you can’t leave because they are blocking the street with all the cars they got coming through here for drugs.”

“The shooting is what finally made the whole thing boil over,” said Marie Harris, an organizer of the meeting. “Something has to be done about this problem.”

Merrifield encouraged the residents to channel their frustrations into a united front against the problem and cautioned against the type of action Grant took. “Unfortunately, it often takes something like this--in this case, a shooting--to bring people together,” he said.

“Instead of one of you trying to run these people off, work as a group,” he told the residents. “The last thing we want to see are vigilante-style tactics being used.”

The residents said they would begin regular meetings and sign a letter to the Police Department asking for increased patrols. They said they would begin calling police when the dealers set up shop on their street and will begin recording the license plate numbers of the cars of both drug sellers and purchasers. The numbers will be turned over to police.

Harris noted that the outdoor meeting had successfully curtailed drug dealing on the street Sunday night. She said the future meetings were likely to be outside as well.

“What is their busiest night out here?” she asked other residents, when scheduling the next meeting for a Friday.

As the meeting was ending, about 10 gunshots were heard about a block down Montford from where the residents stood. Merrifield quickly drove his patrol car down the street looking for suspects and a few minutes later a police helicopter hovered above the neighborhood with its searchlight scanning the homes below. No one was arrested. But some took the shooting as a sign that the neighborhood group was already having an impact.

“Maybe it was one last act of defiance,” Merrifield said.