San Diego’s Mean Street : 30th and Imperial Is Home for Drugs, Deaths, Assaults

The Set is the corner of 30th Street and Imperial Avenue, where two weeks ago a San Diego vice officer chased a suspected drug dealer down a dark alley and accidentally shot the man to death.

The Set is in the heart of an area where police are conducting a massive narcotics sweep, a door-to-door search that last weekend resulted in police shooting another man inside his home after he apparently wrestled an officer’s gun from him.

The Set is also just around the corner from the site of a drive-by shooting at a young bicyclist a few days ago that instead seriously wounded a 58-year-old man sitting on a nearby front porch.

The Set is where the action is.

According to police crime statistics, there is no other location more notorious than 30th and Imperial for killings, shootings, stabbings, assaults, rapes, robberies, burglaries and a litany of other crimes and assorted mayhem. Police crime analysts say more blood is shed on that corner than anywhere else in San Diego.

The numbers are staggering. Last year, 166 common assaults--nearly one every other day--occurred within three-tenths of a mile of The Set. There were 81 robberies and five rapes.

There were 10 homicides--people shot to death, stabbed to death, beaten to death--lives cut short in a neighborhood overrun by dope dealers, gang warlords and transients displaced by high-rise buildings downtown.

Law enforcement officials estimate that as much as 50% of the crimes that happen at 30th and Imperial are never reported to police. Purses snatched, wallets stolen, homes vandalized and broken into in daylight.

Strictly speaking, The Set is a parking lot strewn with broken glass in front of Mullen’s Market & Liquor on the southeastern corner of 30th and Imperial.

At night, particularly weekend nights, large numbers of young men and women, black, brown and many of them gang members, gather to talk and drink and hang out. As crowds of 30 and 40 people congregate, police said, money is flashed and drugs are handed off. Handguns lie hidden in waistbands and in women’s handbags. Slow-moving cars stop long enough to conduct business with those waiting in the lot.

The Scene Never Changes

“It’s been called The Set for years,” Sgt. Anne O’Dell said, “because it didn’t matter if you went back there in one year, five years or 10 years. It never changed. It was always the same, the same scene, the same stage, the same players. It was The Set.”

Inside Mullen’s, a man who identified himself as an owner but declined to give his name said, “I watch the neighborhood, but I don’t see anything. You know what I mean? And I don’t want to say anything to you, nothing more. I want to live. You know what I mean?”

Life can come cheap around 30th and Imperial.

The nude body of Sarah Lee McLemore, 18 years old and five months’ pregnant, was found one morning last spring along the trolley tracks two blocks from The Set. She had been beaten to death167772162 Duane Johnson, 31, was shot in the chest last May and bled to death on the sidewalk in the 3000 block of Imperial.

Gonzalvo Alvarez, 48, was standing with a group of friends when someone called him to the side of a house near 31st Street. Gunshots rang out and Alvarez was dead.

Graffiti, Sleepless Nights

All kinds of crime come with the territory.

San Diego Police Officer Art Campa, who runs the nearest police Community Relations Storefront, described everyday life around The Set:

“You would have to be living with unsightly graffiti. Sleepless nights from people out on The Set. Traffic stopping by to pick up narcotics. Drive-by shootings.

“You would be hearing people yell out for assistance when they’re being attacked or robbed. You would be facing drug hypes and addicts, shooting up on your property. They would use your walkway or back yard to shoot up.

“You’d put up with litter from bottles and cans they throw out. People urinating in front of you, and in some cases women, too. People loitering in front of your house and if you get so bold to tell them to move, they’ll threaten you. You would be living under the fear of never saying anything because they’ll kill you.

“Even if you don’t get involved, the crooks know where you live.”

All of Campa’s fellow officers have their own stories about The Set.

What most bothers Ali Hassan, another storefront officer who grew up in the neighborhood, is the total disrespect.

“People urinate in the doors of churches,” he said. “Even at my mosque (near 26th and Imperial), people urinate there. And in the old days, if someone did that, they’d lose their life.”

Lt. Lou Scanlon remembers responding to homicide calls at a tavern around the corner from The Set. He remembers walking into the bar, seeing a dead man lying on the floor and 18 patrons nonchalantly drinking beer.

18 People Saw Nothing

“You would ask what happened, and 18 people would say they didn’t see anything,” Scanlon said. “Eighteen people would say they were in the bathroom and didn’t see a thing.”

Police said that only occasionally do residents come forward as witnesses to a crime. They try not to get involved.

For instance, Jay (Cowboy) Richards stood on a recent Friday night outside the Rhodesian Card Room at 2952 Imperial, his eyes fixed up the street at the crowd gathering on The Set.

“I don’t go up to the corner,” he said. “You go up there, you better put your pistol on.”

The view up the avenue is lined with palm trees, but what sticks out are the iron bars on the windows of homes and chain-link fences that surround businesses.

The area Neighborhood Watch group will not allow police to give out their names. When the group convenes, they leave their homes in the daytime and gather at a location far from 30th and Imperial so they can meet in safety.

The pastor of Bethel AME Church, just two blocks off The Set, will not get out of his car at 30th and Imperial.

The Rev. Ellis Casson built a new wing onto the church and put in a new front door. “I got so much graffiti on them now that you can’t hardly see them,” he said. He put bars on the windows and gates at the door. “I don’t keep any money on the premises because I can’t afford to lose it.”

On Sundays, he places security men around the church. During the service, he worries about being ambushed.

“As a leader, I’m vulnerable,” he said. “When I’m on the pulpit, I worry that anybody could walk up to the loft with a high-powered rifle. So I put new bars in, and I keep them locked going up the stairs to the balcony.”

Memorial Junior High School nearby has been fortified with a 12-foot, wrought-iron fence because Principal Tony Alfaro said classes were too often interrupted by police chasing dope dealers across the campus.

At Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, 415 31st St., the graffiti and broken windows actually stopped, but only after Principal Anita Calhoun gave in to a faculty vote and allowed the school to be painted light blue--the color of the neighborhood Crips gang.

“If you go out on 30th and along Imperial, you’ll see that some of the other businesses have painted their shops blue, too,” Calhoun said. “The neighborhood knows that that’s what works.”

At the Friendship Center, an agency at 3040 1/2 Imperial that works with the mentally ill, employees Charley Ann Taylor, Margo Clausen and Fredie Salabarria worry daily about the safety of their clients.

The windows of their second-story center have been smashed, their offices burglarized, televisions, stereos, copier machines and cash stolen. They said a patient was boarding a bus out front when a gang member jumped up behind her and ripped off her necklace. They said another client was robbed on the street of his $500 rent money.

Twice they put up “No Drinking on Property” signs and twice the signs were torn down. Clausen has found bullet shells on her office rug. During lunch hour, they look out their windows and through the bars can see the gangs standing outside their door.

“I once saw a stabbing out the window,” Taylor said. “The poor man was bleeding on the sidewalk.”

Rashad and Teresa Shakoor recently opened Teresa’s Fine Foods near 29th and Imperial. They sell peach cobbler and hope the criminal element will permit them to prosper.

Flower boxes they placed outside have already been kicked over. The public telephone out front was yanked from the wall. Still, they haven’t yet resorted to bars on the windows.

“A restaurant should have a relaxed feeling to it,” Rashad Shakoor said. “Not one where you’re barred out.”

Other brave souls refuse to surrender their livelihoods.

Bill Williams has run an automotive shop for 19 years on 30th Street, a couple of blocks off The Set. In September, he tired of gangs openly selling drugs in front of his shop, so he chased them away. The next afternoon, one of the gang members came back and fired three or four shots.

Williams, 44, was hit in the stomach and left thigh. Now, he has bought a handgun. And he has welded a piece of iron into a metal club with a handle, sort of like a sword with a flat end.

“I’m even less friendlier now with people I know are into drugs,” he said.

He reached under his shirt, where the slug that tore through his guts remains lodged in his back. “I can feel the little lump,” he said.

Like Williams, members of the black community’s leadership circle have for some time struggled to find their own solutions to ending the violence. At a recent Saturday meeting, the ministers and businessmen met around a church table and tossed out ideas.

They suggested more money to hire more police officers. They recommended more jail space to house repeat offenders. They called for judges to seek alternative penalties that go beyond plea bargains and probation. They talked about economic incentives for young adults that are more attractive than the get-rich drug trade.

“We need to go down and see the mayor,” the Rev. George Walker Smith said. “We need to stand up and say that’s enough.”

But as meetings on inner-city crime often do, the discussion inevitably turned to The Set.

The Rev. George Stevens said new apartment buildings on Imperial have been turned into drug houses. He said one crack house is right behind a market in the 2900 block of Imperial.

Free Parking at Drug House

“They have got a chain-link fence up and ‘No Trespassing’ signs,” he said. “But it’s still a drive-up drug house. It’s even got free parking.”

When the meeting broke up, all agreed that the real solution is within the homes of the people who live in the community, with the parents of the children who in the future will be lured into gangs, drugs and crime. But that solution is not easily accomplished either.

At police headquarters, Lt. Daniel Berglund, who is supervising the current drug sweeps, described a recent incident that he said “broke my heart.”

Police searched a home near 30th Street early one evening. Inside, several small children were seated around the table, eating dinner. The youngsters told the officers that they know drugs are bad because their mother has told them so.

Then, police arrested the mother on suspicion of selling cocaine.