... and here I was!
NEWBURGH, N.Y. — It started with adolescent taunting near a frozen pond on a January afternoon and soon escalated into a brawl.
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By the time it was over, Levi King Flores, a 17-year-old suspected gang member, was dead from a stab wound between his shoulder blades. A 13-year-old was in jail for his murder. And the year was off to a bloody start.
Gang violence is nothing new in this dilapidated city an hour north of Manhattan. Built along a scenic bluff on the west bank of the Hudson River, Newburgh has long been known for problems far out of proportion to its population of 29,000. In the 1960s and ’70s, it was racial strife and disastrous urban renewal efforts. In the 1980s, when the city was known as “crack alley,” it was drug-fueled violence, which has ebbed and flowed here ever since.
But this latest round of violence is shining a harsh new glare on the city, both for the intensity of the attacks and the young ages of many of those involved. The community led the state in violent crimes per capita in 2008 and is on course to do so again this year.
Gang violence has been responsible for all but 2 or 3 of the city’s 16 homicides in the last two and a half years. By law enforcement estimates, gang members with national affiliations outnumber the city’s police by a ratio of three to one, not counting the hundreds of young people in homegrown groups.
At a Senate hearing with Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. in Washington last month, Senator Charles E. Schumer called the situation in Newburgh “shocking.”
“There are reports of shootouts in the town streets, strings of robberies and gang assaults with machetes,” Mr. Schumer said.
At the senator’s urging, Mr. Holder promised to send a top-level official to Newburgh to examine the problem. Even before that assurance, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the United States attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York had already made Newburgh one of its top priorities in the region after a spate of killings in 2008.
“I think that we will see shortly some of the results of that work,” Mr. Holder said at the hearing.
Newburgh’s persistent violence is remarkable considering what the community is not: a big city. Though people on the streets here like to call it the sixth borough of New York, it is no such thing, either in density or geography.
Adorned with brick row houses and 19th-century Gothic Revival mansions, relics of its industrial past, the city has a certain nostalgic charm. Pleasure boats and upscale restaurants with colorful awnings line the riverfront esplanade. From there, a grassy slope leads to Grand Street, a tree-lined avenue where the expansive homes of the city’s Gilded Age stand in varying states of renovation and neglect.
But just a few blocks away is Lander Street, a menacing little stretch of boarded-up row houses and graffiti-tagged walls that has become one of the state’s most implacable centers of poverty and violence. Young men with pit bulls occupy porch stoops at all hours, guarding barely concealed drug markets inside. It is one of several such streets within a few blocks in the city’s northeast end that law enforcement officials say are mainly controlled by the Bloods street gang, the city’s largest with an estimated 160 members.
A number of homegrown groups — not formal gangs necessarily, but with the same territorial and violent tendencies — occupy various blocks and bear names like Ashey Bandits, Ave World and D-Block.
The narrow avenues and one-way streets make it hard for police — even in unmarked cars that are by now well known by the residents, including a green Chevrolet Suburban they call the “Green Goblin” — to sneak up on anybody.
“As soon as we turn the corner, they call out ‘One time!’ ” said Officer Joseph Palermo, on a recent night patrol.
The city’s southeast side, a largely Hispanic area known as the Heights, is controlled by Hispanic gangs like the Latin Kings, la Eme and a local group known as the Benkard Barrio Kings.
A sense of how embedded the gang culture has become can be gleaned at the local high school, the Newburgh Free Academy.
Two years ago, Torrance Harvey, a social studies teacher, and Mark Wallace, the school’s violence prevention coordinator, created a class where students could come and talk about issues important to them. During a recent session, Mr. Harvey drew a diagram on the board with the word “community” in the center and asked the class to define it. The students rattled off the usual institutions: churches, schools, law enforcement. But high on the list they also called out “gang-bangers,” “drug dealers” and “crackheads.”
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