Sixty-three-year-old Mary Peters was just looking forward to a quiet Easter weekend with her son and two grandchildren. But on April 3, that feeling was shortlived as a bullet whizzed into her first floor apartment in Latimer Gardens, a city-owned housing development in Flushing.
The bullet shattered her kitchen’s upper window and narrowly missed her son, who had just risen from the table. “It sounded like a bomb,” Peters recalled, adding that while no one was hurt, the entire family was shaken.
“My five-year-old grandson kept throwing up all night, saying ‘I don’t want to be shot nanny, I don’t want to be shot.’”
Peters was one of the 50 residents that showed up at a rally on Thursday at Latimer Gardens Community Center, to protest the rise in gang activity that led to the shooting, drug dealing and prostitution in the area that is bordered by 34th and 35th avenues, Linden Place and Leavitt and and 137th streets.
Longtime residents milled angrily outside the newly renovated community center whose top window too had also been blown out in the April 3 shootout.
The apartment complex was built in 1970 and consists of four 10-story buildings with more than 400 apartments and 700 residents. The residents stated there had been a “360-degree change” in the amount of crime in the complex. “What a change it has been,” said resident Joan Snowden, who has lived in the complex for four decades. “It was a beautiful place, nobody would bother you. But now, no one can even go to the playing area.”
Snowden’s sentiments were echoed by resident Lorna Dotson, who said that shootouts like the one Peters experienced were becoming increasingly common. She claimed residents heard gunshots as often as twice a week. Others like Carol Pagan alleged it is not just gang activity outside, but that people also regularly break into the building’s main lobby. She said prostitutes in the area come in and use the hallways and elevators as bathrooms. “The prostitutes make a mess all over,” Pagan said. “And the building takes a long time to fix it.”
Another resident complained that 34th Avenue is unsafe once the sun goes down, adding it is very easy to get caught in the gangs’ crossfire. Others said that a new hotel built right outside the complex also made matters worse as the prostitutes often use it as a base.
With the drug dealers, prostitutes and increased gang activity, more than one resident compared the current situation at Latimer Gardens with the movie “New Jack City” — a 1991 crime thriller in which drug lords convert an entire apartment complex into a crack house.
Latimer resident Donald Wiggins, who helped organize last week’s rally with Councilman Peter Koo’s office, said the police are investigating the April 3 incident, adding the incident is “not unusual and not unexpected either.”
At the rally, residents complained to Koo and asked for increased police patrols in the area. “We need them to come and walk the premises,” Dotson said. “They say we are a low-crime area and that we don’t need protection. But we do.”
Residents allege that illegal occupants in the building deal drugs, causing a lot of strangers to troop in and out. “We have kids here, running around,” said one resident. “Do we really want them to see all this?” she asked, referring to the drug activity.
Currently two officers from the 109th Precinct patrol the area, but residents say they still feel unsafe; asking instead for protection from the Housing Authority. They said complaints to NYCHA and the precinct often go unheeded.
Koo, meanwhile, said he is going to petition NYCHA to install security cameras in and around the buildings, explaining that “security cameras would discourage gang activity. It won’t solve the problem, but it will discourage troublemakers.”
He added that building residents also should take greater responsibility and in some cases, stop harboring troublemakers. “Drugs and prostitution are not good for any area,” Koo said. “We want role models, not drug dealers.”
The 109th Precinct did not comment on the issue, despite repeated calls.
This piece first appeared in Queens Chronicle
