|
From the New York Times
Too Late for Katie, Town Tackles a Drug's Scourge
By JODI WILGOREN
Published: February 10, 2005
CROTHERSVILLE, Ind., Feb. 9 - John Neace forces himself to pass by the run-down apartment buildings every day. Inside, the police say, Mr. Neace's 10-year-old daughter stumbled on someone with methamphetamine last month. Her drowned body was found five days later at a nearby creek, small hands tied tightly behind her back.
As dime and dollar donations poured in from around the corner and around the country for the little girl's burial, Mr. Neace, whose $14.75-an-hour factory job barely covers the $400 monthly rent on his trailer, had a thought: What if he could buy the hated buildings, bulldoze them and build a playground in their place?
"Katie may be gone, but she's going to live forever in this town," Mr. Neace, 35, said of his daughter, Katlyn Collman. "We're taking down one meth house - you probably can't take them all down, but it's sending a message. We're taking our town back."
Katie's Jan. 25 disappearance, and the Feb. 2 arrest of an unemployed high school dropout, have shaken this small town out of silence about the scourge of methamphetamine.
Like many similar communities across the nation's midsection, Crothersville, 40 miles north of Louisville and with a population of 1,541, has seen methamphetamine steadily seep into its streets.
When the roof of a house behind the funeral home exploded in December, a makeshift meth lab was found in the fire. Another lab, spitball distance from the school, was raided earlier last year. The uncle of the young man now facing charges of killing Katie wrote a letter to the town council two years ago beseeching the members to do something about drugs before someone got killed.
But many residents said they had been scared to report suspicions in a community where everyone seems somehow related. Others complained that the three-man police force too often looks the other way - the man who lived at the house behind the funeral home has yet to face charges, and two complaints about methamphetamine use at the dilapidated Penn Villa apartments in the days before Katie's death yielded no arrests.
Now, as people here comfort the families of the victim and of the suspect, stories are spilling out, in a town seemingly transformed.
The pastor who preached at Katie's funeral is organizing Crothersville's first-ever neighborhood watch. Shady characters no longer stalk the streets of the one-stoplight town, where ribbons of blue, Katie's favorite color, hang from utility poles and porches. Gone, too, are the bike-riding and dog-walking youngsters, now let outside to play only with their parents, or in groups.
"This town is not going to be known, and these people are not going to let it be known, for a murder," declared Terry Gray, the assistant chief of the volunteer fire department, who has pledges for $100,000 of the $400,000 he estimates will be needed to buy the Penn Villa apartments and build the park. "They're going to be known as a town that took a bad situation and made it something good."
But amid the pride in the prospect for change that the proposed playground represents, there is shame that it came to this.
"It's changed too late," said Misty Banks, who works at the Butcher Block convenience store, where she gave Reese's peanut butter cups and Popsicles to Katie even when she could not pay. "They've known it's been going on this whole time, and they have to wait until a 10-year-old's dead?"
Katie, whose surname is that of her mother because she was born before her parents were married, was a fourth grader who loved animals and the Disney Channel. She came home that Tuesday afternoon bubbling about a pajama party planned at school the next day, her mother, Angela, said.
And at 3:10 p.m., Katie headed to the Dollar General store a few blocks away to pick up some toilet paper. She apparently swung by the People's Bank to grab a lollipop, and stopped at the Penn Villa apartments to tell a resident that a dog had been hit by a train on the adjacent track.
She never came back.
By nightfall, scores of volunteers were combing the countryside, on A.T.V.'s and on horseback. A state trooper found her body on Jan. 30 in a creek that runs off Cypress Lake, 18 miles up Interstate 65.
For local residents, who presumed Katie had been abducted by a stranger, the tragedy deepened with the arrest on murder charges of Charles Hickman, 20, a fixture in front of his family's trailer on Crothersville's main street, just across from the Dollar General and Penn Villa.
Known as Chuckie, Mr. Hickman had a couple of curfew violations as a juvenile but no police record as an adult. The children who used to shoot baskets with him at the high school hardly recognized the wan face of his mug shot.
According to an affidavit submitted by the F.B.I., Mr. Hickman told investigators that Katie saw people producing or using methamphetamine at the apartments, "so they decided to scare her with the hope that she would be intimidated enough to keep her observations to herself."
Mr. Hickman, according to the affidavit, said he took Katie to the creek in a borrowed pickup truck.
"Hickman stated first that Collman tried to run away and fell into the creek, but also said that he might have 'bumped' her into the water," the affidavit read. "In any event, Hickman watched, left the area with Collman's unmoving body still in the creek."
Two others, including the truck's owner, Timothy O'Sullivan, and a 17-year-old whose name is being withheld, have been arrested on charges of lying to the police, who continue to search for co-conspirators. Sgt. Jerry Gooding of the state police, spokesman for a multi-agency task force of 50 officers, said they had combed through only 20 percent of some 500 leads so far.
In an interview, Mr. Hickman's mother, Sandy, acknowledged that her son had been addicted to drugs, including meth, for perhaps two years, but said he had falsely confessed to involvement in the crime for fear of being killed himself.
"He shook his head and he goes, 'No, Mom' - he looked me in the eye, and he never looks me in the eye," Ms. Hickman said of her jailhouse conversation with her son on Sunday. "I'm scared for the whole town. If they don't stop this drug stuff, it's going to happen again."
Indeed, the authorities say that up to 90 percent of recent crime in these parts is tied to drugs, mostly methamphetamine, a powerful and addictive stimulant that can be made from cold medicine and farm chemicals.
In Jackson County, which includes Crothersville, meth-related arrests skyrocketed to 116 in 2004 from 29 in 2002. There have been 187 methamphetamine labs seized in the county since the first two were found in 1998, as lab seizures statewide climbed steadily to 1,549 last year from 177 in 1999.
"If we had a brothel move into town, people would close it down instantly," said the Rev. Jon Pearce of the First Baptist Church here. "If we had an X-rated movie house come, it'd be gone within a week. But this has been here. It is a monster. We didn't know what kind of monster it was."
Lifelong residents say Crothersville has been changed, like a child coming of age. Marty Hoevener said he checks what his 10-year-old son and 7-year-old daughter are wearing each morning, for fear of having to describe them to the police.
Marsha Fink, a bank teller, said, "my doors are locked now." Mr. Pearce is ordering lights for the alley behind his church's gym, and no longer lets children wander out during activities.
People who had been frustrated with the local police are thrilled that the task force, including county, state and federal agencies, continues to camp at the firehouse, with seemingly new resolve to stamp out drugs. "Anyone who tells themselves it's not a problem in their area is fooling themselves," said Sergeant Goodin. "Are we stupid enough to think we got them all? No way. It's something we're going to stay on."
Neighbors who had not spoken for decades now meet to discuss plans for the playground; Katie's father even met with Chuckie's sister and two uncles, telling them, "I want you to wave at me as you always do." Some 1,600 people paraded through the funeral home over two days to pay their respects.
Everywhere, the beatific grin in her school picture beams from buttons, T-shirts, and framed funeral programs. In the Neaces' trailer, a large painted version is propped on the ice box, behind a ceramic angel and under a butterfly balloon.
Near midnight Monday, after his wife and mother-in-law had gone to sleep, Mr. Neace sat in his worn beige recliner, staring at his daughter's smile.
"I thought, now's my time, finally I'm alone, I can do a little grieving," Mr. Neace recalled. "I wanted to cry. I didn't have the tears. I looked over here, and I caught myself smiling at her."
_________________
Throughout his life, from childhood until death, he was beset by severe swings of mood. His depressions frequently encouraged, and were exacerbated by, his various vices. His character mixed a superficial Enlightenment sensibility for reason and taste with a genuine and somewhat Romantic love of the sublime and a propensity for occasionally puerile whimsy.
harry Wrote: I understand that you, of all people, know this crisis and, in your own way, are working to address it. You, the madras-pantsed julip-sipping Southern cracker and me, the oldman hippie California fruit cake are brothers in the struggle to save our country.
FT Wrote: LooGAR (the straw that stirs the drink)
|
