Posted: Sep 27, 2009 at 1:00 PM [Sep 27, 2009]
Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Hause checks the pockets of a young man who was arrested after he allegedly violated a trespass warning at Danbury Park Manor.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Veloise Cook was shot by a reputed gang member in front of The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard in Superior Township, authorities say.
She fell to the ground with gunshot wounds to her chest and hip and felt an excruciating burning sensation in her leg, she said.
“I told you I’m going to kill you,” she recalled the shooter saying as he pointed the gun at Cook’s face.
“It was like everything bad I had done in my life flashed before my eyes."
Veloise "Val" Cook shows how she protected her face when she was shot in front of The Party Store. She still has scars from the shooting. "That was a wake up call, " she said. "Since then I ain't been in no trouble."
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
He pulled the trigger again, shooting Cook in the forearm as she shielded her face, she said. As the gunman and two fellow gang members ran, Cook was on the ground screaming and searching her pocket for her cell phone to dial 911.
“People walked past me and over me,” Cook said. “Nobody stopped to help me or nothing. They didn’t care.”
Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton was fed up. Violence was becoming commonplace in the MacArthur Boulevard neighborhood, where calls to the sheriff’s department have nearly doubled during the summer months over the past five years.
Cook's shooting June 12 and other violence - including an incident in which a bullet was fired into an occupied patrol car weeks later at an apartment complex - prompted police to crack down.
The department has worked with the township, managers of the neighborhood’s two major apartment complexes and residents to:
•Obtain an emergency order from the state’s Liquor Control Commission to suspend the The Party Store’s liquor license.
•Establish the MacArthur Boulevard Neighborhood Policing Team.
•Jail people who violate trespass warnings.
•Tow cars of visitors who don’t park in designated areas.
•Launch youth sports programs.
"It had to be a collective effort," Clayton said.
In June, deputies responded to 174 calls in the neighborhood - mostly for fighting, loitering and other suspicious activity.
“Things were out of control,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Dieter Heren. “The good residents were scared to death. Shots were being fired on a daily basis. To some extent, it was looking like the Wild West out there.”
Suspending a liquor license
Central to their strategy, police say, was curbing criminal activity in and around The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard.
The store has been a hotspot, according to deputies, who responded to 150 calls there in a 13-month span beginning in July 2008.
Ziad Abuziad, owner of The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard, says a sheriff's deputy held a gun to his head during a drug raid at the store July 31.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
At night, there's a near constant flow of people to the store from Sycamore Meadow Apartments and Danbury Park Manor, the neighborhood’s two major low-income housing complexes.
Together, the complexes have about 1,000 residents. For many, the store is the only place in walking distance to buy milk and eggs.
But that’s not all the store’s selling, deputies said.
The county’s undercover narcotics team, LAWNET, executed a search warrant there July 31, looking for drugs. Undercover officers got the warrant after making four drug buys - two each of crack cocaine and marijuana - from employees inside the store in July, records show.
Officers seized an unregistered handgun behind the counter, crack cocaine paraphernalia and some bags of marijuana from an employee, state Liquor Control Commision records show.
Ziad Abuziad, the store’s owner, was behind the counter when he said a deputy he knows walked inside and ordered him to the floor at gunpoint that afternoon.
“He says, ‘On the ground, on the ground,'” Abuziad said. “He points a gun at my head for no reason. They know 100 percent I don’t have a gun.”
Abuziad told AnnArbor.com the gun seized doesn’t belong to him. Asked whether drugs were being sold out of the store, Abuziad said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t drink,” he said. “I don’t smoke. I don’t do anything. If I sell drugs, why don’t they arrest me?”
The aggressive enforcement near the store is driving away customers, said employee KeAndre Graham, 18.
“People are just tired of the police posting up on here basically,” he said. “It’s just to the point now that don’t nobody want to come to the store.”
The emergency suspension order was issued Aug. 16 and was upheld six days later after a hearing, said Ken Wozniak, the Liquor Control Commission’s director of executive services.
Only two to three such orders are issued each year in the state because many communities fear lawsuits from licensees, officials said.
An unidentified man talks with KeAndre Graham (right), an employee of The Party Store who was taking a break. The store has temporarily lost its liquor license.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
“It can wind up in very extensive litigation, and a lot of communities don’t want to spend the money and effort on the litigation,” Wozniak said.
Abuziad said deputies were determined to win the suspension, which is expected to result in a 40 percent loss of business at the store.
The sheriff’s department submitted documents to the commission that say shots were fired June 25 from the store’s parking lot in an “attempted murder of two sheriff’s deputies,” records show.
The shooting actually occurred June 26 in a parking lot at Danbury Park Manor down the street, according to Derrick Jackson, the sheriff’s department’s director of community engagement.
Jackson said the report was a mistake, and deputies were investigating a different shooting at the party store.
Abuziad’s attorney, Jeffrey Lance Abood, who plans to fight the suspension, said he doesn't know whether it was a mistake.
“With a police investigation, they should have the date and location correct,” he said. “This is someone’s livelihood at stake.”
Superior Township Supervisor Bill McFarlane is confident the suspension will reduce loitering at the store, which neighbors a daycare center and is near an Ypsilanti District Library branch.
“We do not want to see the liquor license going back there,” McFarlane said. “It aggravated the situation.”
Stepping up enforcement
The sheriff’s department has beefed up enforcement in the neighborhood, including establishing the MacArthur Boulevard Neighborhood Policing Team.
Deputies patrol in cars and on foot with no regular route or fixed schedule, aiming to catch criminals by surprise.
Four homicides have occurred in the area since 2004 - none recently - but deputies weren’t going to wait for a fifth.
"You have to be a realist that you're not gonna stop crime," said Deputy Eugene Rush, who used to patrol the area alone. "You're not gonna stop people from doing bad things. You try to make a little bit of a difference. That's the most important thing to me."
Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Rush looks over his notes as he speaks with a Danbury Park Manor resident who was in the car with a man deputies say was trespassing.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Rush patrolled on a recent August night from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. He was on the lookout for a green van being used by the neighborhood’s "Duffle Bag" gang.
Members of the gang - at least a dozen total - were forcing their way into homes while residents were inside to steal items, Rush said.
While many adults and children greeted Rush by name, the turf has not always been friendly to deputies.
Two other deputies were in a patrol car leaving Danbury Park Manor early June 26 after responding to a disturbance involving 15 people when at least four shots were fired.
Deputies searched the area and found nothing. Hours later, they noticed the rear bumper of the patrol car had been hit by bullet.
"I was really, really upset about it because the rumors going around were they were trying to shoot at me," Rush said.
While prosecutors have charged a man with shooting Cook in front of the store, no one has been charged in the patrol car shooting.
Many of the people causing problems in the neighborhood don't live in the area, said deputies, who have been given power of attorney by the complexes to issue trespass warnings.
Rush and other deputies stopped a car at 6:45 p.m. that night being driven by a 20-year-old man they knew had never obtained a driver's license.
The man was issued a trespass warning a week earlier, forbidding him from returning to Danbury Park Manor for 365 days.
“Who’s car is this?” deputies asked him.
“It’s my grandaddy’s car,” he said.
This time, the man was taken to jail.
Deputies twice responded to back up tow truck drivers. If visitors don't park in designated areas, it costs $250 to pick up a car from the towing company and $170 for the company to drop it as it's being towed.
Karley Bodis, 20, was visiting her boyfriend at Danbury Park Manor and started crying as her car was being towed at about 11:15 p.m.
Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Rush looks for information on a computer while on a late-night patrol recently.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
“How am I supposed to get home?” she pleaded with one of the tow truck company’s employees. “You're leaving with the car. Oh my God, this is awful.”
Deputy Kevin Hause attempted to keep things calm and later gave her a ride to pick up her car.
“I feel for you,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened to you, but we really have nothing to do with it.”
While enforcing the rules has brought growing pains, township officials like Treasurer Brenda McKinney say residents deserve a decent quality of life.
“They have the right to live there in peace and safety and harmony and not be bullied and not have their lives endangered,” she said. “People have a right to walk down the street go to bed at night and be safe.”
Making a difference
The campaign against crime has made life better in the neighborhood, according to about 20 residents interviewed at random by AnnArbor.com.
Charletta Bibbins, 28, a mother of two who has lived in Sycamore Meadow Apartments for 11 years, got a concealed weapons permit and carried a pistol all summer.
She needed one for protection when she walked to The Party Store at night, she said. Bibbins doesn’t carry the gun anymore.
“Since the police out here, I don’t have to,” she said. “Every time I walk, I see a deputy around the corner.”
Children play on a handrail as a man fixes a vehicle during a recent evening at the Danbury Park Manor apartments off MacArther Boulevard.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Amelia Chaney, 49, who has lived in Sycamore Meadow Apartments for more than 15 years, was afraid to go to sleep during the spring, fearing someone would kick in the door.
“It was off the chain,” she said. “You had a whole lot of people out here drugging, selling, kicking in doors…It wasn’t safe to walk. It wasn’t safe to lie down. You didn’t know which way a bullet would come.”
Charles Sanders, 41, who recently moved to Danbury Park Manor with his fiancé and two young children, said his apartment was burglarized in May. His 60-inch flat-screen television was stolen.
“It’s getting better out here,” he said. “They police out here enough now. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Elaine Lindsey, 56, who recently moved to Danbury Park Manor, forbid her 4-year-old nephew from going to a nearby playground two months ago. Adults used to fight almost constantly in the street, she said. Now, she lets her nephew go out and play.
“It has calmed down a lot,” Lindsey said. “There was shooting out here and you just don’t see that anymore. There’s too many kids out here for that foolishness.”
Questions or Comments? Contact Clinton Charles Van Nocker at clint@aboodlaw.com
Sheriff's Deputy Kevin Hause checks the pockets of a young man who was arrested after he allegedly violated a trespass warning at Danbury Park Manor.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Veloise Cook was shot by a reputed gang member in front of The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard in Superior Township, authorities say.
She fell to the ground with gunshot wounds to her chest and hip and felt an excruciating burning sensation in her leg, she said.
“I told you I’m going to kill you,” she recalled the shooter saying as he pointed the gun at Cook’s face.
“It was like everything bad I had done in my life flashed before my eyes."
Veloise "Val" Cook shows how she protected her face when she was shot in front of The Party Store. She still has scars from the shooting. "That was a wake up call, " she said. "Since then I ain't been in no trouble."
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
He pulled the trigger again, shooting Cook in the forearm as she shielded her face, she said. As the gunman and two fellow gang members ran, Cook was on the ground screaming and searching her pocket for her cell phone to dial 911.
“People walked past me and over me,” Cook said. “Nobody stopped to help me or nothing. They didn’t care.”
Washtenaw County Sheriff Jerry Clayton was fed up. Violence was becoming commonplace in the MacArthur Boulevard neighborhood, where calls to the sheriff’s department have nearly doubled during the summer months over the past five years.
Cook's shooting June 12 and other violence - including an incident in which a bullet was fired into an occupied patrol car weeks later at an apartment complex - prompted police to crack down.
The department has worked with the township, managers of the neighborhood’s two major apartment complexes and residents to:
•Obtain an emergency order from the state’s Liquor Control Commission to suspend the The Party Store’s liquor license.
•Establish the MacArthur Boulevard Neighborhood Policing Team.
•Jail people who violate trespass warnings.
•Tow cars of visitors who don’t park in designated areas.
•Launch youth sports programs.
"It had to be a collective effort," Clayton said.
In June, deputies responded to 174 calls in the neighborhood - mostly for fighting, loitering and other suspicious activity.
“Things were out of control,” said Sheriff’s Cmdr. Dieter Heren. “The good residents were scared to death. Shots were being fired on a daily basis. To some extent, it was looking like the Wild West out there.”
Suspending a liquor license
Central to their strategy, police say, was curbing criminal activity in and around The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard.
The store has been a hotspot, according to deputies, who responded to 150 calls there in a 13-month span beginning in July 2008.
Ziad Abuziad, owner of The Party Store on MacArthur Boulevard, says a sheriff's deputy held a gun to his head during a drug raid at the store July 31.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
At night, there's a near constant flow of people to the store from Sycamore Meadow Apartments and Danbury Park Manor, the neighborhood’s two major low-income housing complexes.
Together, the complexes have about 1,000 residents. For many, the store is the only place in walking distance to buy milk and eggs.
But that’s not all the store’s selling, deputies said.
The county’s undercover narcotics team, LAWNET, executed a search warrant there July 31, looking for drugs. Undercover officers got the warrant after making four drug buys - two each of crack cocaine and marijuana - from employees inside the store in July, records show.
Officers seized an unregistered handgun behind the counter, crack cocaine paraphernalia and some bags of marijuana from an employee, state Liquor Control Commision records show.
Ziad Abuziad, the store’s owner, was behind the counter when he said a deputy he knows walked inside and ordered him to the floor at gunpoint that afternoon.
“He says, ‘On the ground, on the ground,'” Abuziad said. “He points a gun at my head for no reason. They know 100 percent I don’t have a gun.”
Abuziad told AnnArbor.com the gun seized doesn’t belong to him. Asked whether drugs were being sold out of the store, Abuziad said, “I don’t know.”
“I don’t drink,” he said. “I don’t smoke. I don’t do anything. If I sell drugs, why don’t they arrest me?”
The aggressive enforcement near the store is driving away customers, said employee KeAndre Graham, 18.
“People are just tired of the police posting up on here basically,” he said. “It’s just to the point now that don’t nobody want to come to the store.”
The emergency suspension order was issued Aug. 16 and was upheld six days later after a hearing, said Ken Wozniak, the Liquor Control Commission’s director of executive services.
Only two to three such orders are issued each year in the state because many communities fear lawsuits from licensees, officials said.
An unidentified man talks with KeAndre Graham (right), an employee of The Party Store who was taking a break. The store has temporarily lost its liquor license.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
“It can wind up in very extensive litigation, and a lot of communities don’t want to spend the money and effort on the litigation,” Wozniak said.
Abuziad said deputies were determined to win the suspension, which is expected to result in a 40 percent loss of business at the store.
The sheriff’s department submitted documents to the commission that say shots were fired June 25 from the store’s parking lot in an “attempted murder of two sheriff’s deputies,” records show.
The shooting actually occurred June 26 in a parking lot at Danbury Park Manor down the street, according to Derrick Jackson, the sheriff’s department’s director of community engagement.
Jackson said the report was a mistake, and deputies were investigating a different shooting at the party store.
Abuziad’s attorney, Jeffrey Lance Abood, who plans to fight the suspension, said he doesn't know whether it was a mistake.
“With a police investigation, they should have the date and location correct,” he said. “This is someone’s livelihood at stake.”
Superior Township Supervisor Bill McFarlane is confident the suspension will reduce loitering at the store, which neighbors a daycare center and is near an Ypsilanti District Library branch.
“We do not want to see the liquor license going back there,” McFarlane said. “It aggravated the situation.”
Stepping up enforcement
The sheriff’s department has beefed up enforcement in the neighborhood, including establishing the MacArthur Boulevard Neighborhood Policing Team.
Deputies patrol in cars and on foot with no regular route or fixed schedule, aiming to catch criminals by surprise.
Four homicides have occurred in the area since 2004 - none recently - but deputies weren’t going to wait for a fifth.
"You have to be a realist that you're not gonna stop crime," said Deputy Eugene Rush, who used to patrol the area alone. "You're not gonna stop people from doing bad things. You try to make a little bit of a difference. That's the most important thing to me."
Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Rush looks over his notes as he speaks with a Danbury Park Manor resident who was in the car with a man deputies say was trespassing.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Rush patrolled on a recent August night from 5 p.m. to 1 a.m. He was on the lookout for a green van being used by the neighborhood’s "Duffle Bag" gang.
Members of the gang - at least a dozen total - were forcing their way into homes while residents were inside to steal items, Rush said.
While many adults and children greeted Rush by name, the turf has not always been friendly to deputies.
Two other deputies were in a patrol car leaving Danbury Park Manor early June 26 after responding to a disturbance involving 15 people when at least four shots were fired.
Deputies searched the area and found nothing. Hours later, they noticed the rear bumper of the patrol car had been hit by bullet.
"I was really, really upset about it because the rumors going around were they were trying to shoot at me," Rush said.
While prosecutors have charged a man with shooting Cook in front of the store, no one has been charged in the patrol car shooting.
Many of the people causing problems in the neighborhood don't live in the area, said deputies, who have been given power of attorney by the complexes to issue trespass warnings.
Rush and other deputies stopped a car at 6:45 p.m. that night being driven by a 20-year-old man they knew had never obtained a driver's license.
The man was issued a trespass warning a week earlier, forbidding him from returning to Danbury Park Manor for 365 days.
“Who’s car is this?” deputies asked him.
“It’s my grandaddy’s car,” he said.
This time, the man was taken to jail.
Deputies twice responded to back up tow truck drivers. If visitors don't park in designated areas, it costs $250 to pick up a car from the towing company and $170 for the company to drop it as it's being towed.
Karley Bodis, 20, was visiting her boyfriend at Danbury Park Manor and started crying as her car was being towed at about 11:15 p.m.
Sheriff's Deputy Eugene Rush looks for information on a computer while on a late-night patrol recently.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
“How am I supposed to get home?” she pleaded with one of the tow truck company’s employees. “You're leaving with the car. Oh my God, this is awful.”
Deputy Kevin Hause attempted to keep things calm and later gave her a ride to pick up her car.
“I feel for you,” he said. “I’m sorry it happened to you, but we really have nothing to do with it.”
While enforcing the rules has brought growing pains, township officials like Treasurer Brenda McKinney say residents deserve a decent quality of life.
“They have the right to live there in peace and safety and harmony and not be bullied and not have their lives endangered,” she said. “People have a right to walk down the street go to bed at night and be safe.”
Making a difference
The campaign against crime has made life better in the neighborhood, according to about 20 residents interviewed at random by AnnArbor.com.
Charletta Bibbins, 28, a mother of two who has lived in Sycamore Meadow Apartments for 11 years, got a concealed weapons permit and carried a pistol all summer.
She needed one for protection when she walked to The Party Store at night, she said. Bibbins doesn’t carry the gun anymore.
“Since the police out here, I don’t have to,” she said. “Every time I walk, I see a deputy around the corner.”
Children play on a handrail as a man fixes a vehicle during a recent evening at the Danbury Park Manor apartments off MacArther Boulevard.
Melanie Maxwell | AnnArbor.com
Amelia Chaney, 49, who has lived in Sycamore Meadow Apartments for more than 15 years, was afraid to go to sleep during the spring, fearing someone would kick in the door.
“It was off the chain,” she said. “You had a whole lot of people out here drugging, selling, kicking in doors…It wasn’t safe to walk. It wasn’t safe to lie down. You didn’t know which way a bullet would come.”
Charles Sanders, 41, who recently moved to Danbury Park Manor with his fiancé and two young children, said his apartment was burglarized in May. His 60-inch flat-screen television was stolen.
“It’s getting better out here,” he said. “They police out here enough now. There’s nothing to worry about.”
Elaine Lindsey, 56, who recently moved to Danbury Park Manor, forbid her 4-year-old nephew from going to a nearby playground two months ago. Adults used to fight almost constantly in the street, she said. Now, she lets her nephew go out and play.
“It has calmed down a lot,” Lindsey said. “There was shooting out here and you just don’t see that anymore. There’s too many kids out here for that foolishness.”
Questions or Comments? Contact Clinton Charles Van Nocker at clint@aboodlaw.com
