Just another evening on Allied Drive ... shots, sirens, cops
11:51 AM 4/19/04
Andy Hall and Dean Mosiman Wisconsin State Journal

It's quiet in her apartment, except for a rattling sound - an aquarium pump about to wear out. <

She prepares to get in her car, the one with a sagging muffler, to drive one of her daughters to a youth group meeting and another to work at a fast-food restaurant. They gather their jackets to head into the late afternoon sunshine of Oct. 15, one of the last glorious days before winter. <

Then the peace is blown away. <

A staccato burst, perhaps six popping sounds in five seconds, comes from someplace close. <

"That was guns," she says in a flat voice. "That was an automatic." <

Two minutes later, sirens draw near. <

"You hear sirens here all the time," she says nonchalantly. <

The sirens stop. <

She returns to a point she was making before the gunfire: Allied area residents do not want to live here, but they cannot afford anyplace else. Like half of the families in Allied Drive, she is a single parent. Unemployed, she gets a disability check. She gets counseling for stress and alcoholism. <

A wisp of a woman, she lives in Dane County's most notorious neighborhood because it offers affordable refuge. Her ex-husband, who used to beat her, does not know she is here. She wants to keep her name out of the newspaper. <

The woman pays $550 a month, including heat, for a two-bedroom, two-bath unit - $100 less than she's pay in other low-income neighborhoods. She keeps the place neat. Now, if she could get the landlord to turn on the heat. <

The chill is a minor irritation, she says, compared to Allied's biggest problems, "the violence, drugs." <

Her daughter's bicycle stands, shiny and unused, in the kitchen. It's too dangerous to ride bikes, the mother declares. <

"If I could, I wouldn't be here," she says. "But ... I shouldn't have to live like this." <

More sirens approach. <

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Checking on the kids <

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"Just think about how it feels at night, especially on a hot one when you have to leave your window open," she says. "You go check to see if your kids are OK." <

The mother's phone rings. It's a friend, Veronica, leader of the Girl Neighborhood Power youth group, an after-school program at a nearby building. Tension builds in her voice as she learns more. <

"Oh, no!" she tells her two daughters who are nearly ready to ride with her. "There's shooting outside. Come back. Close that door." <

She continues speaking with Veronica, who sees police outside. <

"They're running around with what? With rifles?" <

The mother hangs up. <

"Come back," she orders her girls. "You're not going anywhere." <

Moments before the gunfire erupts, many of Allied Drive's 1,100 schoolchildren are on the move. They are headed home from after-school programs. Others are visiting friends, arriving at Girl Neighborhood Power at the county's Joining Forces for Families office or attending Boys & Girls Club of Dane County sessions at the Madison School District's Allied Learning Center. <

Teens circulate the neighborhood in boisterous clusters this afternoon, too, cutting across lawns to shorten trips. <

Before hearing the gunfire, Dave Wixom and Lester Moore, Madison neighborhood police officers, are on patrol at Allied Drive and Lovell Lane. <

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Urgent radio call <

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They work with residents to make Allied Drive a decent place, like it was from its construction in the mid-1960s to the late 1980s. When the shots ring out, their routines shatter, like a brick through glass. <

"I've got shots fired, on Carling," Wixom says urgently into his radio at 5:02 p.m. "I've got a subject running across the bike path with a gold shirt on. Shots are coming from Carling toward Allied. People are running ... I need help here now." Wixom catches the man and holds him at gunpoint. <

"Carling at Allied," the dispatcher confirms coolly, as officers on the West and South sides begin racing to the scene. The police get reports of gunfire in the neighborhood several times a month, West District Police Lt. Tony Peterson estimated. About a quarter of the time officers find bullet holes, casings or other evidence. One in 10 calls gets a large-scale response with suspects and action, like this day. <

In four minutes, officers begin establishing two rings around 2341 Carling Drive, where the shots were fired from a parking lot toward Allied Drive. They begin evacuating people within the inner ring. They question several people. They seal off all streets. No one can get in or out. <

Margaret Warner, 40, is irritated. She is trying to get home from one of her two jobs. She works 60 hours a week to buy a house someplace safer than Allied Drive. Tonight Warner, a single mother of four, cannot get past the police barricades to park near her apartment. The whole mess illustrates what she has long preached: A small number of troublemakers make life miserable for the rest of Allied Drive's residents. <

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From a harsher place <

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At another nearby apartment, Maria Alvarez, 54, is confused. She speaks Spanish and just a little English. Police officers are trying to explain why she cannot drive to her job. They point at a building, trying to tell her some people might be inside, waiting to shoot if a car leaves her lot. <

To Alvarez and her family, this incident is an inconvenience but no one is alarmed. They are refugees of a harsher neighborhood controlled by gangs in Chicago. <

Police commanders summon the Emergency Response Team, which arrives in a big blue truck. Officers tote AR-15s, menacing-looking semiautomatic rifles. Fitchburg police also rush to the area and help seal the outside perimeter. <

Madison Neighborhood Police Officer Jeff McPike asks a dispatcher, "Can you call the Learning Center? Have them lock it down. Lock it down." Dozens of children are there, as well as the Joining Forces for Families office. Both buildings are within two blocks of the shots. <

"We have a ton of people down on Allied," an officer tells 911 dispatchers. "We're going to actually need some help on Allied." <

Meanwhile, Marvin Harris, 16, and friends gather on barricaded Allied Drive, tossing a football in the street. Their game includes a not-so-secret secondary target - a parked police cruiser. <

In minutes, two-thirds of Madison's 32 on-duty cops have flooded the area. <

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Taking cover <

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Cops take cover behind buildings, trees and vehicles. Police fear that whoever fired the shots may be hiding inside the building. Maybe someone is wounded. <

Dorene Barlow, 34, who operates a day-care center in her apartment next to 2341 Carling Drive - the shooting scene - has heard the gunfire but dismissed it as a car backfiring. But a rifle-toting officer soon startles her. She glances out her picture window and sees the officer crouching behind a tree, 10 feet from her living room. His weapon is aimed at the adjacent building. <

Barlow sends her children to the basement this school night, where they stay for 2 hours. <

Barlow grew up in Allied Drive and remembers safely walking alone at night. This evening, though, she worries about two of her four children, Troy II, who is 10, and Tiffany, 15. They are with friends elsewhere in the neighborhood. Troy II manages to slip past police and climb a 6-foot chain-link fence to return home. <

Does it frighten him? "Not really," he says later, "because this kind of stuff happens a lot down here." <

A woman phones police to say she saw two men run from the scene toward a maroon van. "They jumped in and took off," she tells a dispatcher. <

Police see a woman at 2341 Carling Drive toss something onto a balcony. They find a handgun and arrest a 17-year-old boy on a weapons charge, but they never catch those who fired the shots. <

So on the evening of Oct. 15 the people of Allied Drive know little, except that a shooter might be roaming their streets. The woman with the rattling aquarium pump motor, so calm after gunfire erupted, is becoming agitated. <

Her older daughter, who was supposed to be going to work, remains silent. She sits at the kitchen table and stares at the floor for half an hour. She still wears her jacket. <

The mother breaks her own rule and lights a cigarette indoors. "Reality," she says, "has set in." <

Drugs involved <

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Police later determine that the Oct. 15 gunfire, like most violence in Allied Drive, involved drugs. They believe the man Wixom caught was there to buy drugs but two men robbed him and shot at him, missing narrowly. <

Most disturbing, perhaps, was that just one person reported gunfire, Wixom said. When something like that happens in safer neighborhoods, he said, "every line lights up." <

In the weeks before the incident, the shooting scene was a microcosm of Allied Drive's ills, police said. Drug deals were being made from two of four apartments. In one, a man with a young child let women sell sex in the bedrooms during the day, while his girlfriend was at work. <

The troublemakers still hang around Allied Drive. They have been forced to move from the building where no one was injured, but an entire neighborhood was wounded, in the gunfire of Oct. 15. <

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Contact Dean Mosiman at dmosiman@madison.com or 252-6141, and Andy Hall at ahall@madison.com or 252-6136. <