By Holly Zachariah
The Columbus Dispatch
ARION, Ohio — Even from across the street, the tiny black hole is visible beneath the big bay window. Through it passed the bullet that changed a family forever.
Now, 4-year-old Ricardo Glover Jr., Little Ricky, lies in a bed in Nationwide Children’s Hospital in Columbus and fights to recover from the gunshot wound to his head.
Police say he nearly died because two groups are shooting up the city as they battle over drugs, fight over territory and retaliate for previous clashes. Little Ricky, sitting on his family’s couch watching television in the middle of the night, got caught in the crossfire.
When the child was wounded just before 1 a.m. on Jan. 10, it was the fourth shootout in this city of 36,000 in two weeks. Police say the same players likely were involved in all of them. Although they’ve charged no one in the boy’s shooting, they arrested seven men the day after in hopes of flushing out information. One was Little Ricky’s 26-year-old uncle, who had been shot in the arm four days earlier.
Detectives won’t say for certain whether they have the suspect in the boy’s shooting in custody, but they say they are confident they will charge someone soon.
After the rash of shootings, authorities appeared on television and called it gang violence. For many, such a description raises an image of thugs wearing certain colors, flashing hand signs and spray-painting mysterious symbols around town.
In a big city, that description might hold true. In semirural Marion County, though, a gang problem is in the eye of the beholder.
Marion’s story isn’t much different from that of a lot of struggling, blue-collar communities across Ohio. The days of high-paying factory jobs — here they were at plants such as the storied Marion Power Shovel, which closed in 1997— are long gone. The Whirlpool Corp.'s clothes-dryer factory is the area’s largest employer, and that company remains committed and strong. For that, officials are grateful.
Nonetheless, the county’s unemployment rate was 6.4 percent in December, higher than the state average, though not as bad as Ohio’s most economically depressed areas.
It can be hard for honest people to make a living in such a place, said Marion Police Lt. B.J. Gruber, who heads the local five-person drug task force. He takes his job personally because he’s a native of Marion and is raising his four children there.
The neighborhood where Little Ricky was shot illustrates the city’s struggles. Of six police precincts, that area is responsible for the most calls, nearly 22 percent of the 41,517 total in 2006. The precinct, which takes in parts of the city’s northwest and north-central sides, also accounts for the most felony arrests.
Authorities blame the troubles on a thriving drug trade, fueled by supply and demand.
Nationally, law-enforcement officers almost always put the street value of a gram of crack cocaine at about $100. But outside big cities, where supply is lower, someone with a bag of drugs can get a much higher price.
“It’s pure economics,” Gruber said. “There’s big money to be made, and people get violent over it.”
Is it the work of gangs?
Not the Crips or the Bloods or the others made household names by news reports and movies and television shows. But what Marion has are two fairly organized factions competing for business, Gruber said. Some of the players have come from Cleveland and Detroit. Locals, who already had established their territory, are fighting back.
“Does that make it a gang for me? Sure,” Gruber said. “I call ‘em gangs, and I’ll treat ‘em like gangs, especially when I’ve got to find the person who shot a 4-year-old boy.”
The legal definition is more specific.
Ohio law classifies a gang as three or more people engaged in criminal activity who have a common name or use an identifying sign, symbol or color. Participating in a gang is a second-degree felony.
While that description might be necessary on the books, reality can be much different, said Capt. Bruce Pijanowski of the Delaware Police Department.
“We’re not South Central L.A. here, I know, but to think that this organized drug trade hasn’t evolved into gang activity and criminal enterprises in small towns would be foolish.”
In Delaware, gang graffiti occasionally pops up, and officials try to find out who is behind it. Pijanowski said officers have been pretty successful, but Rt. 23 and I-71 help bring in a criminal element and make the fight to keep the city clean a tough one.
Experts agree that the freeways make a difference.
“You know that slogan, ‘Ohio is the heart of it all?’ Well, it’s really true,” said Vinko Kucinic, who has worked on gang issues for two state agencies during the past 14 years. “People running drugs along those major routes search out places to set up shop along the way.”
Ohio, he points out, is blessed — or cursed — with I-80/90, which runs coast to coast, and I-75, which spans the country north to south.
Kucinic, who is considered an expert in gang issues, left the Ohio attorney general’s office in October and took over the state prison system’s anti-gang unit.
In studies by the federal Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, Ohio always ranks among the top 10 states for new gang activity. What happens in small towns no doubt helps to earn that distinction, Kucinic said.
“We’ve had gang color painted on barns in the middle of nowhere,” he said. “And the trouble is, the small towns have no gang unit, sometimes not even a detective. So it is easier than you think for these things to take hold out there.”
Still, numbers from the National Youth Gang Center bear out that the organized gangs still are largely a big-city issue. Since 1996, about 75 percent of all gang-related homicides occurred in cities with more than 50,000 people, the center said. It estimates that about 25,000 gangs, with 750,000 members, operate in the United States.
A 2000 survey by the state attorney general’s office found 731 criminal gangs with about 13,000 members in Ohio.
Kucinic is among those who say that smaller communities must stay vigilant to keep what are largely drug-based turf wars from escalating: “Gang violence is like a disease: If you don’t treat it, it could kill you.”
There is no question that the shooting of a 4-year-old is a wake-up call, said the Rev. Ronald Turner.
“When people have lost their fear of God and have lost so much respect for people’s lives that they have the courage to pick up a gun and shoot at anyone’s house ... our society is in trouble,” Turner said. “I have seen firsthand the trouble brought on by the violent drug trade here, and I am worried.”
Turner leads the Mount Zion Missionary Baptist Church, not far from Little Ricky’s home. The boy’s mother attends faithfully, he said, and serves on the worship team and helps with several ministries.
Innuendo that the child’s parents are involved in a gang is unfair, Turner said.
“The child’s mother and father are not drug dealers. They do not use drugs, and they do not buy drugs.”
He visits Little Ricky every other day in Nationwide Children’s Hospital. Doctors removed the bullet a week ago, and the child has been moved from the intensive-care unit to a regular hospital room, Turner said. The boy is able to walk on his own now, and his appetite is returning. Daily therapy has helped, Turner said, as has a whole lot of prayer.
Local ministers gathered for a vigil at Mount Zion four days after the shooting, and the congregation later held an all-night prayer service. It prayed for Little Ricky and for the community, too.
“Something must change,” Turner said. “How can we stop the violence? It’s going to take everyone, I’m afraid, and that’s a mighty big task.”
Copyright 2008 The Columbus Dispatch