'It should be like this every day': West Palm Beach makes a stand with Tamarind Avenue block party

WEST PALM BEACH — Sixty-nine-year-old Jackie Kelly peeked outside before leaving her apartment Friday evening. After seven years living on Tamarind Avenue, it's become a habit. There's no telling what awaits her there each day.

Last year, it was the body of a teenage boy, shot to death and dumped outside. Kelly keeps an ear out for the sound of gunfire now, quick to duck if it sounds too close.

But something new filled the street when she cracked the door Friday; something she hadn't heard before.

It was gospel music.

West Palm Beach police and a team of local clergy members shut down a small stretch of Tamarind Avenue on Friday night to host a gospel-infused block party late into the night.

"If we're going to bring peace to a community, we need to go at a time when there is no peace," Police Chief Frank Adderley said.

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It's a part of Operation PUSH, or "Pray Until Something Happens" — a new approach to bringing unsolved homicide investigations to a close. There have been 140 unsolved homicides in and around Tamarind since 2015, Adderley said.

The number has nagged at him for months. It’s why he called a team of clergymen to police headquarters last year to brainstorm solutions, and why they all arrived with their congregations in tow to a street others choose to avoid.

"You know not to come down here," said Jose Irizerry, who goes to Church by the Glades in Lake Worth Beach.

He grinned as he said it, because he was there anyway.

Party site a once-bustling district of Black-owned businesses

Tamarind Avenue wasn't always this way. Once a thriving hub of Black-owned businesses, the neighborhood's economic fiber has slowly disintegrated over decades, leaving desolation and poverty in its wake.

For four hours Friday, it was something else entirely between 18th and Grant streets. Giant portable lights lit up both ends of the street, and children rode scooters at one end. A live band played at the other end, interrupted occasionally sermons and nearby car alarms.

Gregory Williams and a team of fraternity brothers from the Pride of Palm Beach Lodge 447 handed hot dogs to the kids too impatient to wait for a plate of McCray's Backyard BBQ and Seafood.

"We're bringing a sense of fellowship, trying to figure out a solution to keep this from happening to the young kids," Williams said. "They're the one's that's dying."

Williams, 51, of West Palm Beach, said he didn't grow up like them, attending their own classmates' funerals. He worries that they've grown numb to violence.

Rupert Francis sat in a lawn chair just off the street. He nodded his head toward a group of kids playing catch with a police officer in an empty lot.

“When I look and see children running and playing, believing they’re safe — it shouldn’t be because police are here," Francis said. "It should be like this every day.”

Even without his police uniform on, Sgt. Jeremy Banks stood out in the crowd. He towered over those around him, bowing his head so his voice could carry over the sound of a nearby gospel singer.

“I have to say,” Banks said. “I never thought I’d be standing here in this capacity.”

A man had just been shot to death when Banks was here last year. An officer with the police department's violent crime unit, Banks can point down Tamarind to areas where others were shot before that.

Killings happen here in broad daylight, said Kevin Jones, the police department's community initiative's coordinator. At one end of the street, a pastor shouted: "Evict the devil tonight!"

Many homicides are drug-fueled and territory-based, Banks said. The hope is that prayer will bring closure to some. Even to the faithless, the police department’s presence there was meant as a boon, an outstretched hand that Adderley hopes residents will grab ahold of.

If they don’t, many of these cases could remain unsolved. It isn’t popular to talk to police, Banks said, but law enforcement officers often depend on witness accounts to bring charges against a killer. Residents have shared names anonymously before, but when asked if they’d testify under oath, they clam up.

“It’s fear of retaliation,” Banks said. “People have to return here once we leave.”

Officers’ hands aren’t completely tied. They may stop the suspect for something such as a suspended license or a suspected drug possession, in hopes of gaining footing in the homicide investigation.

Inside the Stop & Shop Grocery on the corner of Tamarind and State Street, owner Kumar Bikas motioned to the large monitor that hangs directly in front of the cash register. It's bisected with views from different security cameras.

Bikas has owned the shop for about seven months and said he calls the police weekly on the groups of people who loiter outside. They’re unruly, he said. They sometimes drink and start fights.

'How can we help our young kids? How can we help our boys?'

On this night, they nodded their heads to gospel music and applauded the children kicking a soccer ball in the street. Tim Coney jogged after it each time his son, an 8-year-old in an oversized New York Yankees cap, accidentally kicked it past the police barricades.

Coney, 60, has lived in this neighborhood since he was a child, and the streets he walks now look nothing like they once did. He remembers when family-owned businesses dotted the avenue: Dave’s Grocery, Ida’s Place, Sam’s Food Market, Lawton’s Grocer, Tammy Tucks, Three Sisters.

Almost all of them are gone now, replaced by vacant lots or apartment buildings with rent so high that it’s hard for Coney to fathom. The intramural sports teams he played on as a kid are gone, too.

"How can we help our young kids? How can we help our boys?" he asked.

Coney founded a youth outreach program in the 1990s, calling it I Can, to help bridge the gap he'd begun to see in the community through toy drives and school drives. Though a lack of funding caused the group to fizzle after just a few years, Coney said he hasn't given up hope for the neighborhood.

He believes in his son, 25-year-old Te'Von Coney, who graduated from Palm Beach Gardens High School and was drafted as a linebacker into the Philadelphia Stars of the United States Football League. In 2020, Te'Von founded the Tough Choices Foundation, a nonprofit based in West Palm Beach to help mentor young people like his father tried before him.

He also believes in the power of public funding.

"We done all we could for CityPlace, Flagler," Coney said, referring to the restaurant and retail complex now known as The Square about 2 miles to the south. "Why not here?"

Coney was among the last people still on Tamarind by 11 p.m. Friday. Most had returned home, except for the officers who stayed to dismantle the lights and the black cat that slunk around them.

Kelly watched from the yard of her apartment complex, not yet ready to go back inside but not yet swayed from what she's seen on her street in the past.

“They need to do this more often. I enjoyed it,” she said. “But shoot, I don’t want to live here.”

She likes to think she'll move away one day. For now, she'll peer out the window and keep the door locked tight.

Hannah Phillips is a journalist covering public safety and criminal justice at The Palm Beach Post. You can reach her at hphillips@pbpost.com.

This article originally appeared on Palm Beach Post: West Palm Beach brings block party to Tamarind Avenue neighborhood