‘Walking on eggshells:’ Many Hartford families live in fear, shut themselves away as shootings batter the city

Since August, Nikkia Parks hasn’t let her kids play in the park or walk around the corner to visit their uncle. Not since a spray of bullets tore through six people across town, leaving her friend dead.

Shootings typically slow as summer turns to fall, but the violence this year has only increased since that Tuesday morning when she learned 28-year-old Kennedy Burgess had died in what qualified as a mass shooting outside a warehouse party on Windsor Street. In the past three months, seven more people have died and dozens have been injured as constant gunfire made Hartford blocks feel like battlegrounds.

No streets have been hotter than those along Albany Avenue, where Parks, a nursing home worker, lives with her four children, ages 2 to 19.

After Burgess, a close friend, was murdered, Parks told her 7-year-old son and 12-year-old daughter they couldn’t go play basketball or jump rope anymore in the playground behind the Wilson-Gray YMCA, or walk to a bodega for juice and grinders. There are blocks they avoid, too, the ones that have long been hotbeds of gun and drug activity.

“They want to know why they can’t go to the park no more or why they can’t sit outside on Bedford Street no more, and these are the reasons,” said Parks, who works at a nursing home in Granby. To the shooters, she says, “it doesn’t matter who, where. It does not matter at this point. They don’t care about kids, old people, mothers, aunts, uncles. Nobody cares anymore.”

To get a grip on the violence, and the growing list of unsolved cases, Hartford police have invited 15 state police personnel to embed with the department. They’re working together to investigate both violent crimes and auto thefts, which are often associated with other crimes and violent wrecks throughout the city.

“You’ve got to literally stop the bleeding at this point,” police Chief Jason Thody said a week into the partnership, which began in mid-October. “We’ve got to bite off as much as we can in as short a period as we can to get things back under control.”

About 190 people have been injured in shootings so far this year, 50% more non-fatal shootings than Hartford has seen in any of the last three full years. Combined with gun homicides — 16 this year — Hartford is experiencing at least a six-year high in shootings, according to available police data.

The violence has waned in recent days, but that’s done little to ease the anxieties roiling in neighborhoods across the city.

Twice a day, 62-year-old Rose Harris slings a backpack over her shoulders and sets out for the south edge of her Clay Arsenal neighborhood, where she dons a yellow crossing guard vest to usher magnet school students across the street.

On the way, she casts a wary eye at the corner of Mahl Avenue and Main Street and the small store where she plays her lottery numbers.

There’s been six gun assaults near the intersection this year alone, police data shows, including a drive-by shooting last month when Harris’ 20-year-old grandson was hanging out.

One of his friends was hit in the leg, Harris said. The 20-year-old, who lives with her, mostly stays home now playing video games.

“It’s too close to home,” said Harris, who’s also raising three other grandchildren ages 4 to 18 in the three-family house she owns on Mahl. “I have babies.

“You can’t even walk outside your house anymore. You’re scared someone’s just going to open and start shooting.”

No lingering outside

Four years after moving from Rocky Hill, Brandon HuBrins is still getting used to police cruisers parking outside his single-family home at the corner of Lawrence and Russ streets in Frog Hollow.

He and his wife bought the roomy colonial across from Billings Forge four years ago, wanting to live in the city where they worked — he is an assistant principal; she is a community health center director. Since then, their corner has become one of the most dangerous in Hartford.

While officers in Hartford have hardly any free time, they try to keep up a presence in trouble spots by writing reports in their parked cars between other calls. A cruiser was there on one of the last warm days of fall, idling on the other side of HuBrins’ fence as he and his wife pulled a sprinkler into their side yard for the kids, 7 and 1, to play.

“It definitely was unnerving to know this is what it’s come to for us just to be outside,” said HuBrins, 32, a social worker and now a school administrator in Ellington.

Last November, a bullet came through his window and lodged in the wall a few feet from his wife, who works at a community health center in Hartford. Since then, HuBrins has witnessed three shootings outside his home, the most recent one two weeks ago as he was getting home from work on a Friday afternoon.

A group of men were walking past the house, arguing, jostling each other. Moments after they left his view, HuBrins heard a shot ring out.

“That was jolting, but in some ways I’m getting a little desensitized to it,” he said.

Maurice “Splash” Eastwood, a 23-year-old graduate student studying social work , said he’s heard more gunshots this year than car horns in his North End neighborhood, near Main and Westland streets.

He lives just down the street from where one of his best childhood friends, 24-year-old Jaqhawn Walters, was shot and killed on Main Street on Sept. 19. Now when he hears there’s been another killing, he stays off social media, not wanting to find out the victim was someone else close to him.

Eastwood doesn’t linger outside, either.

“It’s dangerous outside. I know it,” he said. “It’s almost like if you go outside you have to be prepared for whatever’s going to come, and that’s like walking on eggshells. That’s a fear you have to live in.”

‘Open your blinds’

Barbara Turner, 66, prays every time she hears gunfire and cries every time someone is killed.

About six weeks ago, Turner was headed home from the grocery store when she saw a crime scene outside the Jam Roc restaurant. One of her granddaughters called and told her someone got killed, a good friend named Jaqhawn.

“She told me how old he was, of course, and that just pained me the more,” Turner said. “I knew there’s a mother who’s going to bury her son. Oh Jesus Christ, lord, have mercy. Now she’s in my shoes.”

Turner’s 36-year-old son was murdered in Manchester in the final days of 2017. On Sept. 19, Turner wept as she drove back to her Barbour Street apartment, where she’s raising three of her grandchildren.

“I’ve learned how to — I cry, but you have to keep going,” she said.

Turner has lived in Hartford all her life. She remembers when there was a sense of community on her street, when all the families and working people knew each other’s names and looked out for each other. Now Turner has many new neighbors who’ve never known that side of the North End and keep to themselves out of fear.

“A lot of people who live on Barbour close their blinds, close their curtains,” Turner said. Open your blinds. Open your curtains. Come outside. Make your community better.”

That’s what HuBrins is trying to do in Frog Hollow. He and his wife wanted to move as soon as a bullet came through their window last fall, but he felt like he hadn’t done anything himself yet to turn things around.

He and his neighbors thought they could deter potential drive-by shootings by changing the traffic pattern of the two-block area around Lawrence and Russ streets. In September, they got the city to install cement planters and bollards that force drivers to turn at nearly every intersection instead of continuing straight — an inconvenience to would-be shooters and joyriders alike.

A week or so after that, HuBrins was in his living room when he heard someone yelling outside. He saw a teenager arguing with a homeless man who walks the neighborhood. Both of them left in different directions, but as the boy walked off, he threatened to get “something” to finish the fight.

Fortunately, the drifter was gone when the boy returned a few minutes later on a bike. HuBrins, a social worker, went outside and talked with him, offering a listening ear and some guidance on dealing with his emotions and stress. Before they parted ways, the teenager thanked him.

HuBrins said he’d been scared, knowing the teen probably had a gun, but he felt compelled to intervene.

“I think my fear for myself was overridden by my fear for my family because if there’s a shooting near my home, I know all too well how bullets can ricochet.”

Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.

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