Orange leaders still seek plan for Pine Hills
Daquane Felix Jr. was playing inside his Pine Hills home last month when a hail of bullets sprayed the front of the house.
The home was targeted, detectives said, because a member of a gang lived there or frequented it. But it was Daquane, a 3-year-old boy with a “bright little spirit” and a spitting image of his father, who was hit by the gunfire and killed.
Authorities say he was the latest unintended victim of a 6-month-long gang feud that has killed at least five people and included several drive-by shootings,
including at Daquane’s house and a daycare.
Now leaders are once again searching for solutions to a problem that has plagued the community for decades, including a citizen task force announced last week by Orange County Mayor Jerry Demings.
But Mark Butler, executive director of Kingdom Network Empowering Communities, a Pine Hillsbased nonprofit that organizes anti-violence marches and forums, said he’s tired of hearing all the talk and is ready for elected leaders to take action.
“The only time people have interest in Pine Hills [is] when the crime goes up and elected officials want our votes,” he said.
Orange County Sheriff JohnMinasaidhis deputies have arrested nearly 40 people and recovered 35 guns tied to the feud but admitted the arrests are only a short-term plan to combat the violence. Experts and local officials say a comprehensive approach is needed to effectively address gang violence.
“We can’t rely just on the police to solve the crime issues,” said Orange County Commissioner Victoria Siplin, whorepresentsmost of Pine Hills. “It’s going to take a lot of people coming together from different backgrounds because you can’t treat every young person the same.”
Experts: Arrests not enough
No one has been arrested yet for the drive-by shootings that killed Daquane or 14-year-old Joshua Atkinson— whowas shot the day before Daquane about three miles away — but Mina said investigators have identified suspects in one of the cases.
He has pledged to crack down on the violence, pulling in support from different local agencies to find those responsible for recent killings, which he called his agency’sNo. 1 priority.
“The goal of the current operation is to stop the violence related to these targeted gang retaliation shootings and to arrest the people involved and recover the guns,” Mina told the Orlando Sentinel.
While an initial police crackdown is often necessary, “lawenforcement cannot arrest their way out of this problem,” said Sean Baldwin, a senior research associate at the National Gang Center, which works with local jurisdictions on gang issues.
“The wider and broader the collaboration, the more effective the solutions are,” Baldwin said. “... When you think a little deeper about gangs, why gangs exist, what causes gangs ... gangs are really a symptom of deeper problems in a community.”
William Sampson, a public policy professor at DePaul University who studies race and class, said the reason gangs continue to attract people, especially young people, is because they provide a semblance of support, safety and success — when the community, family or schools have not.
“You’ve got to ask yourself why people are joining gangs?” Sampson said. “We all need these kinds of ties that help us feel good about ourselves, give us direction, give us security — the gang fills in there. It fills inwhere society fails.”
A framework that has been credited with successfully curbing gang violence in cities like Boston and Oakland is Operation Ceasefire, which involves interacting directly with gang members to give them a choice: comprehensive services and support if they put down their guns, or swift enforcement if they continue on a violent path.
In 2016, Mina— then Orlando’s police chief— along with other officials and community leaders considered implementing Operation Ceasefire when Pine Hills and surrounding neighborhoods faced a similar spike in violence. But they chose not to adopt the program. Mina said he recalled the program requiring more-sophisticated supervision for ex-prisoners thanwas available.
Instead, officials kicked
off Operation RISE— short for Restoration, Inclusiveness, Safety and Empowerment — and focused on making dozens of arrests in specific areas. They also created a new mobile Sheriff’s Office substation in Pine Hills.
About seven months after that operation began, the agency credited it with a decrease in crime and said efforts would continue. Mina said last week that Operation RISE, which didn’t focus specifically on gang violence, is no longer in effect. He wasn’t sure when it officially ended.
Bishop Kelvin Cobaris, who has long pushed for community-led action, said he thought Operation RISE was initially successful, but then fizzled out without any real replacement.
“When you stop that stuff and you just have nothing, it starts back up,” Cobaris said.
Mayor Demings, who declined comment for this story, last week announced the Citizens Safety Task Force, which he said would combat the spread of violence by identifying community solutions to longstanding problems. The mayor did not release many details, including who would serve on the task force, saying only that he wanted “authentic people” driven to promote change.
David Kennedy, who helped develop Operation Ceasefire two decades ago and still helps cities implement the program, said research has shownthat most gun violence stems from gangs or similar groups, who incite violence in otherwise peaceful communities.
“A lot of money and attention goes into addressing these issues, andthe fact simply is most of what [cities] do right now doesn’t work,” Kennedy said. “Those efforts can be very serious and extremely heartfelt but they’re not effective.”
Minasaid he supports efforts to comprehensively address the issues leading to gang violence, including the new community task force, but he said his main responsibility as law enforcement is to find and arrest violent offenders.
“We’re also going to continue tomeetwith ourcommunity leaders and solicit ideas from them.” Mina said. “I am definitely willing to play that part; I am willing to give resources.”
‘Turfwars’
While the majority of the recent shootings tied to it have occurred in Pine Hills, the dispute has spilled across Central Florida. The feud dates back to at least April 14, court records say, whenWolphLuma, 20, was shot and killed at a house party nearDavenport in Osceola County.
Elevendays later, a driveby shooting at a vigil for Luma in Orlando’s Carver Shores neighborhood killed: Dexter Rentz, an Ocoee High football player set to go to theUniversity of Louisville. Four others were injured.
A suspect in that shooting was Jeremiah Robinson, described by authorities as a member of the All Family No Friends gang, who on July 7was shot and killed by Vanshawn Sands on Powers Ridge Court in Pine Hills. Officials said Sands fired back after Robinson shot at him.
Sands, who deputies called the second in command of the rival 438 gang — though he denies the group is a gang— was at the FloridaMall on Aug. 7with Salaythis Melvin and two others when Orange
County deputies in plain clothes descended on them to arrest Sands on a warrant. Melvin, who officials said had a gun, ran and was shot in the back by Deputy James Montiel, a shooting that has sparked protests. Montiel saidhe feared for his life after Melvin turned his head toward him while clutching the gun.
There were two other shootings tied to the gangs that month, detectives said: an Aug. 2 “gun battle” that wounded an innocent 12-year-old boy at the Rolling Hills apartment complex and an Aug. 10 shooting at a day careonPine HillsRoadwhen a gang member was picking up his children. Bullets hit his car and the day care, both of which had children inside.
OnSept.11, justdays before Daquane was killed, someone shot up a home off Glendale Road, striking a 15-year-old boy and fatally wounding Joshua Atkinson, 14.
Thegangs— whichMina called the “two major” ones his agency deals with — are tied to five other shootings in Pine Hills since July, detectives said.
“Those two gangs have been aroundfor about a decade or so, members either get arrested, some tragically get killed, some go to prison, some move on,” Mina said.
Itwasn’t untilAugust that officialswere able to link the violence to the gangs, Mina said. He has faced criticism for notwarning thecommunity and seeking its help sooner, but he said detective work takes time.
Mina said gang members range in age fromabout15 to 25, a “small fraction of the youth in the community.”
Mina said they are involved in gun thefts, and commercial and vehicle burglaries but don’t run large drug-dealing operations. The groups are tied to local rap artists, authorities have said, and disputes often originate with a social media “beef” that escalates to violence and retaliation.
Cobaris, who said he’s performed too many funerals over the years for young people caught up in these groups, said he doesn’t believe they’re highly organized criminal enterprises, but rather neighborhood cliques using social media to promote their rap music — prompting rivalries over respect and domain.
“I know these individuals, I’ve been around them, it’s about rappers and it’s turfwars,” Cobaris said.
‘I’vewatched them change’
An unincorporated subdivision with roughly 70,000 residents northwest of downtownOrlando, Pine Hills was developed in the 1950s as one of the city’s first suburbs. While it first served as a bedroom community for employees of what is now Lockheed Martin, the neighborhood began to suffer in the 1970s when more affluent residents left the area, causing property values to decline and crime to rise.
Sandra Fatmi-Hall, executive director of the United Foundation of Central Florida, has spent the last seven years running an after-school program at Evans High School, taking young people on trips to see college campusesand to the Orlando Science Center, as well as organizing community cleanup days.
But she only has the funding to mentor about 50 or 60 kids a year — about a quarter of how many request to participate — and relies on personal donations to make up the $250,000 operating budget. More government and corporate
funding is needed to help expand access to mentoring for vulnerable youth, she said.
“If we focus on helping those after school enrichment programs, we will offer these youth continued hope,” she said. “Jobs will open up for them. When a young person has one person that is missing from home ... that’s where they gravitate for thosewhomay nothave their best interests. When their friends are in after-school programs they are able to pull them along.”
Out of the 350 kids she’s helped mentor, about 100 have gone on to college. Giving the students hope and letting them know that people care about them goes a longway, Fatmi-Hall said.
“I’ve watched their eyes brighten. I’ve watched them change,” she said. They dress well. They do better in school.”
In 2011, the Pine Hills Neighborhood Improvement District was formed to revitalize the community’s economy. Chairman TimHabercamp pointed to anumberofprojectshesaid are fostering change like theHawthorne Park Senior Housing project, a new$6.5 million Lynx bus station at Pine Hills Road and Belco Drive and an under-construction trail for walkers and cyclists.
“Anytime that the community is developing, it gives people a better environment to live in,” he said.
Habercamp said he wishes more people would get involved.
“There’s always the same 15 people that show up to the [Orange County] commission meetings,” he said. “What we need is to have 500 people at the meetings. Then the commissioners will listen.”
Cobaris agrees, but said that involvement has to span the community, from downtown Orlando and across the county — noting many of these gang feuds start or end up in different neighborhoods, not limited by geography.
“This is not a Pine Hills problem,” he said.
Former Orange County Commissioner Homer Hartage, whose district included Pine Hills, where his family runs a day care, said he’s seen leaders make decisions that transform communities — pointing out that Thornton Park in downtown Orlando was not considereda safe neighborhood before the turn of the century.
“At some point we have to start getting to the bottom of these things ... we have to start addressing the holistic nature of people’s existence,” Hartage said. “We know how to fix this, the question is, do we have the will to fix it?”