Barberton group fights to close drug houses
BARBERTON — When he asks at a meeting or church gathering if people know where a drug house is located, most of those in attendance raise their hands, says Mark Canfora, founder of Families and Friends for a Safe Barberton.
They know, but they feel powerless to do anything about it, he said. They shouldn’t, Canfora said.
“Everybody knows where there’s a drug house in their neighborhood,” he said. “The question is: What are they going to do about it?”
Canfora, who lost a son to opioids in July 2005, says residents living near a drug house shouldn’t feel the situation is hopeless, and he and his group know how to get a house shut down.
What it takes, he said, is commitment, a little knowledge of the law and a willingness to provide pressure at the right time.
Canfora has proof — a former drug house on Third Street Northwest in Barberton across the street from the Lake Anna YMCA that was shut down and boarded up this summer.
Soon, he says, his organization and a coalition of other groups intent on ridding the city of the scourges will claim its second victory with another drug house it’s in the process of shutting down.
Canfora said the boarded-up home near Lake Anna was once a hotbed of drug activity, housing at one time or another half of Families and Friends for a Safe Barberton’s growing list of residents whose addiction killed them. The group is assembling the list to build a permanent and a mobile memorial.
“They were renting rooms by the week at $150,” he said. “As many as a dozen people per room when it was at its peak.”
Outside the walls of the three-bedroom house, neighbors were picking up needles in their yards for years. Inside was worse, with rapes and sexfor-drugs exchanges a constant occurrence, according to accounts Canfora has heard.
It didn’t start out that way, Canfora said. At one point the house was leased to someone who turned out to be a wolf in sheep’s clothing.
“This person said he was a recovering addict and he was going to help people using drugs,” he said.
The individual received government funds to help with the rehabilitation effort. He told the landlord he was going to fix up the house.
But it was all a lie, Canfora said. By the time it was shut down, the house had become a hellhole, he said. The plumbing didn’t work and some of it had been removed. Addicts used buckets as toilets.
The key to closing down that drug house and others, Canfora said, is their status as a nuisance property. In Barberton, three nuisance reports in a year make the occupants eligible for eviction.
Once landlords become aware of the situation — in many cases, they aren’t — and realize they could be subject to hefty fines, things begin to happen. For the Third Street house, Canfora contacted the landlord, who wasn’t receiving payment from the renter. Because of a family medical issue, the landlord hadn’t kept up and wanted to act quickly.
The process took about a month, and when the three-day eviction notice arrived in July, the dealers and most of the addicts had cleared out.
“When that house closed down, there were only three remaining addicts that were very sick,” Canfora said.
Canfora counseled and prayed with the three, pointing them toward help. A former street preacher, Canfora said faith is essential in the recovery process.
“As a Christian man and one of the leaders of this effort, (I) know God loves the drug dealers, too,” he said. “The point is, if they want to give up that life, we’ll pray with them .... But we’re not going to allow them to kill our friends and family anymore.”
Theresa Newberry, a member of Families and Friends for a Safe Barberton, lost a son when he was injected by a dealer with carfentanil. The death certificate didn’t register the death as a homicide, and that’s often the case, she said. When she’s not helping shut down drug houses, she’s advocating for a change to how those deaths — especially when another individual administers a fatal dose — are registered.
Newberry, who is helping another son with his addiction problem, now lives in Florida but returns to Barberton frequently to visit family. She said she was shocked by the drug activity in the city. Another relative of hers was recently held hostage for eight days in the basement of a drug house, she said.
“I just want to see these houses shut down because there are so many of them,” she said.
Canfora estimates there are at least 10 in the city that could be closed using the nuisance property process. He believes a concerted effort of dedicated residents will make it happen.
“One neighborhood, one block at a time, we can take our city back,” Canfora said. “This is our town; this is not their town.”