Liberian kids get a kick through soccer
Columbus coach helps them by giving back
Eugene Harmon grew up playing soccer barefoot on the street of Monrovia, the capital of Liberia in West Africa.
As kids, he and his friends did not have fancy gear or a well-manicured soccer pitch. Collecting large rocks as goalposts and creating lines and markings out of sticks, Harmon said the sport taught him not to give up easily.
Years of practice paid off. When he moved to the United States in 2009 to pursue higher education, a soccer coach at Bucks County Community College in eastern Pennsylvania invited him to join the college’s soccer program and offered him a scholarship. He ultimately completed his associate degree in computer science in four years.
Now, living on Columbus’ East Side and earning his living as an IT specialist, the 33-year-old wants to give back to his community.
Two years ago, he started a soccer program called the Zion Astro Football Academy (zionastro.com) in his home country to remotely mentor about 60 Liberian children ranging in age from 12 to 15. So far, Harmon said he has paid tens of thousands of dollars out of his own pocket to keep the program running.
“The youth in Liberia had no opportunity and no one to direct them to the right path,” Harmon said. “Soccer is the most-popular sport in Africa, so I decided to use it as an instrument to get the kids’ attention and push them to stay in school.”
Harmon was born into a 14-year-long civil war that decimated Liberia’s infrastructure and social fabric. His mother did everything to keep him safe, but he saw on the news how children were displaced, assaulted and killed on a daily basis, he said.
of researchers with the National Network for Safe Communities (NNSC), who worked with the Columbus Division of Police to review 107 homicides between January and September of last year in an effort to pin down who is driving the city's lethal violence.
They found that about 480 total members of 17 gangs — roughly 0.05% of the city's population — were confirmed or suspected to be involved in 46% of the homicides, either as victims, perpetrators or both.
The mayor talked about this as though it were unplowed ground. He said that in response, the city is assessing existing anti-violence strategies and beefing up newer efforts to target that core group of individuals who are most at risk of being victims or perpetrators of violence.
That is a valid approach, but it is not a new one. Criminologists have recommended variations of this strategy for many years, and in Columbus, some of them were rebuffed by city leaders nearly 10 years ago.
Columbus, like other cities, has seen a sharp rise in homicidal violence both this year and last. But the trend is not entirely unprecedented.
If the current pace keeps up, we are certain to surpass last year's record 175 homicides. Should we reach 200, which looks likely the way things are going, the per capita breakdown would come close to 22 homicides per every 100,000 people.
We hit that same rate in 1991. While 139 homicides occurred that year, the city was much smaller. In that sense, the current level of violence is not unheard of.
And to suggest the violence today is inherently different, as the mayor would have us believe, contradicts much of the report.
In addition to the information — it was not a revelation — that much of the violence is driven by a very limited pool of violent actors, the study found that homicides often were tangled up in petty beefs and interpersonal disputes.
That also is not new.
In more than half of the killings, the victim and suspect knew each other. They are overwhelmingly male.
Not new.
“The results displayed in this report are largely in line with NNSC'S national experience,” the authors concluded.
Also not new were many of the names on the list of 17 gangs.
The report established a rivalry between the Elaine Gangster Crips and the Easthaven Bloods. That same rivalry was implicated in a homicide in 2007.
The Elaine Gangster Crips are rivals with another group calling themselves the Blam Squad, the report noted. A beef between those gangs was cited in the killing of a 15year-old boy on an East Side Street corner in 2016, a year that ended with 106 killings.
The T&A Crips gang that takes its name from the Near East Side intersection of Trevitt and Atcheson streets was identified as the most victimized group during the nine months of homicides that were reviewed. Six victims and two suspects were linked to the gang.
But the violence tied to the T&A stretches back much further, and their gunplay hasn't claimed only gang members.
A bullet fired during a 2010 gunfight between T&A members and rivals severed the spine of Alix Reese, a young motorist who had lost her way and drove into the gang's turf at precisely the wrong instant.
Reese fought on as a quadriplegic for almost nine years but died of complications of the catastrophic injury in 2019.
Also named in the latest report are the Brittany Hills Posse, the Short North Posse and the Deuce-deuce Bloods. We've heard those names linked to city violence not for a few years but for decades.
“Police launch massive gang sweep,” declared a front-page Dispatch headline from 2001. The Deuce-deuce Bloods and another gang mentioned in the latest report, the Miller-ell Bloods, were among those targeted in that crackdown 20 years ago.
“The violence we're seeing today is different, and so we need a new plan,” the mayor said on Tuesday.
No, the violence isn't different. But clearly we do need a new plan. And as for Step 1, perhaps we could be direct and honest about the history and nature of the problem. tdecker@dispatch.com @Theodore_decker