LAKEWOOD IS JOLTED AWAKE BY A NIGHTMARE
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) - July 12, 1995
Author: DICK FEAGLER

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Lakewood is a wonderful town. I grew up in Cleveland and stayed here and I've lived East, West and South. But my last 14 years in Lakewood have been the best.

You can feel the lake in Lakewood. The houses along its rocky cliffs are old and elegant. Lakewood Park is a painting by Norman Rockwell. Teams of little girls play marvelously inept softball on the park's diamonds. On Sunday nights, there are band concerts, and on the Fourth of July, the fireworks rival Cleveland's.

The downtown is pleasant and viable. The population is ethnically diverse. The schools are old but well-maintained, with mottos carved above their doors which praise the virtues of education and remind the reader that our children will determine our future.

There are mansions and rows of high-rise apartments and inexpensive walk-ups. There are streets of Victorian houses and tree-shaded blocks of nice, frame starter homes for young families. Young women jog alone and fearlessly along Lake Ave. well after dark. Public Square is a convenient 10 minutes away.

So it has been possible to live in Lakewood and dream the American dream - a dream made slightly fitful by headlines from other places. Yesterday morning, though, the citizens of Lakewood arose to confront the American nightmare on Page 1-B of this newspaper where a headline read:

"Teens took life, dollar, police say

"Man stabbed to death on street in Lakewood."

The plot of the nightmare was this: A group of five teenagers, four of them from Lakewood, picked a 38-year-old man as their prey and allegedly stabbed him to death with a buck knife in a residential neighborhood.

Vincent Drost tried to cross the street when he saw the youths approaching but it didn't do him any good. According to police, the youths who were arrested said they were out to "do" somebody. Police reported that they showed no remorse.

There it was. All of it. Dumped like toxic waste amid the shade trees of Dreamland. Zombie youth, innocent victim, random selection, death.

The ripples of civic trauma began immediately. First, people began calling the Lakewood police seeking some word of reassurance.

"They are saying things like, `I usually like to take a little walk down Lakeland and over to Detroit. Is that safe? Should I be doing that?' said Police Capt. Alan Clark, who investigated the fatal knifing.

Clark is a Lakewood resident and a 30-year veteran of the police force. What he sees happening to Lakewood, he doesn't like. If you ask him what the problem is, the answer he gives you is the same answer you've already heard. You've heard it from cops in Cleveland and East Cleveland and Cleveland Heights. You've heard it on your TV from cops in Los Angeles and Miami - from sea to shining sea.

"The parents don't supervise them," Clark said. "They've got too much money without working for it. They don't have a sense of right and wrong. They just don't care."

One of the juveniles arrested told police he likes fights. He pulled up his shirt sleeve and displayed old knife scars on his arm.

"What do you want to be when you grow up?" a cop asked him. "Besides a killer, I mean."

"A rapper," the kid said promptly. Then he complained that he was tired and wanted to go to bed.

"They had just killed a man," a policeman said. "And they were complaining that we wouldn't let them get a good night's sleep."

If you ask around Lakewood, you will hear a lot of complaints about too much rental property and too much Section 8 government-subsidized housing. You will hear fear and frustration and racial distrust and ethnic distrust and distrust of the poor.

Beneath the town's idyllic landscape is that other American landscape. That ugly landscape ulcerated by anger and tired of political rhetoric empty of solutions.

But you have to ask. Because what happens in a place like Lakewood when the American nightmare arrives is not speeches. Oh, there are speeches all right. Speeches about putting more cops on the street. And speeches about how the death of Vincent Drost was just one of those isolated incidents that should not be blown out of proportion.

But beneath the surface where the real action is, little, telling changes take place. Fewer young women jog down Lake Ave. after dark. Mothers worry a little more about their kids in Lakewood Park. The "starter family" begins scanning the real estate section, looking at the prices of the houses in those new treeless developments an hour's commute from town.

Lakewood is the best place I've ever lived, which is why I almost didn't write this column. The Chamber of Commerce won't send me a fruit basket for it. I will not be serenaded by the Lakewood Rotary Club.

But I've been around long enough to know a turning point when I see one. In the Belle Barber Shop on Detroit Ave., a troubled customer told the barber he had always thought of Lakewood as a town that had it all.

"We do now," the barber said.

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