FINDING REASONS FOR ACTS THAT DEFY REASON
Plain Dealer, The (Cleveland, OH) - December 4, 1995
Author: DICK FEAGLER

Back to Crimewood blog

Avery Holland will stand trial as an adult in the fatal stabbing of Vincent Drost in Lakewood last summer.

Holland's birth certificate says he's 17. That number is meaningless. The charges against him suggest the chaos of his life has made him primeval. Older than civilization. As ancient as suffering and cruelty.

The county took him out of an abusive home. They did it for his own protection. He passed through a series of foster homes. There is some evidence that he was deliberately scalded when he was very young. Hot liquid poured on a child will speed the aging process.

When the county adopted Avery Holland, what do you suppose it did with him? It enrolled him in something called a "re-entry program," as if he were coming back to Earth from outer space. When you think of it, that may be an apt analogy. But the re-entry program didn't quite live up to its tidy name. They stuck Avery Holland in a YMCA over on W. 25th St. Police say that when he re-entered society, he came with a knife.

Somehow, Avery Holland became friends with a 17-year-old boy named Anthony Wilson. According to testimony in Juvenile Court from a companion of Holland and Wilson, Anthony Wilson was beating Vincent Drost with a stick while Avery Holland was stabbing him. When Drost collapsed, they took a dollar from his pocket.

Anthony Wilson lived in Lakewood and was a student at Lakewood High School. That is, however, a rather generous use of the word "student." The last year he attended Lakewood High, Anthony Wilson was absent 78 days. That's more than 15 school weeks. And it doesn't count frequent tardiness.

Lakewood police arrested Holland and Wilson and two other juveniles shortly after Drost was slaughtered. The cops asked them why they had attacked Drost. The answer they gave was incomprehensible to the police. They spoke of creeping on a come-up.

"Creep On A Come-up" is the name of a song on a rap record. Lakewood police Capt. Al Clark got a copy of the record and played it. This unpleasantly expanded his musical awareness.

"To creep on a come-up," he told me, "is to approach a victim and ask him something innocent, like directions, or like change for a dollar. Then, when he's off guard and reaching into his pocket for change, the `come-up' is, you hit him.' And Clark made a sudden uppercut motion with his fist.

A week before Vincent Drost was slain, a pedestrian told police he had been assaulted by four youths at the corner of Nicholson and Detroit avenues in Lakewood. The "creep on a come-up" method was used. After the Drost killing, the assault victim picked Avery Holland's picture from a batch of photos and identified him as the assailant.

Lakewood residents had not recovered from the trauma of the Drost slaying when they picked up this newspaper last week and were greeted by this headline:

"Man is shot in Lakewood during stroll."

The story revealed that Cleveland firefighter James Sliter and his wife were walking to a supermarket on Bunts Rd. about 8 p.m. when three teens stopped them to ask directions. Mrs. Sliter kept walking while her husband paused. One of the youths shot him in the neck. A witness told police that the youths ran away from the broken robbery attempt laughing and giving each other high-fives "as if they had just scored a touchdown." Sliter is recovering from his wounds. The city of Lakewood is not.

Vincent Drost was an artist. A soft-spoken, gentle man. He was engaged to be married when he was killed. A lot of the community's self-confidence died with him. Nervousness rippled through the neighborhoods, and there was muttering about low-rent housing and racial distrust. The youths charged in the Drost slaying were African-Americans. The youths who shot Sliter were not.

I said after the Drost slaying that I would write more about him. But that is a difficult task, and I'm not sure how to do it. So far, this is a story about innocent victims, random violence, a possibly abused child, lax supervision, a crowded court system, meaningless schooling, rap music, lack of a conscience and a town affected with spreading, low-grade apprehension. It is a story of the America that scares us on the 11 o'clock news.

But what does it all add up to? Where, in these random facts, is a key to a workable solution that goes beyond platitudes? That, like the future of Lakewood, is an open question.

Back to Crimewood blog