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SATURDAY, APRIL 3, 2010

Mass shooting dims neighborhood’s hopes

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PHOTO COURTESY OF GALLAUDET UNIVERSITY

Right-handed pitcher Jeremy Shepps, left, helped deliver Coach Curtis Pride and the Bison their first conference victory since 1997.

Gallaudet ends its 13-year skid

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3-2.

Gallaudet has not experienced much success in other athletic arenas, either, but had a string of recent minor victories before Thursday’s win in baseball. In the fall, the football team had its first winning season at the varsity level since 1930. In De- cember, the women’s basketball team snapped a 63-game losing streak in CAC regular season play. And last spring, the softball team won its first conference game since 2001. Gallaudet has struggled to

compete in the CAC and is mov- ing to the North Eastern Athletic Conference, which also competes at the Division III level, starting next season. In baseball, Pride, a Silver Spring native, has tried to change the losing culture since he be- came head coach two years ago. He was the only deaf player to reach the major leagues in the modern era and batted .250 in 421 games in parts of 11 seasons through 2006. Pride can’t isolate one weak- ness on his team, and said his team’s struggles have more to do with his players’ inexperience than the fact that they are deaf. He is working with a group that has only two real pitchers. In ad- dition to the pitching, the Bison make defensive lapses and their batters are not aggressive. “Well, most of the guys on the team don’t have much baseball experience,” said Pride, who was born 95 percent deaf after his mother contracted rubella during her pregnancy. “They never played all year round. Even when they played baseball, it was for fun, not competitive, or competi- tive league. So basically, my assis- tant coaches and I had to teach them the game of baseball and how to play the right way. It has been a learning process for these guys. I have seen guys make a sig- nificant improvement since Day One, and they’re starting to un- derstand what it takes to win a ballgame. In other words, they are starting to play like real base- ball players. “I’ve been preaching you can’t accept losing,” Pride said. Some players said the low point of the season was a three- game trip to Florida during spring break in which the Bison lost by a combined score of 43-14.

Before a game against Mary Washington on March 28, Pride held an impassioned closed-door meeting with the team that has helped change the mood around the program. “I mean, even worse than the

Bad News Bears,” Pride said. “We were making mistakes left and right. We were the laughingstock in the league.” Players have rallied around each other’s friendship. The team has a motto: “Brothers in Blue.” “It’s been a tough two years,” sophomore Ryan Hastings, a first baseman and a pitcher, said through an interpreter. “But we have to stay behind each other. We trust each other.” It all came to a head on Thurs-

day as word started to spread on campus that the baseball team was leading Stevenson. Jeremy Shepps, who pitched a

complete game, said he started to sense victory once he realized he had a no-hitter going in the fourth inning. He grew more ner- vous with every pitch, and Ste- venson scored a run in the fourth inning and two in the sixth. When it was over, players rushed Shepps on the mound and piled on top of him. A guard re- quested that an outfield security camera keep rolling in order to capture a wide shot of the play- ers’ celebration. But the celebra- tion was brief: After the game, the players had to compose them- selves and rake the infield dirt to prepare the field for the second half of the doubleheader. Gallaudet is made up mostly of freshmen and sophomores and has only one senior, and ending a losing streak that outlasted any current player’s tenure with the team was difficult to articulate. “It was hard to process,” said Shepps, a sophomore. “But after- ward, we felt like we were big men on campus.” Gallaudet finishes its regular season conference schedule on Saturday with a doubleheader at home against York College of Pennsylvania. Now that the Bison have snapped their 13-year streak of futility, some on the team are feeling confident. Asked Friday when Gallaudet’s

next win would come, Shepps smiled and made a sign language gesture in which he rubbed his thumb against his cheek. “Tomorrow.”

vieram@washpost.combermanz@washpost.com

the area. “They don’t have any- thing to do, no jobs, no activities.” In earlier years, the neighbor- hood was largely white, with mid- dle-class residents who worked in the federal government and lived in the tiny, brick apartments or single-family homes, locals said. In the late ’60s, more African Americans began moving in. The crack epidemic of the late ’80s and early ’90s devastated the area as it did many locales in urban Washington. The 4000 block of South Capi- tol Street, near Wier’s townhouse, sits in both Southeast and South- west Washington, on the border of Bellevue and the Washington Highlands neighborhood. On one side of the block are a row of down-on-their luck townhouses. On the other side is a small strip mall where youths began gather- ing over the past few years, grab- bing Chinese food or chicken from a carryout place, drinking, talking and laughing. The kids called it “Ground Zero.” It was known as a “chill” loitering spot, where neighborhood turf wars and beefs could be peaceably set aside without reprisals. Until Tuesday. “All of those kids were neigh- borhood kids,” said resident Vic- toria Jones as she stood near the crime scene this week. “They say ‘no child left behind,’ but these children were left behind. Most were being raised by single moth- ers. Now this has happened. They have finally shot up the last little place in Southeast that was peace- ful.”

Like Wier, Nardyne Jefferies had once believed in the dream of Bellevue’s future. She bought a small townhouse a few houses from Wier’s the same year. There, she home-schooled her daughter, Brishell Jones, 16, a petite teen- ager who loved to cook in the gleaming kitchen of granite and stainless steel. She dreamed of go- ing to culinary school, maybe Le Cordon Bleu, after her schooling was complete.

“She only had a little bit more

to go,” Jefferies said. “My child would have been off to college and pursuing her dream.” Brishell went out Tuesday and never made the two blocks home. “She was a beautiful little girl,” Jefferies said. “It’s senseless.” The bullet-scarred sidewalk and steps are a memorial now, the adjacent telephone pole covered in teddy bears, plastic red carna- tions, good-bye notes. Traffic rolls noisily by. For locals, it will now be memorialized as the spot where four young people died af- ter a chain of events that started with a tiff over a gold-colored bracelet. The surviving victims are re- covering, but if or when the sur- rounding neighborhood will is uncertain. Wier’s dream of one day walking to a brew pub or a coffee shop seems far away. “I think we’re going to progress and survive it. We have some very good people up here in this area,

PHOTOS BY MICHAEL S. WILLIAMSON/THE WASHINGTON POST

The Rev. W.W. Flood, pastor of Southeast Tabernacle Baptist Church, plants turnips with grandson William Flood. “People have no concern or self-respect for nobody,” the elder Flood said.

traffic, until she stopped in at the library Tuesday. She was walking home when she saw the ap- proaching van with the assailants and the hail of gunfire that erupt- ed.

“I saw the bullets coming out of

there. It looked like fire to me, and cannons going ‘boom, boom, boom,’ ” she said. “I ran and never looked back again.” Now in the neighborhood where she has spent most of her life, she said she feels unsafe. “You’re not at ease any more,” she said. “Walking down the street thinking someone’s going to shoot at you.”

Miriam Jones, above, was nearby when the shooting happened Tuesday. “I heard the shots and ran and never looked back,” she said. Banners put up by the city reflect an earlier optimism about the area.

About a block away from the scene this week, the Rev. W.W. Flood, 94, pastor of Southeast Tabernacle Baptist Church, was planting turnips along his church’s fence, with the help of his grandson, hoping for a harvest of greens. The neighborhood is as “different as the day is from night” than when his congrega- tion moved into their new church in 1966, he said. “It’s getting worse,” Flood said.

“People have no concern or self- respect for nobody. They need some home-training.” He worked on the turnips all

day in the warm sun, leaning on his walker, oblivious to the com- munity leaders organizing a last- minute meeting nearby, police cruisers zooming by or the heli- copters hovering. It was coming on spring and time for planting.

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and even now the families coming into the neighborhood are going to enhance it,” said Theresa Howe-Jones, an advisory neigh- borhood commissioner who rep- resents the area. Miriam Jones, 50, a painting contractor, has lived in the neigh-

borhood since 1969. She has fre- quented the shopping center since it was a strip of “community friendly” businesses, such as a Dart Drug, rather than the liquor store and carryout places there now. She had avoided the place of late because of the youths and

Staff writer Hamil R. Harris and staff researchers Meg Smith and Madonna Lebling contributed to this report.

ON WASHINGTONPOST.COM

View more images of the vigil and the crime scene as well as video of neighbors’ reactions.

Jews, abuse victims criticize priest’s Good Friday homily

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the United States, and the accusa- tion that Benedict, before he be- came pope, did not do enough to take action against suspect priests.

And it came amid a new CBS

News poll that shows that the pope’s favorable rating has fallen 13 points among American

Catholics, from 40 percent in 2006 to 27 percent today. More than two in three Americans, in- cluding a majority of Catholics, say the pope has done a poor job of handling allegations of abuse by priests.

But other Catholics agree with cChurch officials that Benedict and the Church have been un- fairly smeared.

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During an evening liturgy, Can- talamessa said he had received a letter from a Jewish friend who was upset by the attacks against Benedict and the Church and ex- pressed his “solidarity” and “sen- timents of brotherhood.” Quoting from the letter with the author’s permission, the priest said his friend had been following “ ‘with indignation the

violent and concentric attacks against the Church, the pope and all the faithful of the whole world.’ ” “ ‘The use of stereotypes, the passing from personal responsi- bility and guilt to a collective guilt remind me of the more shameful aspects of anti-Semi- tism,’ ” Cantalamessa said his friend wrote.

Rabbi Marvin Hier, founder and dean of Simon Wiesenthal Center, in Los Angeles, called the comparison “bizarre.” “The fact that he’s quoting [a]

letter from a Jewish person doesn’t excuse the ignorance,” he said. “These priests were per- petrators. They abused their call- ing, betrayed their faith. And then were protected by the hier- archy. To say that is like the perse- cution of the Jews is a distortion of history and shameful.” “It’s Good Friday,” he added.

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The priest “knows his remarks are going all over the world. And that’s the message you want to give? Ridiculous. Not only should the priest retract it, but the pope should address it . . . to say noth- ing condones it.” The Rev. James Massa, chief of-

ficer for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops on interreli- gious matters, said he worried

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how the comparison will affect the Church’s relationship with the Jewish community. He noted the great progress made in recent decades in understanding be- tween leaders of the two faiths. “I hope that what was said will be understood as the comments of one particular priest, albeit a prominent one, and doesn’t re- flect opinions of the pope or the Catholic Church,” Massa said. “I think the comparison is not only unfortunate, but inappropriate [and] . . . has no place in a Good Friday sermon.” The Rev. Federico Lombardi, a

Vatican spokesman, said the priest was speaking for himself. “There is no position of the

Vatican to do a parallel between the critiques of the Church and the anti-Semitism,” he said in a phone interview. “I stress that the intention of the priest was to give witness of solidarity of the Jewish friend who referred to his experi- ence and suffering of his people. . . . The Vatican is not comparing critics with anti-Semitism.” But others in the Catholic com-

munity said they have been struck by the Church’s response to recent abuse allegations. “If they hired someone to draw up the worst possible PR plan for the Church, they could not do any worse than these guys are doing right now,” said the Rev. Thomas Reese, senior fellow at the Wood- stock Theological Center at Georgetown University. “It’s disastrous,” he said. “They really need to get someone from the U.S. bishops conference who has been through this before to get over there and help guide the coverage. I mean, to invoke the persecution of the Jews? They are making every mistake in the book.”

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