By Bill Kirby Jr. | Columnist
There were those in this community, including some members of the Fayetteville City Council, who never quite warmed to Ted Voorhees, the no-nonsense city manager.
He could be pompous.
He could be brusque.
Downright arrogant, some might say.
But when it came to crime in this city, particularly homicides, criminals knew they were dealing with a city manager who meant business.
“We need to be outraged,” Voorhees said in January 2013, just 41/2 months on the job and talking about city crime before hiring Harold Medlock as police chief. “Any murders are unacceptable, but if you think that somehow you’re going to get away with murder in Fayetteville, you need to think twice.”
Voorhees said it right there at the Fayetteville Police Department, and he made no apologies.
We could have used some of that Ted Voorhees attitude Wednesday when the City Council convened at City Hall to discuss public safety and how our short-staffed Police Department seems to be investigating one homicide after another.
That’s not to say we didn’t learn about many initiatives Chief Kemberle Braden and his police force are using to combat crime, from property and vehicle thefts to tracking down the perpetrators to seizing illegal guns to doing all that humanly can be done to curtail city crime. Among the initiatives in place, according to Braden, are residential cameras and FUSUS I business cameras and license plate readers to assist police in finding “the bad guys” who commit crimes. The Sound Thinking, aka ShotSpotter, technology for tracing neighborhood crime, too.
“We need to find the root causes of gun violence in our community,” Councilwoman Courtney Banks-McLaughlin would say.
No question there, Braden would concur with the councilwoman.
“If we get less guns stolen,” the chief says, “that’s the less guns we have out there.”
‘It’s straight to guns’
For all of the 33 homicides to date in 2023, a gun was involved in someone’s death. There were, according to the Police Department, 44 homicides in 2022.
“As I look at social media, I see more people displaying guns than before,” Braden was telling Councilman Mario Benavente. “There’s no fighting anymore. It’s straight to the guns.”
The chief told us that mental health, poverty and addiction are among the root causes that Banks-McLaughlin was wondering about.
“A lot are teenagers, right?” Councilwoman Shakeyla Ingram asked the chief.
“Teenagers,” Braden would say, “and young adults.”
And, the chief would say, when there are disputes among this younger generation, “rather than get police involved, they handle situations on their own.”
Homicides by the numbers
Many of those 33 homicides thus far in 2023 support what the chief says.
A prime example is the July 29 shooting death in broad daylight of Lorenzo Darnell McLaughlin Jr., 22, who was shot to death along Stanberry Street and Primrose Drive after what police say a social media dispute. Devonte Tyrell McClain, 20, and his brother Adriane McLain, 18, have been arrested and charged in McLaughlin’s death.
Four nights later, gunfire breaks out at a memorial balloon release for McLaughlin at Seabrook Park near Slater Avenue. A motorist is the victim of gunfire and, in the frantic and chaotic scene, drives his vehicle through a fence and into the park’s swimming pool. The victim is transported to a hospital in critical condition, again the result of gunfire.
A 19-year-old Hope Mills woman is gunned down on July 17 during an apparent robbery at a Valero gas station on Bragg Boulevard.
A 20-year-old and an18-year old are charged with first-degree murder in the May 22 shooting death of a 37-year-old man, again in broad daylight, on Schmidt Street.
A 20-year-old male is fatally shot on July 5, and two others sustain shooting injuries. A 25-year-old dies from a gunshot wound on June 5 in the 1900 block of Louise Circle. A 19-year-old woman is a May 26 shooting victim, and a 27-year-old man is charged with first-degree murder.
The list of homicides goes on and on to include the May 31 double homicide of an18-year-old and a 24-year-old, resulting in murder charges for two who both are age 21; the May 29 shooting death in the 400 block of Lynne Avenue, where a 45-year-old died from a gunshot wound allegedly at the hands of a 39-year-old man who was charged with first-degree murder; the May 26 murder of a 19-year-old woman near a Fort Bragg Road bowling alley and the arrest of a 27-year-old man on a murder charge; the May 24 fatal shooting of an 18-year-old woman, with the alleged 18-year-old shooter taking his own life; the May 7 deadly shooting of a 27-year-old man who dies in the 1900 block of Palomino Drive in what police describe as a narcotics transaction, and a 54-year-old man from South Carolina is charged with first degree murder; the May 2 shooting death of a 30-year-old man in the 1200 block of Kienast Drive, with a 37-year-old man charged with first-degree murder and robbery with a dangerous weapon; an April 18 robbery attempt in the 200 block of Alphin Street that leaves a 36-year-old man dead and three others suffering gunshot wounds, with a man charged with first-degree murder and attempted first-degree murder, among other charges; a March 6 shooting spree in the 200 block of Gertrude Street with three victims, one of whom dies; two men ages 26 and 33 who die in a Feb. 7 shooting in the 1100 block of Bunce Road, and an infant also is a victim; the Jan. 8 shooting death of a 20-year-old man in the 3500 block of Nutmeg Place, with a 19-year-old man charged with manslaughter.
And just for the record, city police issued a news release Friday asking for the public’s assistance in identifying a suspect in the Jan. 15 shooting death of an 18-year-old man in the 5300 block of Docia Circle.
You get the picture.
There’s an alarming trend here, and it all has to do with gun violence to include that shooting at Seabrook Park, where the young man was a victim of gunfire at a balloon release to remember the July 29 shooting death of 22-year-old Lorenzo Darnell McLaughlin, and the panicked motorist drove his car into a swimming pool.
“We are experiencing a cycle of violence that our community has the power to stop,” Chief Kimberle Braden said in a news release after that shooting. “It will take the cooperation of our community to help solve this crime and prevent further acts of violence.”
Something else we learned Wednesday from Braden is that our Fayetteville Police Department has 374 sworn officers, with 57 vacancies.
‘No discussion on the 33 murders’
Hence, the city called for Wednesday’s public safety meeting about what this city and police can do to address crime in the community.
“As you know, public safety is a very important item in the community,” Mayor Mitch Colvin would say, “… but we wanted to have a specific meeting tonight with a more detailed, in-depth conversation about where we are.”
All well and good for the community, but you didn’t hear a lot of concern from the mayor or council members Kathy Keefe Jensen, Shakeyla Ingram, D.J. Haire, Derrick Thompson, Mario Benavente, Brenda McNair, Courtney Banks-McLaughlin or Deno Hondros about these 33 homicides. Mayor Pro Tem Johnny Dawkins did not attend Wednesday’s meeting.
“Other than the chief of police, no one on the City Council understands law enforcement, and it showed,” Efrain “Freddie” de la Cruz, mayoral candidate in the Oct. 10 primary, would say later. “There was no discussion on the 33 murders we’ve had this year so far.”
De la Cruz is on point.
There wasn’t.
There was no Ted Voorhees, the old city manager, in the council chamber to say he was outraged by city homicides.
Councilwoman Jensen did acknowledge that perhaps a public safety task force to include Cumberland County, the county school system and health care officials be a part of addressing how to mitigate gun violence.
“They have the knowledge to help us, and our police cannot do it by themselves,” the councilwoman would say. “We all agree that this is going to take the whole county for us to be able to put a dent in this and get out of this Tier 1 situation.”
Councilman Thompson offered that he grew up hard on the streets of Philadelphia in the 1960s, and that young people need pastors and community leaders to guide them in the right direction. “You have to start off by doing the right thing and not going down that path of violence and guns,” he would say.
Epilogue
We could have used someone like Ted Voorhees on Wednesday to tell us and those who plan to commit murder in this city that it will be tolerated no longer.
Someone to show us some emotion.
Some visible frustration and anger over the shooting death of 19-year-old Danielle Claire Golcher at a Bragg Boulevard gas station or Lorenzo Darnell McLaughlin Jr., the 22-year-old gunned down along Stanberry Street and Primrose Drive in broad daylight.
“Any murders are unacceptable, but if you think that somehow you’re going to get away with murder in Fayetteville, you need to think twice,” Ted Voorhees, the former city manager, would say in January 2013. “And, frankly, we’re not going to shy away from this. We’re going to stand tall.”
Bill Kirby Jr. can be reached at billkirby49@gmail.com or 910-624-1961.
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