They were laughing, and back-slapping, and eating, and drinking, and watching as souped-up cars, their chrome rims gleaming in the sunlight, cruised down the streets, providing a stark, colorful contrast to the otherwise drab neighborhood. It was May 28, 2006, and about 200 people — white, black, Hispanic — had gathered at this annual Westside block party.
Those 200 people — grandmothers and their grandchildren, twentysomethings and their pals — behaved as if they were one large family, waving and embracing each other with the easy familiarity brought by shared experience.
Then a slight rumble, a verbal exchange, erupted amid the crowd. Voices, some angry, some stern floated above the din of car engines and squeaking tires, music and conversation. Some noticed and some didn’t notice the six or so teenagers making trouble where there was none. A few adults asked them to leave. While the teens agreed, they did so grudgingly.
The party continued. Kids kept jumping up and down in a bounce house; adults kept rapping back and forth; and the cars kept rolling past.
Then the teens returned, moving through the crowd with a deliberateness they didn’t posses before. At least one stopped behind the bounce house, and pulled a handgun from under his shirt. Peals of children giggling with excitement carried through the street.
BAM! BAM! BAM!
The crowd scattered in a sea of confused and hurried movements, as gunshots — one after another after another — rang out. Bodies dropped to the hot street. Red stained the ground. The shooting suddenly stopped. A frantic silence filled the air.
The shooting started again.
An elderly woman, bad hip and all, ran toward children near the bounce house, hustling about a dozen to a safer location. There were screams. More bodies dropped with wounds to heads and chests.
When the shooting finally stopped, and the gunmen disappeared, three people lay dead or dying, hit by some of the estimated 30 bullets fired. Four others were wounded. The party was over.
On May 28, 2006, at the seventh annual Berkley Square Memorial Day weekend block party, police cruisers, ambulances and other emergency vehicles descended on the 500 block of Frederick Avenue like an invading army. Sirens and lights. Pointed questions and yellow tape.
Adolph Robles was on the ground, telling his mortally wounded wife, Tina, to hold on while a bystander tried CPR, her son looking on. Somebody else tied a belt around a person’s leg in an attempt to stop the bleeding. Steven Beck and Germar Samuel lay dead and dying on the sidewalk and street in front of a house.
A couple of hours after police first got the call, friends and relatives of the victims, their nerves frayed, gathered outside University Medical Center’s trauma unit, anxiously awaiting news on the victims’ conditions. Someone took a call from a doctor seeking permission to operate on a loved one. Tensions were high.
Soon another fight broke out, and the police swooped down to quell the violence and calm the crowd. Someone was pepper-sprayed — not that that was necessary to bring tears here. There was plenty of pain — deep and unrelenting — to go around.
Back at the crime scene, the cops were cordoning off a three-block area, from D Street up to Owens Avenue, from H Street up to Lake Mead Boulevard, talking to witnesses, some more cooperative than others, and searching the ground for shell casings and other physical evidence. The investigation was moving forward. The bad guys would be brought to justice.
But that hasn’t happened. One year after that terrible afternoon, despite all the details we know from the police report, conversations with those either directly or indirectly involved with the shootings, and articles in the Review-Journal, the Berkley Square killers remain at large. And the tragic irony of it is the police know who they are.
Running down the list of everything the police have going for them, this looks like the proverbial open-and-shut case. Potential witnesses? Some 200. Reward money? Some $16,000. Resources? Thousands of man-hours have been spent on the investigation so far. Media attention? Articles were coming out for months after the gunsmoke cleared. Description of the suspects? Police have a photograph showing six teens believed to be involved or have knowledge of the killings. Tips and leads? Hundreds and hundreds of them. A good idea of the suspects’ names? They were common knowledge both within the department and on the streets almost from the beginning.
Why hasn’t the case been solved?
It isn’t for lack of dedication on Metro’s end. While Lt. Lew Roberts, who leads the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s homicide unit, doesn’t have photos of the victims tacked to the walls of his office or some other investigative shrine dedicated to their memory, it isn’t because he’s unconcerned. Not even close.
“It still angers me to this day that we haven’t solved this case. Of all the murder cases that we’ve had — and we’ve had some sensational murder cases — this is the one case that really irritates me. It’s … sickening really that people would go shoot at a party in broad daylight, where you got a bunch of little kids around,” he says.
Of course, he’s not the only one disgusted by the killings. Former Sheriff Bill Young remembers the phone call informing him of the awful news well. “It was my day off. It just stunned me when I heard it,” he says. What’s even more sad is that four Metro patrolmen were nearby when the shooting started, but they couldn’t get there in time to stop it. “It
Frustration and sadness don’t even begin to describe the community’s reaction to the crime. Clark County Commissioner Lawrence Weekly, who grew up on the Westside and who was then a city councilman representing Ward 5, which included Berkley Square, says he heard a combination of pain and outrage from constituents.
“There were a lot of bad, mixed emotions,” he says, noting that the death of Robles was taken particularly hard at City Hall, because she’d worked there. “People needed to vent.”
Problem is, for all the venting Westside residents were doing, and all of the heartache they were feeling, no one was willing to put themselves in the spotlight and become a witness. The reason is simple and understandable: Since the suspects are believed to be gang members, people are too scared to come forward. Indeed, no one contacted for this story who was either present when the murders occurred, or who were related in some way to the victims agreed to speak to CityLife.
Says Young, “When you have gang members actively entrenched in neighborhoods, they use intimidation tactics. So [witnesses] are very, very hesitant [to testify in open court], because they’re worried about retaliation. They’re actually in fear of their life for speaking to the police. And it’s a sad thing.”
Directly related to this fear of retaliation from gangbangers is the overall relationship between Westside residents and Metro. Patricia Cunningham, who’s a member of the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department’s Multicultural Committee, says, whether it’s deserved or not, those who call the predominately African-American neighborhood home feel they’re given short shrift by the police.
“They don’t trust that the police can protect them from the gang members. They’re not convinced. People are truly afraid. This lack of trust didn’t happen over night,” she says, noting that Vegas’ nasty history of racism is a major contributor to the distrust. “It’s going to take time to rebuild, if this trust was ever there.”
But, she adds, “It’s frustrating to me as an African-American civilian [that people still think Metro doesn’t care], because I know that it just isn’t true. The police worked very hard to change that perception.”
So how to quell the fear? How to convince people to stand up to the gangs? How to establish that trust?
One solution, started after the Berkley Square murders in Metro’s Bolden Area Command, is a community-wide initiative called Safe Village. Based on a program to reduce the homicide rate in Chicago via coordinated responses from the police, activists and others, including residents of neighborhoods frequently touched by violence, the Vegas version is “designed to respond to acts of violence within 24 to 48 hours,” says Pastor Troy Martinez, a leading activist with Safe Village. “We send … an anti-violence message that this is unacceptable” through public demonstrations, door-to-door interviews with residents, youth events and more.
“It’s amazing the change,” he adds of the relationship between Metro officers and residents since Safe Village began in January. “The shift has started. And I must stress it’s changing in both directions. The community is now looking at the police different,” and vice versa.
Indeed, Roberts credits Safe Village with leading to more tips on the Berkley Square case: “We’ve gotten a whole lot more information in the last three, four months on this case than we had on the previous eight months. Because it seems there’s dialogue. People are becoming positive about taking back their neighborhood.”
It’s an essential ingredient to solving crimes, from high-profile murder cases to other, lesser offenses. “You gotta have examples,” continues Roberts. “There’s gotta be cases out there where people have done the right thing, and they’ve testified, and they have been taken care of. That’s a huge part of it.”
And that works both ways, says Cunningham, adding, “What I’d like to hear from the community … is what would you have the police do? What is it going to take to get the public to open up to law enforcement?”
The $16,000 offered up by Meadow Gold Dairy sure hasn’t helped so far, which is unusual, says Young. “Generally, that type of reward … will generate somebody calling.”
One could argue that those who have information on the shootings, and especially those who witnessed it, don’t want to relive the horror that impacted their tight-knit community. Certainly, that could be one reason why those contacted for this story either hung up as soon as the words “Berkley Square” were mentioned, or failed to return calls.
So if you’re an eyewitness, the thought of facing the killers in court and being hammered by their attorneys all while replaying that chaotic, bloody scene in your mind is, to put it mildly, unappealing.
In the end, however, it all comes back to consequences: When gangbangers face them, so do witnesses. It’s a point of no return.
But one that must be faced if crime is to be curbed: “We cannot look to law enforcement or any particular group of people to fix it,” says Cunningham. “When we see the criminal element in our communities … we have to step up to the plate and take a stand.”
But if you’re living on the Westside, it’s possible that violence subsequent to the Berkley Square murders is keeping you from calling Metro. Consider: There is evidence, in the form of more dead bodies, that last year’s shootings may have lead to more. Roberts says five detectives are working this case and several other cases that may be connected to the Berkley Square incident, but cautions, “I don’t want to paint a picture that … these are retaliatory. But I will say, in some ways that I won’t identify, yeah, it is related.”
Chances are, of course, as Martinez notes, “What’s heard on the street is common knowledge.” Translation: Witnesses probably knew about the other killings before the police did.
Still, there are alternatives to testifying before a jury, alternatives, even, to placing an anonymous phone call to the homicide unit or Crime Stoppers. Roberts says based on the intelligence he and his detectives are getting off the streets, that, in addition to the video of the suspects taken just before shots rang out, there may be up to two more videos out there that show the actual shootings taking place.
“If we could get that video, obviously, that would be huge. There were a lot of people out there with cameras; they were taking pictures of the cars. We need that. We’ve been trying to get a hold of that for months and haven’t had any success,” he says. It’s an opportunity for a witness to testify without stepping foot in a courtroom, or even giving up his name to the police. The video will testify for him.
Despite the problems turning up a witness, police are optimistic about catching the killers. Even former Sheriff Young is upbeat. “My guess is that police are on this case … and close to solving that crime. That’s a guess, but it’s a pretty educated guess,” he says. Adding, “Metro homicide will never give up.”
In the meantime, Roberts and his detectives are making their presence known to the suspects. “I want to create that situation where they know that we know, and it’s just a matter of time. I want you to know that we’re on your heels, and that you’re not getting away with it. We’ll continue to keep the heat on them until we’re able to make an arrest.”
But as police pressure the suspects through back channels (they’ve yet to bring any of them in for questioning; Roberts says they’ll do that when they get closer to making an arrest), another kind of pressure is closing on people come May 28, 2007: the one-year anniversary of the Berkley Square shootings.
Says Weekly: “The anniversary is upon us, and it is just kind of a time where we’re reliving what happened. People aren’t forgetting the victims.”
And with those nightmarish images of that day returning, and those emotional wounds being opened again, Roberts fears there may be more blood spilled before it’s all said and done. “I’m always leery of anniversary dates for big events, because you just don’t know. We don’t want tensions to escalate where other people get hurt.”
If you have any information, contact Homicide Detectives Marty Wildemann or Jimmy Vaccaro at 828-3521 or L3379R@lvmpd.com.
VIA:Las Vegas CityLife
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