The Bronx Ink

Weekend mornings in Melrose are usually about sounds that help people relax. There’s the bell from the Church of Immaculate Conception, and soft music from shops that have just opened up for business. So when Maximino Rivera heard shots early on a Saturday last November, he couldn’t believe his ears. Minutes later, he walked in on an armored truck that had just been looted on Third Avenue.

Members of the South Bronx Community Congress, a consortium of various community organizations, demand more jobs to control violence. (NASR UL HADI/The Bronx Ink)

The weekend after, Rivera and other members of the South Bronx Community Congress — a consortium of various community organizations — marched down Brook Avenue in Mott Haven, demanding measures to control the violence. “We haven’t seen such heists since the 70s,” said Rivera, who has been involved with welfare work since 1989. “The statistics may or may not show it, but we can see that violence is becoming a bigger problem.”

Rivera’s instincts are fairly accurate. The South Bronx’s 40^th Precinct, an area of less than three square miles, has reported almost 500 incidents of violent crime this year. More than 90 percent of these are felonious assaults, mostly shootings. In October, six incidents of gun violence were reported on a single Sunday.

Violence has climbed steadily, almost straight up, since 2008. This year’s toll — both overall, and individually for murder, rape and assault — is the highest in at least five years. The count so far is at least 20 murders and 23 rapes; that’s about one of each every two weeks, in a population of less than 180,000.

Statistics

Murders in the community have gone up by more than 35 percent since last year. The last time this number was at par with the average across other precincts in the Bronx was in 2008. Since then, the borough’s average has remained below 12, while the 40^th’s numbers have gone up by more than 50 percent.

The 2006 Community Health Profiles rank homicide among the top five causes of premature death in Mott Haven.

The rise in incidents of sexual violence is even more disturbing. Rapes are up by 75 percent since last year. Also, for the first time in five years, the 40^th has registered more incidents than the borough’s average per precinct.

Assaults in the neighborhood remain at a much higher threshold than the rest of the Bronx, and the gap has been widening consistently. There were 445 incidents of felonious assault in the 40^th Precinct this year, 20 percent more than the borough average of 367.

Analysis

Banners at the residents’ march against violence primarily demanded more jobs and less poverty, as a solution to the spike in violence. “It’s all about connecting the dots between our social problems and violence,” said Raymond Figueroa, who runs a development program for incarcerated youth at Brook Park.

“Poverty and unemployment statistics are like canaries in the mine,” he said. “The minute they start acting up, you know that the situation is becoming dangerous. It’s a circle. Violence happens when people are violated.”

Figueroa explained that there are several jobs in the neighborhood that are just not available to locals, mostly because they are not educated enough. “Our schools haven’t been able to help our children, because they don’t have enough human resources to address our needs,” he said.

New York University’s Furman Center found that more than 75 percent of students in Mott Haven and Hunts Point perform below grade level in reading. In math, that number is almost 65 percent. Eventually these students drop out; more than half the residents in this community do not have a high school diploma.

“These unemployed youth then turn to underground businesses,” said Figueroa. “Prostitution and drug/gun running provide something that is very tangible and immediate.”

This reasoning does seem to hold ground. At least two-thirds of those involved in this year’s murders — both victims and perpetrators — were 25 or younger. Also, all the data charts shared earlier in this text show the 2008-09 recession to be the start of the upward trend in violent crime. During the same period, unemployment in this community doubled, going from about 9 percent to more than 18 percent.

“Joblessness feeds poverty in our community,” reiterated Figueroa, “which in turn makes it difficult for our kids to stick to school.” The 2006 Community Health Profiles estimate the poverty level in Mott Haven at 45 percent, twice as much as New York City overall.

“Poor school-age kids eventually turn to friends on the street for support, and that’s how they become gangs. The Dominicans go to the Trinitarios, the African Americans stick with the Bloods, the Puerto Ricans with the Latin Kings, and so on.”

“We call them gangs, but they think of themselves as street families,” he said. “And these families run the underground economy, which is the source of most violence.”

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Blood stains on the pavement across the street from Joel Rojas' house in Mott Haven, the morning after he was stabbed to death. In the background, passersby condole his sisters, who set up a small memorial under the mailbox where he was found. (NASR UL HADI/The Bronx Ink)

Joel Rojas must have fought hard for his life.

The trail of blood on East 138th Street in Mott Haven was nearly a block long. It began outside the storefront church at 467, reappeared on a red sports Pontiac parked all the way up at 481, and ended under a mailbox next to it.

When the emergency team arrived shortly after midnight on Saturday, the mailbox was dented, with scratches all around the impact. Rojas, who lived in an apartment just across the street, lay there bleeding from a stab wound to his abdomen. He had almost made it home.

The medics rushed him to Lincoln Hospital, but Rojas was declared dead on arrival at 1:35 am. Police had informed the 24-year-old’s family–his parents, two younger sisters, wife and 3-year-old daughter, Analia.

This stabbing is part of a recent surge in violence across the 40th Precinct. Last weekend, there were six shooting incidents, one of them fatal. The homicide count till October 2 this year is 15, up 15.4 percent from 2010.

Around noon on Saturday, Rojas’ sisters set up a small memorial with candles and bouquets under the mailbox where he was found. A cardboard carton sheltered the candles from the wind, with “R.I.P. Cholo” and “Shortiiee loves you” scribbled on it. Passersby paid their respects and asked how he died, but the family had no explanation.

“We don’t know who my brother was out with or why, because he lived alone in his apartment,” said Laura “Shortiiee” Rojas, a high school freshman, who lives with her parents in another building on the same block. She claimed that there were “a lot of people here who hated Cholo for no reason.”

But most of the gathered mourners weren’t sure they knew him at all. “There’s no photograph of him,” pointed out a woman who lived in the same building, “so I don’t know who it was. But it’s tragic that he was so young.”

People outside the House of Faith Ministries, the church where Rojas’ blood marked the site of the attack, said that two gangs, the Mexicanos and the Chicanos, shared this neighborhood. Brook Avenue, just a block away from Rojas’ home, serves as the dividing line for the gangs’ territories, they said.

But detectives who spent most of the afternoon interrogating people in the neighborhood said that the connection was still speculative. “We keep hearing about the gang rivalry here,” said one of the investigators, “but there’s nothing conclusive yet. We are still looking.”

Rojas’ sister too insisted that her brother, who worked in construction, didn’t hang out with any “bad people.”