Chapters 1— 4

  “Coop, a mass murder on Mowbray Street. Where are you?” It was Joyce Warren from The Observer newsroom.
  “I’m at Dickens on Head House Square.”
  “Get to 414 Mowbray. You’re very near. Between Fourth and Fifth, Lombard and South.”
  “What’s going on?”
  “A bunch of people have apparently been shot.”
  “Blacks or whites?”
  “No details. It just came over the scanner.”
  “I’m on my way.”
  I stuffed the phone back in my pocket and went into the crowded hall and down the long, straight flight of stairs to the street. With the advent of the cell phone, reporters are always connected. Unlike the old days, we never run a bar tab any more. If called, you can leave immediately without waiting for a check. I hated leaving most of a pint glass of John Courage on the bar.
  I glanced at my watch. Ten after one Sunday morning following the Greek picnic. Outside, the July night was hot and humid, and the acrid smell of urine hung heavy in the air. Head House Square was a roiling ocean of black youth in their teens and twenties, the young women in tube tops and halters, many of the young men bare-backed, their muscular bodies glistening in the 90-degree heat. Car horns were caterwauling everywhere. Thumping rap music reverberated out of half a hundred boom boxes and car radios were turned up to full volume. Motorcycles growled amidst the high-pitched babble of voices. A quiet neighborhood plaza had been turned into party hell.
  On Friday, 200,000 members of African-American fraternities and sororities from all over the East had descended on Philadelphia for an annual aberration known as Greek Weekend. “Greek,” as in collegiate Greek-letter organizations. What saved pandemonium from becoming a full-blown riot were legions of uniformed police officers in blue helmets on every corner and scattered throughout the crowds here in Head House Square and along South Street—which becomes Mecca after dark when the picnic in Fairmount Park shuts down—all the way to Broad Street twelve blocks away.
  I pushed through the semi-naked herds to Lombard and cut through the outdoor parking lot abutting Mowbray, one of Philadelphia’s excruciatingly narrow streets that ran for just two blocks.
  From the corner of Mowbray and Third I could see chaos raging up ahead. Police cars and ambulances were converging, sirens and air horns blasting, blinding red, white, yellow and blue strobes flashing in the blackness. It was the quintessential sound and light show of a grave emergency. I tried to hustle up the 300 block of Mowbray, past the rows of neat, 19th century brick row houses, but was impeded by hundreds of curious black teenagers and twenty-somethings, eerily silent and moving cautiously toward what was obviously a catastrophe.
  Fourth street was clogged with official vehicles and swarming humanity. Blue helmeted police were everywhere, shouting orders while they tried to keep crowds of onlookers behind barricades of bright yellow plastic tape.
  I caught sight of Sgt. Jim Hines, second in command of the South Street Mini-Station waving people away from the scene. Traffic was gridlocked on South and Fourth. The already horrendous decibel count was ratcheted up by the horns of angry, stuck motorists. I became aware of another sound—the rot-tot-tot of two hovering helicopters overhead, their vicious down lights knifing through the darkness.
  Hines was a big man, built like an NFL guard with a neck thicker than most men’s thighs and a jutting lower jaw that gave him the mean face of a bulldog which was ironic, since he was the kindest, gentlest guy you’d ever want to know. “Jim, what’s going on?”
  “Oh, hi, Coop. A massacre. A bunch of black kids shot dead.”
  “In the street?”
  “No, in a guy’s house. At 414. Ed’s in charge. But the mayor and the commissioner are on their way over.”
  He was talking about Ed Delaney, the tall, rail-thin and bespectacled police lieutenant in charge of the mini-station at Ninth and South. “How many dead?”
  “I heard four, but it may be more.”
  “Can I get closer?”
  “Yeah, go ahead.” Hines yelled to a cluster of cops that I was with The Observer and to let me by.
  I threaded my way up the narrow street, glutted with parked cars and several ambulances surrounded by scores of cops and emergency medical personnel. When challenged, I announced I was with The Observer and moved on. Reaching a point opposite the opened front door of 414, I stood looking over the hood of a parked maroon Jeep Grand Cherokee. Half on the curb and half in the street between the front of the Cherokee and the parked car ahead of it was a discarded window box, its flowers and dirt in a pile at the edge of the sidewalk. Lieutenant Ed Delaney came out the door and stood with his legs apart on the top step, straddling a pool of blood that had collected in the shallow indentation of the marble and had run down the other two stairs and into the brick of the sidewalk. He wore blue trousers and a white, short-sleeved shirt with gold badge and nameplate. Delaney’s eyes met mine over the top of the parked car.
  “Ed, what happened?”

Top of the page | Next Page | Coldcocked Home