On most dangerous street, residents look out for each other

The people who live on the deadliest street in Beaufort County are a teacher and roofer, a Marine and law enforcement officer, retirees and long-term vacation renters, a tennis player and tennis coach, a pastor and a poet.

They live in cottages, ranches and duplexes near churches, cemeteries, a funeral home, playground, swimming pool and basketball court. Some homes are boarded with plywood and condemned. Others have been recently renovated with high-end finishes.

Beaufort’s Greene Street owns the dismal distinction of having the highest number of homicides in the county in recent years. And its residents are aware.

But they say the gun violence has been limited to a few blocks. Neighbors look out for each other. The street is mostly quiet, they say.

“It’s like it is now — morning, day, night — quiet,” 57-year-old Danny Green said outside the Greene Street home where he was born and raised.

Greene Street, at least in certain areas, hasn’t always been quiet. During a spate in 2015, three men were shot and killed, including two in the vicinity of the Charles Lind Brown Activity Center at Greene and Hamar streets, police records show. Another man, Ver’mon Steve, went missing from his Greene Street home the same year, and his body was later found on St. Helena Island, authorities said.

The activity center leases space to Bridges Preparatory School, which uses the Beaufort County government building during the day. Circle of Hope Ministries operates an after-school program there, and the county Parks and Leisure Services uses the gym for organized recreation.

The center’s outdoor swimming pool is popular during the summer months.

But for a facility billed as a neighborhood activity center, the Greene Street gym lately has offered little for the children in the neighborhood, area residents say.

Open gym time, when people from the neighborhood could come play basketball, was discontinued several years ago. The gym wasn’t being used enough to justify staffing it with a county employee, deputy county administrator Josh Gruber said.

A Greene Street resident, while walking recently to a convenience store, said the loss of the gym and nearby Boys & Girls Club has reduced recreational opportunities for neighborhood youth.

“Young kids ain’t got nowhere to go,” said the man, who declined to give his name, noting he was friends with more than one of the recent homicide victims. “For every cause, there is an effect.”

Gruber said there has been talk of reinstating public play at the gym. Security cameras capture the activity center’s parking lot and outdoor basketball court across the street, and surveillance is monitored by Beaufort police and the Beaufort County Sheriff’s Office, he said.

Beaufort Police Department’s community response team regularly patrols Greene Street by car and on foot, police spokeswoman Sgt. Hope Able said. The team of three officers is assigned to areas with higher call volumes over a period of time, of which Greene Street is one. The area is also the subject of regular police patrols.

Anita Singleton-Prather, who lives on Monson Street about a block from the most recent Greene Street shooting death, said Police Chief Matt Clancy has done a good job being proactive in the community.

After a drive-by shooting in 2011 targeted the outdoor basketball court while her grandson was across the street at the pool, Singleton-Prather invited several teenagers, Clancy, Mayor Billy Keyserling and other community leaders to her home for lemonade. She learned during the meeting of the limited activities at the gym and organized a group of volunteers who passed background checks when told the county didn’t have the resources to staff the gym.

The volunteers offered karate, music, and arts and crafts. They conducted anti-bullying workshops, convinced the county to extend the center’s hours, and hosted family movie nights on Fridays.

But organizers continually ran into scheduling conflicts with other events at the center, and the volunteer effort dwindled, Singleton-Prather said.

“I don’t want to wait until another incident has to happen before things start moving, where we can get these kids back somewhere where they can start building relationships with positive adults in the community,” she said.

Keyserling raised the prospect in a recent newsletter of establishing a community center with educational and recreational activities, and serving all of the greater downtown area.

The man walking Greene Street who pointed out the lack of youth activities said there have been no incidents on the street recently, and that the 2015 killings were coincidental. In October during Hurricane Matthew, 25-year-old Alfred Thompson was found shot to death in a car nearby at the corner of Church and Duke streets, but Greene Street residents say they are enjoying a time of calm.

Shawn Fields, 41, recently moved back to Greene Street after being away eight years. He grew up in Beaufort and played tennis at Beaufort Academy before attending Savannah State University and North Carolina A&T State University, where he received a degree in early childhood education.

His childhood tennis coach, Larry Scheper, also lives on Greene Street. Fields regularly makes the short walk to the uptown tennis courts to hit.

Fields said while Beaufort has grown, Greene Street has a remained a quiet part of the neighborhood with older residents. He lives across from historic Pruitt’s Grocery, once a haven for neighborhood residents seeking penny candy and lunch meat before it closed in 2015. Longtime owner James Pruitt died later that year.

In an updated Greene Street cottage operated as a short-term rental, Michigan resident Bill Suter and his wife, Wendy Moustakas, are in the midst of a six-week stay while they look for a permanent home in Beaufort.

The couple said they have heard about some of the crime downtown but enjoy riding bikes on the Spanish Moss Trail and walking twice a day to Bay Street.

While their home has a welcoming front porch and glistening stainless steel kitchen appliances, Moustakas said she was struck by the dichotomy of the homes in the area.

“It’s obvious some people have money, and some people don’t have as much money,” she said.

Other than having a stranger on the front porch peer into the window the night of the Super Bowl, the visiting couple said they feel safe.

Yet Greene Street native Lester Williams said he prefers to stay indoors when the sun goes down. Given the choice to walk to a nearby club on Church Street or the convenience store, Williams said the smart choice is to buy beer and enjoy it at home.

“When it gets dark, I don’t trust anything,” he said.

Williams said he was close with Steven Brown, who was killed in a late-night shooting on Church Street in October 2015. Greene Street’s last-recorded shooting death was Christmas Eve that same year, when 38-year-old Henry Frazier was killed.

The shooting death was the third on the street in 2015, according to police records. Before Frazier’s death, Matthew Horne and Detuan Jenkins were shot to death near the basketball court in separate incidents.

Things have been relatively quiet since then, said Jimmy Watson, a self-described poet who lives in a Greene Street duplex.

“I guess some people feel like it’s not worth getting in trouble,” he said. “I guess maybe they are taking a moment.”

This story was originally published February 24, 2017 at 12:00 PM with the headline "On most dangerous street, residents look out for each other."