NW DC Community Fights Back With Heist Video on YouTube

By Clarence Williams and Elissa Silverman
Washington Post

The two masked robbers saunter into a corner market in LeDroit Park, each pointing a gun at the store clerk. The clerk runs behind the counter, but the thugs have him.

As one empties the cash register, the other holds the clerk against the floor, a knee and a handgun pressed into his back. The thief pistol-whips the clerk before standing up and kicking him. Then he walks out with his partner.

The incident, caught on the store’s video camera, took a little more than four minutes at about 1 p.m. on an overcast and sultry Tuesday. And it’s all there on YouTube (click here to watch).

LeDroit Park is fighting back.

“I want the mayor, council member and the police chief to see this video,” Simon Mahteme, owner of LeDroit Park Market, tells the camera. “I’m tired of it. It’s not human behavior. I’m trying to make an honest living.”

The July 10 robbery was the latest of 10 break-ins and armed robberies since October at the market, considered the heart of the community. A customer, outraged by constant vandalism in the historic Northwest neighborhood, posted the footage on the popular video-sharing site in hopes that a viewer would identify the robbers.

Late last week, police charged a 17-year-old. They are not saying whether YouTube played a role, but the video got the attention of Mayor Adrian M. Fenty and Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier.

Fenty and Lanier, along with a sizable retinue of their deputies, listened last week as about 100 LeDroit Park residents demanded increased police presence. Fenty (D) said he had heard about the video clip on YouTube, and Lanier has seen it.

“If this is one way that more people will see a potential suspect that will identify him, then I think it has some redeeming value,” Fenty said in an interview.

The community’s crime-fighting campaign isn’t over with the YouTube salvo: It has raised $4,500 to buy a video camera for the building’s exterior, and residents and police are working together to connect it to the city’s network of crime cameras.

Among the issues to be worked out: Who would own and maintain the camera? And although some residents want to use the camera to monitor the goings-on at the store, police say the tapes can be used only after a crime has been committed.

LeDroit Park, with its ornate Victorian houses and narrow streets, has a small-town feel. More than a half-century ago, the tiny neighborhood was home to Ralph Bunche, a Howard University professor who would later become the first African American to win the Nobel Peace Prize, and Duke Ellington, who lived there before rising to jazz greatness.

Today, as the fabled neighborhood recovers from decades of decline, many residents point to Mahteme and his little corner market as the community’s spirited heart. So they all felt victimized by the break-ins and robberies.

“Any one of us could have been in that store and been the victim of that crime,” Myla Moss, an advisory neighborhood commissioner, said of the most recent armed robbery. “It’s just unnerving.”

When Mahteme, an immigrant from Ethiopia, bought the store at Fourth and T streets six years ago, he resisted the bulletproof glass and metal bars that armor so many other urban markets. His shop sports a fresh coat of mint-green paint, with cream-colored “eyebrows” painstakingly painted over its windows.

Inside, pictures of restored neighborhood homes share pride of place with a neon Budweiser sign. There’s a deli on one side and racks of wine, along with the usual necessities. Customers’ toddlers dawdle in the aisles, playing with the merchandise as staffers smile.

“The market is kind of the epicenter for the community,” Moss said. “Everyone goes there.”

Moss, a lobbyist for dental schools, moved to LeDroit in 1999 because “I didn’t want to be a Beltway bandit, living in my car. I wanted to live in the birthplace of black intelligentsia.”

Andrew Dreschler, an executive at an opinion research firm, is part of the new wave of younger professionals who have renovated neglected houses and populated LeDroit’s brick sidewalks once again.

While house-hunting in 2005, Dreschler decided to buy a home in the neighborhood after walking into the corner market with no security glass or bars on its windows, sharing Mahteme’s dream of a safe, urban haven.

“I moved into this neighborhood because of this store,” Dreschler, 32, said.

The notion of safety — and Mahteme’s resolve not to surrender to fear — didn’t last.

Before last fall, Mahteme’s market had been burglarized twice in several years. But one morning in October, three robbers barged in, one pointing a gun in Mahteme’s face and striking him in the right eye with the weapon. It was only the beginning of a sad series of break-ins and robberies.

“After I got robbed [in October], I didn’t want to come back, believe me,” Mahteme said. “But after I opened that door, everybody [in the neighborhood] followed me. These are good people.”

In early December, he gave in and installed metal bars over the windows. They didn’t have the effect he expected.

On New Year’s Eve, his security camera captured a burglar kicking in the plate-glass front door, lifting the bars behind the glass by a few inches and urging a boy to climb inside.

“It was just like a mother giving birth,” Mahteme said.

The child then unlocked a side door, and the camera videotaped the pair grabbing all the merchandise they could carry; no cash was on the premises.

When Mahteme didn’t file insurance claims for fear of losing his policy, neighbors raised $800 to help him replace the broken glass.

“It was amazing, these people,” Mahteme said. “They didn’t have to do it.”

Neighbors speak of a recent surge in break-ins and armed robberies throughout the neighborhood, although police statistics indicate that the rate of those crimes has declined from each of the previous two years.

In addition, resident Michelle Sforza said, juveniles have assaulted passersby, and construction sites have been vandalized.

“You can be assaulted for just being on the street,” she said. “It’s not hard to imagine someone getting really, really hurt.”

At Mahteme’s market, new shatter-resistant glass shows pockmarks and spider-web cracks from would-be burglars and vandals. And each week, Mahteme sees youths who he suspects have robbed him, walking into his store.

But every morning, Mahteme keeps opening the doors of his elegantly restored market.

“I can’t give up. I can’t pack up and go,” he said as he stood outside the store just before closing one recent night.

“These people want me to stay.”