New Haven Independent

Wanda Vazquez (pictured at left) woke up in her Level Street apartment around midday to the sound of fire alarms. “I was sleeping. I started screaming, ‘Code Red! Code Red!’”

That’s family lingo for “emergency.” Her daughter picked it up at the Ross/Woodward School. They use it when “someone’s inside the house, or someone is hurt.” Thursday, the family’s first “Code Red” experience, Vazquez and her two sleeping children escaped without harm.

No one else was hurt — the apartment next door, 29 Level St., just had a small kitchen fire.

Al Shakif, 15 (pictured at right), was home from school, asleep, when the kitchen in his house went up in flames. His mom was away at work. He didn’t think she’d left anything on the stove. “I didn’t see anything. I was asleep.” He ran downstairs and saw only “fire and smoke.”

This truck from the Goffe Street fire station pulled in at about 11:40 a.m., joined by several cop cars. Firemen smothered flames that had consumed kitchen cabinets, turned the stove black, and filled rooms with smoke. At noon, Al stood in the doorway, still a bit foggy-eyed, as the truck pulled away. Housing authority officials were already in the house, arranging to replace the cooked cooker.

After the flashing lights disappeared, neighbors at Westville Manor were left to mull over an overnight drive-by shooting. At 1:18 a.m. Thursday, a female passenger in a four-door Nissan fired at another woman at Wayfarer and Level Streets, and missed.

Near that corner, two housing authority workers awaited a ride on the sidewalk. A woman in a HANH shirt who gave her name as “Love” picked up pebbles off the sidewalk with long trash-pinchers. She dropped stones into a big red bucket while she spoke.

“Ask the young people. They know what’s going on,” said Love of the shooting. She’s lived in the complex for 18 years. “They need some recreation. There’s too many kids up here with nothing to do.” In the isolated project, where city buses come every 35 minutes, there is nothing for kids to do except play basketball, she said.

Love said a curfew would be “a great idea.” The gun violence has been worse, she said, “‘cause they got three projects moved here” — nearby Rockview Circle has been razed, and people from shuttered Brookside apartments have also moved into Westville Manor. “It’s too much — they got everybody out here. A lot of younger kids.”

Love’s coworker, a younger woman named Sharice, sat on a milk crate on Level Street, huddling against the chilly wind. “Hey cuz!” she called to a teen on a nearby street. “Get a job or something!”

The teen said he would try. Sharice said the boy is the brother of Eddie Washington, who was shot to death at age 21 after a high school basketball game in December 2005. This memorial sits on Wayfarer street, where Washington used to live.

Nearby, Tiffany Gary, 18, who was wearing a tight purple shirt with an R.I.P. Larry pin, said she’d heard about the shooting but didn’t know what had happened. “They focusing on the gangs and drugs. They need to focus on the guns!” she said.