Michelle Turner Photo
Gunfire woke “Miss Brenda” up — and not just from sleep.
A little more than a week later she showed up at a community meeting in West Hills and vowed to take back her neighborhood at the foot of West Rock.
“We had a shooting, and no one knew it until the news people started showing up. They had our neighborhood in lockdown, and nobody knew why,” Miss Brenda — aka Brenda Fulcher, a 60-year-old daycare operator who lives on Taylor Avenue — remarked after the meeting Thursday night at the Shree Nathji Haveli Temple (formerly The Belvedere) on Pond Lily Avenue.
The shooting took place last weekend down the street from Miss Brenda’s house at 4 a.m. Police had had walking patrols in the area until 2 a.m. The shooting victim hasn’t cooperated much with police, who have no suspects. A narcotics dealer was shot to death on the same property in 2010; it was the first murder of 2010. A little more than three days before the recent shooting on Taylor Avenue, a man was shot to death blocks away in West Hills; it was the second homicide of 2012.
West Hills needs to fight back, Miss Brenda told her neighbors Thursday night. She plans to start a block watch. And she pressed the neighborhood’s top cop, Lt. Martin Tchakirides, for answers.
“I have a bullet hole in my windshield. I had magazine rounds in my yard. I’m listening to rapid fire at 4 a.m. What are you going to tell me? What are you going to do about it? We need to have a captain of each of these organizations get together about once a month, and talk about what’s going on. Once they [the people bringing violence into the neighborhood] find out we’re connected by a chain, that will be an issue for them.
“I’m a homeowner. We fought like dogs against foreclosures to keep our property. There are 19 people who are anointed Christians on our street, and we’re gonna lose our street to Satan and some little kids. If you say nothing, they will do nothing.
“No! [They are] not going terrorize my neighborhood!”
Lt. Tchakirides said he didn’t have much information to report yet on the Taylor Avenue shooting. He didn’t want to compromise an active investigation by letting out too much preliminary information, he said. That frustrated Miss Brenda, who said the flyer for the meeting promised talk about the recent violence in her neighborhood.
Miss Brenda also had something to say about another part of the meeting, which featured talk about a basketball league and free beautification and environmental programs now active in West Hills. Southern and Central Connecticut State Universities are helping out with the programs.
Why haven’t we heard about these programs before? Miss Brenda asked. She also wondered aloud about the community center West Hills once had on Valley Street.
“They had basketball, they used to give out free bread. We used to go there, and there was brochures spread out on a table with all kinds of information,” she said. “Now, it’s like your doing this over here, you’re doing this over here, but doing voting time, you can’t drive down to vote without someone jumping on you with flyers on who to vote for. Why can’t you pass out this information during that time? Why can’t you combine all this West Hills information when you pass out all these flyers?”
Ward 30 Democratic Ward Committee Co-Chair Honda Smith, one of the meeting’s organizers, responded that lots of activities take place in that building, including a job readiness program, an Upward Bound program, a nursing program. She said neighborhoods would like to see a GED program added. She also explained that people have been less involved in the neighborhood than in the past.
“We need more people like you, Miss Brenda, who are gonna work,” Smith said.
“We want our building back,” Miss Brenda said quietly.
Miss Brenda then spoke about the new ownership of a neighborhood convenience store near her home.
“We’re glad to have you,” she said, “but we want you to be a good neighbor. So many times these stores come into our community and they are not helping. Selling loosies, crack pipes, marijuana pipes, that only helps the drugs dealers sell more drugs.
“That ain’t helping our neighborhood. Shoot, I will be in there watching, checking you out, in my rollers and my scarf, and you won’t even know that I’m in there, that I’m checking you out. This has got to stop.”
