February 26-March 3, 2004

city beat

Scene of the Crime

Shelled out: Kent's family wants this crumbling home gone from the face of North Philly. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

A North Philly family that wants a painful reminder demolished will finally get its wish.

by Brian Hickey

A sign posted at 1520 N. Eighth St. last March urged passersby to stay out because -- according to that city Licenses and Inspections Department warning -- the three-story property was in "imminent danger of collapse."

Nearly a year later, the building is still standing -- barely.

But to Earthadine Christy and Letrese Bryant, it's more than just a neighborhood eyesore. It's an unnecessary, in-their-face reminder of the heinous crime that brought police investigators and L&I inspectors there in the first place.

On Feb. 28, 2003, a pair of homeless men foraging for scrap metal made a grisly discovery in the back of the building. Face down under an old chandelier, pieces of wood and various debris was the body of Willie "Pete" Kent, the 60-year-old "Mayor of Seventh Street" who had been missing for three weeks.

When police arrived, they turned Kent's body over. Kent's throat had been slashed, his chest was cut and ripped open from neck to stomach and his heart, liver, kidney and part of his esophagus had been removed. A rope was also tied around his neck.

Since there was no blood near the body, police figured Kent was killed and eviscerated elsewhere before being dumped a block from the neighborhood bodega where he earned a few bucks doing odd jobs.

Investigators worked the case hard -- they even turned to an expert in the occult for guidance while amateur sleuths speculated about depraved medical students. But they haven't offered many updates since the initial onslaught of reporters' questions.

About a month after the discovery, a captain from the homicide unit conceded that they'd already faced a number of investigative dead ends. All they really knew was that Kent was last seen leaving David's Food Market with bus fare Feb. 7. Nobody heard from him after that, even on his granddaughter Cora's second birthday two weeks later.

With Saturday being the one-year anniversary of Kent's discovery, friends and family are gearing up for another lap on their emotional, crime-survivor roller coaster. They'll have a candlelight vigil, open to anybody who wants to pay respects, just after sunset Saturday at Seventh and Jefferson to remember a man who was beloved throughout the neighborhood. Many who knew Kent worry police may never crack the case.

"It was a clean job," says Christy, who had one child, Bryant, with Kent.

Despite the family's concerns, they say the city can still do something to make their coping easier: Bulldoze the building, just like they did to vacant shells that were recently replaced by brand-new Neighborhood Transformation Initiative (NTI) homes a scant block and a half away.

"No matter how many times I see it, it hurts," says Bryant, whose four children still have problems dealing with both the murder and the unexpected heart attack that claimed their 36-year-old father a month earlier. "I mean, there's still some of the [police] tape up outside. It's horrible. That house should be gone. We already have enough reminders of what happened."

Bryant, who learned of Kent's murder when a television-news camera captured a police officer holding his gray-and-white sneaker, plans to skip Saturday's vigil because it'll be nearly as painful as the day she identified his body.

For the past year, she's avoided seeing the house where her father's body was discovered. To get from her home near Seventh and Hunting Park to Center City, she has to walk one block east and hop on the No. 47 bus. But since that bus drives directly past the property where Kent was found, Bryant now walks seven blocks to Broad Street and takes the subway to City Hall before trekking another half-dozen blocks to her normal downtown destinations.

For Christy, however, it's not that easy. She lives just six blocks from the crime scene and her church is just around the corner from it. In a living room adorned by dozens of family pictures, an emotional Christy recently asked a seemingly simple question: "Why haven't they demolished that building?"

The quickest of glimpses would leave anybody wondering the same thing.

It's a vacant shell on a block abandoned by just about everybody but junkies, dealers and the homeless. Rows of chairs -- they look like they'd been ripped out of buses -- are piled between a crumbling garage and a home that's missing two exterior walls. Last Saturday, a gust of wind left a neighboring roof flapping like a flag, but somehow it didn't crumble like the piles of bricks that once constituted walls. Since police found Kent's body, the only notable change -- other than weeds that have grown wildly -- is graffiti on a nearby wall that reads, "R.I.P. Pete."

Across the alley behind the building, however, an L&I poster dated Dec. 23, 2003, condemned yet another home as "imminently dangerous," meaning inspectors were back within yards of the unsafe edifice where Kent was found. Christy says it's almost insulting, considering that a nearby restaurant was torn down a few months back even though "it wasn't even a [safety] threat."

It leaves her wondering whether the city is "just waiting for something else bad to happen."

"It's bad enough that we live with the way he was killed," Christy says. "Why should we have to look at it? I just can't go over there anymore. I just can't."

While the city wasn't waiting for something bad to happen, there was apparently a reason for the delay: NTI. With the onset of Mayor Street's $300 million blight-eradication program, demolition philosophies changed in Philadelphia, says Jay McCalla, the deputy managing director who oversees the initiative's demolition and housing-preservation programs. Rather than taking the wrecking ball to one property at a time, the city now goes after entire swaths of land, like several tracts not too far from where Kent's body was found, including one within sight of where this weekend's vigil will be held.

But despite those changes, nobody can say for sure whether 1520 N. Eighth St. would have been demolished any quicker in the city's pre-NTI days. (Chances are, it wouldn't have been.) But, city officials say, the property will soon disappear from the face of North Philadelphia as a result.

City Council is currently mulling a proposal that would see roughly $7 million earmarked for NTI projects in the 5th District, which is represented by Councilman Darrell Clarke. When told of the family's concerns Monday, Clarke noted the preference for mass demolitions.

"It used to be that we'd come out and knock one down, regardless of whether there were 25 or 50 more that should have been demolished too. But instead of just one, we're going to do 100 over there. If they haven't started yet, they will soon," Clarke promised.

In other words, while the property was slated for demolition nearly a year ago -- as well as being cited by L & I as unsafe as long ago as October 2000 -- they had to wait until City Council signed off on an 81-demolition bid package.

"Now," says L&I spokeswoman Andrea White, "it's just a matter of time."

While that comes as somewhat welcomed news to Kent's family -- they still say that somebody should have done something about the property sooner -- Christy and Bryant are left to wonder whether they'll ever get the answers they seek.

"We don't want this whole thing swept under the rug," Christy says. "Mr. Kent doesn't deserve to just be another statistic. He was a good man who loved his family. The kids, they really miss him. That man was too well-known in the neighborhood for nobody to do anything. It's really just tearing this family apart. Nobody's telling us anything about what's going on. This could happen again, to someone else."

A couple of months ago, there was some neighborhood talk that caught the family's attention. A woman who hangs around the same spots Kent once did tracked Christy down at a Girard Avenue market and told her that Kent talked about having "a doctor friend in [New] Jersey" who was tending to his health. Christy had never heard anything of the sort from Kent, who'd been treated for bleeding ulcers not too long before his murder.

Both Christy and Bryant also say they rarely hear from police but understand that they're busy with an apparent serial killer stalking prostitutes along Kensington Avenue, children being shot outside schools and a murder rate that jumped 20 percent last year. That doesn't make anything easier though, and it leaves them pleading for anybody who knows anything to call police, who didn't respond to numerous requests for updates about their investigation this past week.

"Every time there's a tragedy on TV, I see what I went through all over again," Bryant says. "I understand that I may never really know what happened. I really do. Sometimes, you just get tired of being a victim."