Published: November 25, 2009 10:56 pm      

Citizens say Beckley’s drug problem continues, little being done to stop it

Editor’s note: One year ago today, The Register-Herald published the first of a four-part series investigating citizen complaints that drugs were being trafficked 24/7 in the East Beckley area. Since the series was published, some residents say little has been done to resolve the issue. This is the first in a two-part, follow-up to that series.





The dealers are still working the streets.

They walk around the neighborhood like it’s an “open air drug market,” Antonio Avenue resident Adib Aqeel said.

“They (drug dealers) almost know, or have reason to know, that the police aren’t going to stop them or don’t really give a damn about what they’re doing,” he said.

A series of articles published a year ago included details from a reporter’s evening ride-along with a Beckley police officer. The only potential drug activity the reporter noted was at a Barber Avenue apartment complex.

“Shortly after that story came out, which was a positive thing, miraculously, all of those people moved. All of that activity stopped,” Aqeel said.

“Now that parking lot is clean and quiet. Children can get out and play. Before, it was just filthy. It was like the prototypical ghetto,” he said.

“If you ask me what’s changed since last year, the only thing that’s changed is, last year they weren’t selling drugs on Antonio. The same people selling drugs on Barber Avenue moved over to Antonio,” he claimed.

Today, Aqeel says, there’s a drug house two doors down from him on Antonio and an apartment complex a few doors up that’s polluted with drug activity.

People are dealing all day. Every day, he says.

“I see the activity. The cars coming and going. It’s miscellaneous crackheads going in and out all day long.”

Another Antonio Avenue resident, who was afraid to have her name published, backed up Aqeel’s claims regarding drugs being trafficked in the neighborhood.

“It’s crowded. It gets loud at times,” the woman said. “Most of them are respectable. I have nothing against the drug dealers, and I’m not afraid of 99 percent of these drug dealers. I’m afraid of the ones that come over here that I don’t know.”

At one point, the woman says, dealers were doing drug transactions near her front door.

“I called 911 to tell them they were selling drugs outside of my apartment, and she (the 911 operator) said they couldn’t do anything about it. That they can’t tell anyone to leave,” the woman said.

“This is my neighborhood. Some people are afraid to give this interview. We shouldn’t have to put our lives in jeopardy to get something done about it.”

The woman, who lives in low-income housing, said she suffered an illness and lost her job. The apartment on Antonio is all she could afford.

“I love my home. Just because I live on Antonio doesn’t make me a piece of trash,” she said.

“I wish they would clean up the neighborhood. When I come out and there’s people standing in my doorway, I’m very scared. And I shouldn’t have to be. I could walk out my door right now and walk up on the wrong thing and get shot.”

She’s not the first resident alleging the Beckley Housing Authority knows drugs are being trafficked out of the Antonio Avenue apartments.

“They know it’s here,” she said.

“We have elderly people out here and I worry about them. I just wish our city and city councilmen would take more interest in us (East Beckley),” she said. “There’s drugs everywhere. But I guarantee if you ride through Maxwell Hill, you’ll see police patrolling.”

In predominately white, middle-class neighborhoods, the drug activity isn’t tolerated, the residents say.

“I haven’t seen any black guys posted up on the corner of Woodlawn and Park Avenue selling drugs. I haven’t seen any black guys posted up on the corner of the apartments in Maxwell Hill selling drugs. If they were, they would’ve been arrested yesterday,” Aqeel commented.

The residents say it’s not meth, weed or prescription drugs being trafficked in the area — it’s crack.

“Cocaine is expensive. Crack is much cheaper,” Aqeel said. “That’s the main reason there’s been a crack epidemic in the black community, because it’s cheap.”

Aqeel says most of the people he sees doing drug buys are “whites” who live outside of East Beckley and come into the city to purchase their high.

“Ninety-nine percent of the time, in most of the cars that I see, it’s white guys coming in to get drugs,” he says.

“I’m not trying to be racist. If the drug dealers had to depend on the crackheads in East Beckley, they would’ve gone out of business yesterday.”

Aqeel says he’s provided police with descriptions and license plate numbers of potential drug dealers.

“They know what these people are doing. They say they can’t get the inside information they need to arrest them,” he says.

“In a lot of places, police will stop people because they have reason to suspect there’s activity going on, or they arrest them for other reasons and search and find the drugs, and they don’t seem to be willing to do any of that,” Aqeel said.

“It’s a very big problem.”

The East Beckley resident says he’s not trying to paint his town in a negative light.

“It is what it is,” he said thoughtfully.

“The drug activity is there. I feel that the quality of life in my community has been affected by the inability and unwillingness of the police to honestly and forthrightly deal with this drug problem. Patrol. Arrest these people. Get these people off the streets,” he said.

Beckley’s drug problem isn’t left solely in the hands of city law enforcement, Aqeel added.

“Why don’t the feds get more actively involved?”

“Crack cocaine isn’t grown in East Beckley. It doesn’t come from up there on Antonio. It comes into the city from across the state line,” he said.

— E-mail: jayres@register-herald.com