A Murder in Paradise?

Did someone say holiday?

Last May, I wrote a piece here about my boyhood neighborhood in Indianapolis. It remains near the top of my most-read list. I wrote about growing up in the 1950s, at East 44^th and Primrose. Just up the street, at Steeg’s Drugs, comic books were a dime and cherry cokes were a nickel.

Good God, do I sound like an old fart, or what?

My Old Neighborhood story was a reluctant admission that there just may have been something a tiny bit special about the place. After all, it is the star of its own weekly  podcast called The Primrose Chronicles, hosted by my old boyhood friend and neighbor, Marty Young.

The Primrose Chronicles recently finished its second season still going strong, so I have to think Marty has tapped into memories that are shared by folks far, far beyond this one street. Maybe lots of people had their own personal Primrose, and it wasn’t too different from ours.

Sadly, two weeks ago the Old Neighborhood took a direct hit.

A man was murdered right there, almost directly in front of Marty’s old house, and just three or four houses up from my own childhood home.

Primrose Avenue, blocked off with yellow crime scene tape? Not a pretty sight.

Police identified the victim as Brandon Lamonte Drake, 35 years old. He died on the scene, but there are conflicting reports about whether he was shot inside the car or out of it.

I just can’t remember as a boy ever having to navigate my bike around yellow tape on Primrose just to get my nickel Coke at Steeg’s, so I was curious to learn more.

The police weren’t exactly spewing out helpful information for me. Why should they? Being the writer of 5 a.m. Stories does not exactly entitle me to a desk in the police department’s press room, where I once felt right at home.

The shooting was on October 18, just before sunrise. An alert 5 a.m. Stories reader who remembered my Primrose piece sent me a link to the murder story. I didn’t write about it immediately because, for one thing, I’m no longer in the breaking news coverage business, and for another, I figured they would catch the guy pretty quickly.

Well, they didn’t.

Newspapers and TV stations covered the shooting admirably the day it happened, but I’ve seen not one word from them since then.

(Colorful Primroses)

So, minus helpful updates from the police, I did what any former reporter would do. I went back to the old neighborhood and gossiped. Amazingly, I still knew a few people there, or at least I had known their parents, or their grandparents. The melting away of years kind of gave me the shivers:

“Hi, can I talk to you? I grew up in that house over there a long time ago. We moved away in the early ‘60s.”

“Really? I remember the people in that house. I was a little girl, then.”

“Oh my God! Were you a Thompson? Your dad paid me to mow his lawn!”

“That sounds about right. He was too lazy to cut it himself.”

“He used to lend me Zane Grey novels to read, when I was 12!”

“Of course. If it had to do with the Old West, he was all over it.”

“You know, we built a garage behind our house, but I see it’s gone, now.”

“Yes, I remember it. The foundation is still there. There’s stuff people don’t know about unless somebody tells them. See that house there? The driveway is all overgrown with grass. The new people park on the street because they don’t even know they have a driveway.”

With that brief exchange, I was right back home. One woman told me she had heard the gunfire.

“There were six shots, and I heard they hit him four times,” she volunteered. “I haven’t been able to find out what kind of gun it was. We hear shots around here pretty often, but it’s usually just a .22 or .32 caliber. This was definitely something bigger.”

Here is a woman, pushing 70, who really knows her ballistics.

By the time the sun rose, she said, the body had been removed and there was crime scene tape in front of her driveway. Another neighbor said Drake’s relatives quickly came to retrieve his car, only to find it had been impounded as evidence.

I guess smaller crimes are part of modern life on Primrose. One neighbor told me a nearby house had been fixed up to be a rental, but before it could be shown some guys came and stripped off all the aluminum siding.

“The last murder was a few years ago,” one recalled. “There was this house on Primrose where people went to gamble. A guy left the game one night with a man he owed money to. That guy shot him, and he rolled his car down the hill and hit our tree. Dead.”

Neighbors told me they weren’t holding their breath waiting for an arrest in this latest case, and that mostly they just heard rumors.

One had heard that the police had already written it off as a “random killing.” I couldn’t verify that, and anyway, I’m not sure “random killing” is a real thing in official police jargon. I hope we haven’t reached the stage where we only expect to make arrests in murders that are “non-random,” whatever the hell that is.

The Indianapolis Star has been keeping a running log of murders in the city, day by day. Drake’s killing was one of 22 reported last month alone. His October 18 death is tucked neatly between one homicide on the 17^th and two more on the 19^th. One of those was a hit-and-run classified as a homicide and one was a guy shot to death in a backyard.

Meanwhile, the victim’s friends and relatives continue to grieve on social media. They say Brandon died on the morning of his 35^th birthday. He left small children.

The Primrose Chronicles Podcast hasn’t begun its third season yet. When it does, I have an idea Marty might be giving his loyal listeners the shocking news about what happened out on the street right there in front of where the Jupins and Kunzes used to live.

I hope by then he can report on an arrest.