90 KILLINGS
Last year's 2nd-highest toll in Tucson's history affected all parts of the city and outlying areas
By Stephanie Innes and Joseph Barrios
ARIZONA DAILY STAR
The 90 homicides committed in the Tucson area last year nearly matched the record 95 reported five years earlier, but with one chief difference: What was largely a South Side problem in 1995 has spread into the city and its outlying areas.
Forty-four percent of Pima County's 95 homicides in 1995 occurred in Tucson's southern area and the city of South Tucson, compared with 27 percent in 2000. Now, slaying scenes dot the metropolitan region, from Oro Valley to Sam Hughes to San Xavier.
One explanation for the shift: Anti-gang and other efforts are reducing violence on the South Side while domestic violence - a regionwide problem - remained a major category and showed a 6 percent increase.
"After 1995, the community focused on educational programs about stranger danger and gangs," said Gail Leland, director of the Tucson-based Homicide Survivors Inc., which offers support to family members of murder victims. "We've attacked those problems. Now let's do it with domestic violence as well. We have all known about domestic violence for some time now, but maybe we are talking to the wrong people.''
Halfway through 2000, the region was on a pace to surpass the 1995 homicide record. The pace slowed in the second half of the year.
Law enforcement officials say the homicide total in 2000 mainly reflects a thriving narcotics trade and poor lifestyle choices, and that random killings by strangers remain in the minority, though Leland noted that with 40 percent of the cases still unsolved, it's difficult to say random homicides are an anomaly.
(See sidebar for other trends last year)
'A street of death'
Homicides in the northern part of the metropolitan region - including the North and Northwest sides, the Catalina Foothills, Marana and Oro Valley - jumped from 14 in 1995 to 23 in 2000.
The areas that, combined, posted the greatest increase over 1995 were the East Side, the West Side, outlying unincorporated county areas and the Tucson Mountains. Homicides there totaled 29 last year, up from 15 in 1995.
In contrast, the South Side's homicide count decreased.
In 1995, 42 homicides occurred in an area bordered roughly by 22nd Street on the north, the city limits (roughly Los Reales Road) on the south, Davis-Monthan Air Force Base on the east and the Tucson Mountains on the west, and in the city of South Tucson.
Last year, homicides in that same area numbered 25.
Within the city limits, murders in Tucson's southern parts made up 60 percent of the Tucson Police Department's homicide investigations in 1995, compared with 40 percent last year.
"We still have a ways to go but it has improved. South Sixth Avenue used to be a street of death. I can drive down there and say, 'This is where so-and-so died.' You can still see the crosses lining the roadway,'' said Leland, of Homicide Survivors.
"I think that we still have a high number of murders that involve the use of drugs and are drug-related, but what is significantly different is we had very few gang-related murders.''
Count unusually high
Last year, a homicide occurred every four days.
The 90 homicides also represent a 28 percent increase over 1999, when 70 people were slain here.
"It's not surprising, but it's unfortunate,'' said Capt. Michael Garigan, who oversees the central investigation division of the Tucson Police Department. "I do think the statistical data will tell you that violent crime is everywhere. For us to say one side of town is better or safer would be invalid or inappropriate information. Our victims as well as our suspects come from almost every neighborhood.''
The victims from 2000 included 69 men, 20 women and one of unknown gender - an unborn child known only as "Baby Doe Vega,'' whose 22-year-old mother, Rosanna Vega, was shot to death, along with her boyfriend, on Oct. 10. That case remains among the 40 percent of last year's homicides that are unsolved.
"We're on the high end of homicides and I can't pinpoint the reason. We still believe a high number are related to the drug trade. Tucson is still a major conduit for the drug trade in the U.S. and we have seen a steady increase in that,'' said Detective Sgt. Michael G. O'Connor of the Pima County Sheriff's Department. The department investigated 23 homicides last year.
A homicide is the willful killing of one person by another. The count does not include suicides, traffic fatalities, accidental deaths or killings classified as justifiable, thereby conforming with records kept by the Arizona Department of Public Safety and the FBI.
The count includes homicides recorded by the Pima County Sheriff's Department and police departments in Marana, Oro Valley, South Tucson, Tucson and the Tohono O'odham Nation.
Those slain ranged in age from the unborn Vega child and a newborn named Margaret Swain whose teen-age mother discarded her in a trash bin behind her North Side home on July 15, to 88-year-old Irene Johnson, a frail immigrant from Britain who on July 24 was raped and beaten to death in the bedroom of her Sam Hughes home, where she lived alone.
"Homicides can be reflective of a community's safety. I don't think alarm is the right word, but people should be concerned. One homicide is too many and we should never accept anyone who backs away from efforts to work with what causes it,'' said Daniel G. Sharp, chief of police for the town of Oro Valley, which had a record four homicides last year.
Those accused or convicted in last year's homicides range in age from 16-year-old Ralph David Cruz, charged with shooting a Tucson mother and her two young children in broad daylight in an August carjacking, to 78-year-old Charles A. Kremer, who investigators say shot 67-year-old Dolores Ann Owens in their East Side home before pointing a gun at an officer and then shooting himself in the head. The officer also shot at Kremer, and the autopsy did not conclude which of the bullet wounds was fatal.
18 died in fights
The most common motive last year was fighting, which authorities listed as the motive in 18 deaths. Other motives were domestic violence, drugs, gangs and robberies. Motives in 31 of the murders remain undetermined.
Several of the robbery-related homicides received much media attention. In addition to the Cruz carjacking, in December, two 18-year-olds - Frankie Lee Rodriguez and John Michael Harper - were accused of killing Amanda Gerber, a 23-year-old nurse at University Medical Center, and Dana Hall, a 21-year-old telemarketing worker, apparently because they wanted the victims' vehicles.
Yet O'Connor of the Sheriff's Department said that such random "stranger'' homicides are in the minority.
"If you are living a low-risk lifestyle - for example, you do not have a son who is a gang-banger or a son-in-law in the drug trade, and you are not a prostitute or a drug dealer - your chances of random homicide are slim to none,'' said O'Connor.
"Thankfully, random homicide is at a low. We have not seen an increase in that area.''
O'Connor said he'd been expecting the homicide total for 2000 to be lower than the final tally.
James Alan Fox, a nationally recognized criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston, said Tucsonans should try to maintain a long-term perspective.
"One year a trend does not make. It's not a harbinger of worse things to come,'' said Fox, who says he has maintained a database of "virtually every'' homicide in America since the mid-1970s.
Fox noted that the total number of homicides is bound to rise over time as population increases. Pima County's population since 1995, for example, has shot up by 13 percent. It is currently 854,329.
"You've had a slowly rising homicide rate over the last quarter-century. In recent years, it spiked a couple of times. The year 2000 is an anomaly, the same way 1995 was an anomaly,'' Fox said. "The only good news is that the year 2001 should be a lot better.''
Homicide statistics will meet with what Fox calls "criminological gravity.'' When the number of homicides goes up, it generally comes down the next year. He noted that Tucson police investigated 45 homicides in 1998, which he called an "extraordinarily low'' number.
Robert Lehner, an assistant chief with the Tucson Police Department, said the nation appears to be experiencing an overall increase in violent crime.
"I think our increase will be less than most other cities, but the declining crime trends over the last 10 years are over,'' Lehner said. "Based on conversations with counterparts in other cities, we are all experiencing generalized increases in violent crimes.''
Also, the murder rate per 100,000 people is a gauge that many criminologists use. Based on population estimates from the Arizona Department of Economic Security, that rate for Pima County in 1995 was 12.52, compared with 10.53 in 2000.
The 172 homicides that occurred within the city of Phoenix last year would give that city a rate of 13.81 per 100,000 people based on current population estimates.
Alfred Blumstein, director of the Pittsburgh-based National Consortium on Violence Research, said 10.53 for Pima County is "not an alarming rate at all.'' Although the national average homicide rate in 1999 was 5.7 per 100,000, as reported by the FBI, Blumstein said larger metropolitan areas typically have rates into the teens.
In 1970, when Pima County's population was 351,433, the homicide rate was 17.3, based on 61 homicides reported in Tucson and unincorporated Pima County. That was the year of the intentionally set Pioneer Hotel fire in downtown Tucson in which 29 people were killed.
"In terms of overall crimes, homicides are still a rare event,'' Lehner said. "The numbers are so small, little changes make huge percentage differences from year to year. . . . When you compare us to other cities across the country, we're a good place to live, even in terms of homicide.''
