Pubdate: Sun, 16 Jan 2000
Source: New York Times (NY)
Copyright: 2000 The New York Times Company
Contact:  http://www.nytimes.com/
Forum: http://www10.nytimes.com/comment/
Author: David Rohde

MEN IN WHEELCHAIRS SCARRED BY CRACK WAR

As a teenager in the 1980's, Andrew Aiken rhymed and danced his nights away
as a master of ceremonies at house music parties in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.

A son of Jamaican immigrants, he dreamed of glory as a rap and reggae star.

But in 1991 a robber shot Mr. Aiken for a gold bracelet on his wrist and
$90 in his pocket, paralyzing him from the waist down at 18. For the next
seven years he cycled in and out of public hospitals, battling chronic bone
infections and depression. Eighteen months ago his left leg was amputated.

"I slept more than I was awake," he said, referring to his long struggle.
"Because when I slept I was on my feet."

As a teenager in the 1980's, Johnnie Montalvo ruled a swath of Sunset Park,
Brooklyn, with the power of a deity. A founding member of La Familia M. C.
Street Gang, he could have a rival drug dealer shot dead with a wave of his
hand. In 1988, a fellow criminal got to him first, shooting Mr. Montalvo
twice in the back and paralyzing him from the waist down.

In the last decade, he has struggled to break the grip of the streets, been
arrested for selling heroin and carrying a gun in his wheelchair, and been
shot again.

He says he prefers chairs with no hand grips because he cannot stand being
pushed by other people.

"I ain't afraid of dying," he said. "The only thing that hurts me is that
some stupid little young kid can put a bullet in me."

Andrew Aiken has never met Johnnie Montalvo, not surprising for two men
whose lives were once on differing trajectories. Yet in their two-wheeled
prisons, they are stark reminders of one of America's worst urban episodes.

They are just two of hundreds of young black and Hispanic men paralyzed by
gunshot wounds during New York's crack epidemic a decade ago. Across the
country, an estimated 4,900 blacks and 2,000 Hispanics were paralyzed in
violent incidents between 1987 and 1994, the peak of the epidemic. In
neighborhoods like Brownsville, Washington Heights and Harlem, the sight of
a young man in a wheelchair has become an emblem of the urban landscape.

Like Mr. Aiken and Mr. Montalvo, they include the wholly innocent as well
as the wholly criminal. From those who have mustered the strength to
soldier on and gain independence, to those still trapped in the lives that
made them street corner targets. From those who use family support or
religion to soothe their ravaged bodies and souls, to those who succumb to
drugs to ease the pain and frustration.

"People like Andrew and myself," said Daniel Appan, 28, a friend of Mr.
Aiken's who was shot and paralyzed for a leather jacket, "we're sort of
casualties of the ghetto."

Now entering their late 20's and early 30's, they are faring poorly as a
group, vexed by the anger, depression and disappointment any victim of
paralysis suffers, as well as by an array of societal perils beyond their
control or power of will to change. For the innocent, there are the
assumptions on sight that they were all drug dealers. For the former drug
dealers, there are the temptations to return to an illicit life. For all,
there is a struggle to find proper housing, the isolation of being trapped
in the city's poorest corners and the disadvantages of not knowing what
rehabilitation and educational programs are available to them.

"They're a very different group," said Dr. Adam B. Stein, director of the
paralysis rehabilitation program at Mount Sinai Medical Center. "They tend
to have fewer financial resources, little family support."

Almost nine years after being shot, Mr. Aiken is still struggling to
overcome such obstacles. After his first hospital stay, he moved into his
mother's apartment. Because his wheelchair was too wide to fit through a
narrow bathroom doorway, he used a bedpan or crawled across the floor each
time he had to relieve himself. The stress of crawling aggravated a leg
abscess. It grew larger, became infected and developed into chronic
osteomyelitis, a potentially fatal bone disease. For the next five years,
he was in and out of hospitals, enduring 10 operations and eventually the
amputation of his left leg. Mr. Aiken says shoddy medical care has
prolonged his suffering.

During that time, his rage over an injury he did nothing to cause grew so
intense that he pushed away those around him. "Whoever is dealing with me I
force away, and whoever I want goes the other way. Is there no hope for
me?" Mr. Aiken wrote in a poem after he was shot. "I'm a human. I'm a man.
I'm Andrew Aiken. Nothing can take that away from me. So legs or no legs,
love or no love, I must go on."

Now 26, Mr. Aiken said he had been too sick to find a job. He is on public
assistance and shares a Brownsville public housing project apartment with
another paralyzed gunshot victim.

The stress of his injury destroyed his four-year relationship with his
girlfriend, Tina Katina. They are now close friends. Both say they needed
more counseling, particularly from people in wheelchairs and their spouses.

"It would have helped a lot to have a person we could've talked to," Ms.
Katina said. "We needed people who could tell us it could work."

So Mr. Aiken and other gunshot victims are creating support groups, mostly
informal.

Mr. Aiken's ordeal resulted in a stronger bond with Mr. Appan, a friend he
once performed with at reggae parties in Brooklyn, and in friendships with
other gunshot victims. In 1994, the thief trying to steal Mr. Appan's
jacket shot him in the neck, paralyzing him from the chest down.

Unable to afford a car with hand controls, Mr. Aiken must take the bus to
Mr. Appan's Crown Heights home.

When he rolled through Mr. Appan's apartment door on a visit last month, it
was a day of triumph. Mr. Aiken was eager to show his friend the prosthetic
leg he had been fitted with at the hospital that morning. He loved to hoist
himself out of his chair, lean on the prosthesis and stare into the mirror
at the image of himself standing on his feet.

Both men complain that people in their neighborhoods often assume they were
criminals. Unlike in suburbia, where a wheelchair might suggest a
motorcycle accident, a wheelchair in their neighborhood connotes one thing:
a gunshot wound. While the leading cause of paralysis among white Americans
is motor vehicle accidents, according to the National Spinal Cord Injury
Statistical Center in Birmingham, Ala., the leading cause of paralysis
among black and Hispanic Americans is violence.

The number of people like Mr. Aiken and Mr. Appan -- paralysis victims who
were not criminals -- probably stretches into the hundreds.

They are like David K. Snowden, a former personal manager for four National
Basketball Association players, who was unloading groceries in his St.
Albans, Queens, driveway in 1991 when he heard a popping noise. The next
thing he knew he was lying on the ground. A stray bullet from a drive-by
shooting had torn through his spine.

They are like Camilla Tucker, 29, a Bronx woman who was drawn to her
boyfriend's fancy car and clothes. She was on a double date in Queens in
1991 when two masked gunmen rode up on motorcycles, one on either side of
the car. They fired dozens of rounds into the car, killing Ms. Tucker's
cousin and their dates instantly. A slug hit Ms. Tucker's brain and lodged
in her motor cortex, destroying the engine that drives the nervous system.

She is totally paralyzed.

Mr. Appan, who is studying at Kingsborough Community College and hopes to
become a business consultant, said victims like him got little attention or
support because they were poor and nonwhite.

An immigrant from Guyana, Mr. Appan said he was struck by the public outcry
over shootings in middle-class schools across the country.

But the phenomenon, he said, is nothing new in poor urban areas.

"The reality is that they did all this because of Columbine," he said,
referring to the Colorado school shootings last year. "Because it touched
home. Because it was in suburbia.

What about the thousands of young people who die or are wounded every year
in the cities?"

Hermina Jackson, 56, a longtime adviser to the state on rehabilitation
programs for the disabled who was shot and paralyzed at the age of 13, said
the system had failed those urban victims. She said that under the current
welfare system, there was little incentive to get jobs, because those
people would lose Medicaid and face thousands of dollars in medical bills.
They would need more than $40,000 a year on average to pay their medical
bills, a difficult task for young men who often have no more than a high
school education.

For former criminals like Johnnie Montalvo, the lack of programs and the
lure of the streets can be overwhelming. That Mr. Montalvo is even alive is
astonishing.

During his 35 troubled years, he has had buckshot and bullets fired into
his arm, cheek, neck, left thigh, right forearm, left buttock, stomach,
left hand and spine.

He has only one lung, and reconstructed intestines. A 1996 razor attack
left a 10-inch scar from his right temple to his chin. The seats of his
gold Buick Regal are still stained with his blood from a 1997 shooting. A
portrait of Lazarus, whom Jesus raised from the dead, hangs from his
rear-view mirror.

Yet last month on the Sunset Park street corner he has long dominated, he
was holding court again. As he sat in his wheelchair, friends and gang
members paid their respects. Everyone, it seemed, had heard the stories.
Mr. Montalvo says his paralysis is his penance for past wrongs. And his
fate has clearly made an impression on some of the young around him.

Jose Rosario, 23, from Sunset Park, cited Mr. Montalvo and three other
people he knew in wheelchairs as among the reasons he became a police
officer. "He's like a prophet," Mr. Rosario said. "It's all fine and dandy
to be a tough guy, but in the end, 90 percent of the people wind up like
him, or dead."

In the Bronx, Nick Corredor, 32, a former drug dealer shot in the neck by a
rival in 1993, said he had learned his lesson. He enrolled in John Jay
College of Criminal Justice last fall, majoring in deviant behavior.

In Harlem, Brian Lewis, 25, lives in seclusion out of fear that former
rivals will try to finish the job. Once the leader of a drug empire that
spanned five cities up and down the East Coast, Brian was gunned down in
Baltimore in 1995.

Mr. Montalvo says his days of crime are over. He and Mr. Corredor speak at
schools against gun violence, part of a group called the Gunrunners.

Run by Ruben Tavares, 29, a former Bronx gang member, the group ends its
visits by having children play them in wheelchair basketball, giving a
sense of their confinement in steel and rubber.

But while Mr. Montalvo renounces his past, he struggles to make a clean
break. Last February, after spending seven months in jail in Massachusetts,
he was acquitted of helping a man flee a drive-by shooting there.

The birth of his first child, John Elijah Montalvo, in 1997 put new
pressure on him to "do the right thing," he said. He is raising the boy
alone. The mother is in jail on a drug conviction.

He and his son are temporarily living in an East New York public housing
project. They subsist on $670 a month in welfare.

Mr. Montalvo, who talks of opening his own gas station, says he is eager to
do right by his son, but is trapped by a criminal record that bars him from
bank loans, public housing and many jobs.

"I get discouraged," he said, as he sat on the corner. "It's hard out here."

"You don't want to do it," he added, "but sometimes you have to do things
to survive.'

Mr. Aiken said renewed religious faith had given him hope of going to
college and becoming a recording engineer. But he said isolation, despair
and lack of opportunity were leading many friends down the wrong path.

"A lot of my close homeboys in wheelchairs, they're incarcerated," Mr.
Aiken said. "A lot of people in wheelchairs end up going the wrong way
because they don't have other options."
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