Pubdate: Sun, 22 Jan 2006
Source: Washington Post (DC)
Page: A01 - Front Page
Copyright: 2006 The Washington Post Company
Contact:  http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Details: http://www.mapinc.org/media/491
Author: Del Quentin Wilber, Washington Post Staff Writer

VIOLENCE IN SE TWICE SHATTERS A GRANDMOTHER'S PEACE

Former D.C. Council Member Struggles to Cope With 1 Grandson's
Slaying, Another's Arrest

By the time a stray bullet killed Jon Allen Jr., a lot of people in
Southeast Washington knew just who he was.

"I'm Sandy Allen's grandson," the 15-year-old liked to
say.

Almost everyone in Southeast knows or has heard of Sandy Allen. She
was born in the District, a fifth-generation Washingtonian, a one-time
welfare mom of two sons who became a community activist and then a
member of the D.C. Council until last year. A woman of stature and
influence, from the neighborhood.

"Little Jon" was close to his grandmother, working on her political
campaigns, tailing her at community meetings, doing vacuuming, dusting
and other chores at her home. Until he was shot and killed on New
Year's Eve. An innocent target, police say, of a neighborhood beef in
which he played no part.

He died less than six months after another of Allen's beloved 11
grandchildren was arrested and charged with murder. Ever since he was
jailed this summer -- accused of firing a stray bullet that killed a
woman who was in her home watching television -- Russell Mitchell, 18,
has called Allen twice a week as he waits for his trial.

One grandson dead, another locked up. Even in the neighborhoods where
Allen is a household name, political connections and a tight family
network offer little protection against the realities of street life.
Right after Jon was killed, Allen had a heart attack. She says the
grief and stress broke her heart.

"Bad things happen to anybody, anywhere," says Allen, 62. "It doesn't
matter who you are. . . . There is no explanation. There is no way I
can explain that Jon got killed because of this reason, and Russell is
incarcerated for this reason. It's very hard."

She was barely out of the hospital when the funeral was held Jan. 10
at one of the city's most prominent churches, Allen Chapel AME Church
on Alabama Avenue SE. The family, not related to the church's
namesake, has worshiped for years at the place that calls itself "the
Cathedral of Southeast." Frail-looking and emotionally spent, Allen
sat in the front row watching a stream of people file slowly past her
grandson's coffin.

The facts were familiar to many at the funeral: Some young men got
into a fight. The trouble broke up, but not for long. Someone returned
with a gun and brazenly sprayed the street with nearly 20 bullets --
in broad daylight, in the middle of the afternoon. Only one person was
hit: "Little Jon," a bystander, shot in the stomach, who became the
city's last homicide victim of 2005. Police have made two arrests but
still are seeking the gunman.

Nearly 4,000 people came to the church to pay their
respects.

Many were teenagers and children from Allen's grandson's neighborhood
and her own, Washington Highlands. Dozens wore the all-too-familiar
R.I.P. T-shirts commemorating Jon's life and death. Some cried, others
clutched one another's arms.

A few rows from Allen sat a half-dozen D.C. Council members and
political leaders, including council Chairman Linda W. Cropp (D) and
Del. Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.). Filling the other pews were
neighborhood residents, many of them mothers and grandmothers who knew
only too well how empty and lost Allen was feeling.

"There was a certain pain, a collective pain that was in that church,"
says Philip Pannell, a community activist who attended the service.
"It was quite powerful. It was a bond in that church because the
violence is pretty much so woven and interwoven into the fabric of
this community."

A Difficult Rise to Politics

As a youth, Sandy Allen and her older brother John lived for awhile
with her grandparents, and then her mother. She learned about public
service from her grandfather, James Carter Sr., a messenger for the
federal government. She recalls trailing him across town as he raised
money to build a youth center. They'd go to church together every Sunday.

Her grandfather and mother were tight with the neighbors. To a young
Allen, it seemed as if the entire community was her family.

"The family is not as strong as when I was coming up or when my sons
were coming up," she says in a recent interview at her home, still
filled with flowers from people offering sympathy. "When I was growing
up, if I did something wrong, my mother knew about it before I got
home because the whole community was a family. That was the key. If I
decided to walk home on Stanton Road instead of Morris Road, my mother
knew it."

In the 1960s, Allen grew tired of school and dropped out in the 11th
grade, taking a job as a clerk at a drugstore. "I felt I was grown,"
she says. "I just didn't feel like I needed it." She had two children
with different men, neither of whom she married. Her first son, Jon
Allen, was born in 1965. Her second, Gilbert, was born six years later.

After going on welfare for a short time, she thought hard about her
family's future and got a general equivalency diploma.

"I couldn't have my children go to school, and I didn't have a high
school diploma," she says.

She took several clerical jobs at agencies that ran the gamut of the
District government: Public Works, Human Services, Corrections,
Consumer and Regulatory Affairs. By the late 1980s, Allen says, she
believed she had to do something for her neighborhood, which was at
the epicenter of the nation's crack war.

Like many parents, she worried about her children getting into drugs
or gangs. When Jon dropped out of high school, she says, she made him
attend a job-training program and get a GED. She sent Gilbert to a
high school across town to help him get away from neighborhood
troublemakers. She got an uncle, a D.C. high school principal, to help
set her sons straight.

Gilbert became a driver and messenger for the D.C. Department of
Health, and Jon works for a moving and storage company.

Allen entered politics at the grass roots, becoming an advisory
neighborhood commissioner in 1986. Like many people in Southeast, she
backed Mayor Marion Barry, and she remained a staunch supporter
through his 1990 arrest and trial on drug charges. Two years later,
she aided Barry's comeback, helping him win election to the Ward 8
council seat months after he got out of prison.

When Barry won a fourth term as mayor in 1994, Allen saw her chance to
move up. She ran for the Ward 8 seat but lost by one vote to a
political newcomer whom Barry backed as his handpicked successor.
Allen was hurt but didn't quit.

She ran again in 1996 and won. She was reelected in 2000 by a wide
margin. One of her proudest achievements, she says, was increasing
funding for youth addiction programs. She had community meetings about
crime, but some constituents believed she didn't do enough to clean up
drug dealing and prostitution in her ward, even after violence hit
close to home. In September 2003, her son Jon was grazed by a bullet
in the same neighborhood where "Little Jon" later was slain.

Her political career was derailed in 2004 when Barry -- returning to
politics after a six-year absence -- crushed her in the Democratic
primary. Since then, Allen has mostly kept a low profile. Soon, she
will be sworn in as a member of the D.C. Taxicab Commission. During
the summer, she helped conduct surveys of drug-addicted youths for
several neighborhood programs, she says.

Mostly, Allen has spent her time out of politics on her favorite
hobby: doting on her grandchildren.

Russell and Jon

Allen was especially close to Russell and "Little Jon," who were
cousins but treated each other like brothers.

The two were a bit of an odd couple. Russell, Gilbert's son, is slim
and outgoing, able to crack a joke with anybody. Jon Jr., three years
younger, was described as a shy giant. As tall as his cousin -- just
under six feet -- Jon weighed twice as much, about 300 pounds. He
loved steak-and-cheese sandwiches and hamburgers slathered with sauce
and bacon.

The boys lived 10 minutes apart in neighborhoods that are among the
roughest in the city. Jon stayed with his mother, two older sisters
and younger brother in a second-floor apartment on 14th Place SE.
Russell lived in a fourth-floor apartment on Robinson Place SE with
his father, stepmother and 16-year-old sister.

After school and on weekends, the boys often played basketball,
watched movies or simply hung out and listened "to what they call
music," their grandmother recalls.

And they got life lessons from Allen. Once a week, they came over to
her two-story white house on busy Wheeler Road SE, which she shares
with her mother. She put the boys to work, vacuuming, dusting, taking
out the trash. Allen gave them pocket money, but that wasn't the
point. Her goal was to teach them respect and duty.

"It was a way to give them a sense of responsibility -- have them
clean up to earn," she says. "But I don't think the money ever entered
their minds. It was only a little bit of money, maybe enough to go to
McDonald's."

Allen also wanted to give the boys a broader sense of the world. She
took them and other family members on annual summer vacations to the
beach in Delaware. If they got decent grades, she also paid for the
boys to attend Georgetown University's basketball camp.

The grandmother's attention was returned. She was often the first
person they called for advice or help in a pinch.

"They just really looked up to her," says Gilbert Allen,
34.

Russell and Jon had their struggles. Both had emotional and
developmental problems that required them to attend specialized D.C.
public schools.

Russell was forced to leave his high school, Luke C. Moore Academy in
Northeast Washington, because of disciplinary problems last year,
family members and school officials say. His father says he had
enrolled in another school and still hoped to get his diploma.

Jon hung out with a rough crowd at times and was known to get into
tussles on the street. At the same time, he had a quiet side and loved
to play chess. It was clear to his teachers that the teen's family had
been battling in the "constant tug of war" between what parents try to
teach their children and what occurs on the street, says Victor Reece,
director of Jon's school, D.C. Alternative Learning Academy in Southeast.

"He was very respectful," Reece says. "It was clear that somebody had
taken the time to explain right from wrong to him, and respect. He was
no angel, but he worked on his problems on a daily basis."

'A Distraught Grandmother'

Allen was at home when Gilbert called her one morning in August. The
police had just arrested Russell. Gilbert was too flustered to explain
the charges, so he asked his mother to come right away.

As she was leaving her house, she was confronted by reporters who told
her that Russell had been arrested on a murder charge.

"There is only one word, the one that came to mind first, and that is
horror," Allen recalls.

She felt worse when she learned more about the crime: Dorine Fostion,
47, a grandmother, was killed Aug. 17 by a stray bullet that pierced
her fourth-floor apartment on Robinson Place SE. Police say that at
least eight young men opened fire on the building about 10:30 p.m. The
motive, police say, was typical of many crimes in Southeast Washington
- -- and eerily similar to the circumstances surrounding Jon's death.

According to police, Russell and the young men who were with him were
acting in retaliation for an earlier altercation or delivering a
message to rivals in the complex. Police have arrested one suspect:
Russell, who lived two buildings from Fostion. He is charged with
second-degree murder.

On the day that Russell was charged, Allen told reporters that she was
"a distraught grandmother. I'm shocked. To me, he was the most
wonderful grandson in the world."

Russell has pleaded not guilty. No trial date has been set. His father
says he has no doubt that his son is innocent.

Allen says she has never asked Russell about what happened.

"That is a question for him, his God and his lawyer," she says. "It
doesn't matter to me. I love him. I love him as much today as the day
he was born."

'Ride the Chariot'

Allen was just leaving a bank in Southeast on Dec. 31, about to hop
into her car and drive to Jon's neighborhood to give him back his cell
phone. He had left it at her house while doing chores.

Her own phone rang. It was Gilbert, again the bearer of bad
news.

Jon had been shot.

She screamed. Her mind went blank. Somehow, she got into her car and
drove home, and then got a ride to Howard University Hospital. The
prognosis wasn't good. So she went to church to pray. Halfway through
the New Year's Eve service, her cell phone's red light began to flash,
and she knew that Jon was dead.

At the hospital, she made sure to get some time alone with her
grandson before he was taken to the morgue.

"There really is no description for that," she says. "I told him to
ride the chariot. That's all I could say."

She would learn later that there had been a fight on 13th Place SE,
near Jon's home. Jon wasn't involved, but he was the only one who had
been hurt or killed.

As the family struggled to deal with Jon's killing, a relative got
word to Russell.

After the shock, he made a phone call.

To his grandmother. 
- ---
MAP posted-by: Richard Lake