Five shots in Denver
In 2013, anti-gang activist Terrance Roberts shot a man in the Holly, a historically Black neighborhood in Denver. What really happened that night?
Courtesy of Julian Rubinstein
On the last evening of summer 2013, five shots rang out in a northeast Denver neighborhood known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the area had become an “invisible city” within a historically white metropolis. While shootings weren’t that uncommon here, this particular shooter’s identity came as a shock: Terrance Roberts, a revered anti-gang activist, whose attempts to bring peace to his community had won praise from his neighbors as well as from the state’s most important power brokers. Why did he fire that gun? The following is an excerpt from The Holly: Five Bullets, One Gun, and the Struggle to Save an American Neighborhood, by Julian Rubinstein, out now from Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Denver, Colorado
Sept. 20, 2013
Terrance Roberts took off his shirt and climbed up to the roof of the small building that housed his community youth organization, Prodigal Son. Under one arm, he carried a sledgehammer.
Across the street in the sun, next to a pair of basketball courts, a group of Blood gang members watched. “Climb like Tarzan,” one of them sneered.
Terrance, who had big eyes and a trim beard, tried to ignore the taunt. Now 37, he’d spent the last nine years of his life working to end the gang violence he’d once been a part of. Prominent activists, influential clergy, two Denver mayors, even law enforcement had all praised his efforts. Not that any of it came easily.
The roof was only one story up. Once on top, Terrance looked out at the young gang members, several of whom he knew. He had grown up in the neighborhood and had been a Blood. Tattooed on his left arm, in ornate cursive, was “ShowBizz,” his former gang name; across his muscled chest was “Damu Rida”; damu was Swahili for “blood.”
Terrance had never been on the building’s roof before. It offered him a commanding view of Holly Square, a 3.6-acre space about five miles east of downtown Denver. The Holly, as it was known, was legendary in Denver’s African American community. For decades it was the site of a shopping center and served as the community hub. In 1968, a police shooting in the parking lot became the pivotal moment in Denver’s civil rights movement. In the 1980s, the square became an open-air drug market, and the headquarters of Denver’s first Blood gang. Now it appeared to be finding a new identity.
A high-profile redevelopment of Holly Square was coming to fruition, and Terrance had been an integral part of it. In the middle of the square was a new Boys & Girls Club that he had campaigned for. Terrance had planned a peace rally for that evening, in advance of its official opening. He wanted residents to come together to promote gang unity and an end to the violence that had flared again in recent months.
The day, however, had begun inauspiciously. When Terrance got to the Holly, he had run into Aaron Miripol, the white CEO of the local nonprofit that bought the square in 2009. As they greeted each other, two men rattled the chains around the club’s front doors. “It’s not open yet,” Terrance called out.
“Gentrifiers!” they yelled back.
As Terrance turned and headed back toward the Prodigal Son office, he had his first encounter of the day with the Bloods. Five of them were under the gazebo next to the basketball courts, smoking “spice,” a synthetic marijuana, and acting rowdy. “I already told you, you can’t be over here if you’re going to be like that,” Terrance told them. He had a lease to maintain and operate the courts. Drug use wasn’t permitted.
“Whatever, snitch,” said Hasan “Munch” Jones, getting up from the table. Terrance looked at him. Hasan was 22, thin but wiry. He had a long face and two big front teeth, from which he got his gang name. “These are our courts,” Hasan said. He tugged a front pocket of his pants, showing Terrance the butt of a knife that was clipped inside.
Watching from outside the Prodigal Son office, Bryan Butler, one of Terrance’s gang outreach workers, called out to Terrance. Bryan had also grown up in the neighborhood, and knew Hasan. He couldn’t hear the threat Hasan had just made, but he could feel the tension.
“T!” Bryan yelled. “We gotta go.” Bryan wanted to get Terrance out of the Holly to let things cool down. Prodigal Son’s board had raised a couple thousand dollars for new office furniture, and they planned to go to Ikea. After the peace rally, they would move the Prodigal Son office across the street and into the Boys & Girls Club.
But when they returned to the Holly a few hours later, the group of Bloods milling around the courts had grown. One of them pointed to a bulky camera on the roof of the Prodigal Son building and accused Terrance of collecting evidence for the police.
Oh, yeah? Terrance thought. I’ll show them. And so there he was on the roof, with a sledgehammer. He walked over to the camera, which looked like an old battleship gun. As far as Terrance knew, it had never worked. As the Bloods watched, he took a deep breath and swung the heavy hammer into the camera, again and again.
Read more: https://www.hcn.org/articles/ideas-books-five-shots-in-denver/view
