Life and Death in Lefrak City

In a bleak apartment complex beside the Long Island Expressway, three families struggle to protect their children from a cycle of violence that proves inescapable.

by Nell Gluckman

When Debra Greene’s son Theodore was in middle school and he and his younger brother Pernel misbehaved, she would pack the boys into her car and drive from Corona, Queens, across the Triboro Bridge to a rough neighborhood in Harlem, threatening to leave them there if they didn’t shape up. When a homeless man knocked on the car window, the boys cried, but Greene was grateful that the man was reinforcing her mission. She was determined to do whatever she could to keep her boys out of trouble.

“I drove them to a school with bars on the windows and said, ‘This is where you will go to school,’” recalls Greene, fifty-two. Though she is tired from working a long shift in the ICU and from the challenges this past year has presented her with, she erupts into laughter as she retells stories of her kids growing up. “During the day it doesn’t look so bad, but at night?”

But crime wasn’t confined to neighborhoods away from home. The family lived in Lefrak City, a housing development built for middle-class families in the 1960s that was supposed to be not only affordable, but safe. Lefrak City hasn’t really delivered on that score.

The massive twenty-building residential development is arranged into X-shaped pods with darkened windows, making it look like public housing, although it’s not. With 12,330 residents, these brick buildings lining the Long Island Expressway are home to more than one-fifth of Corona’s entire population, according to the 2010 Census.

The complex was a cornerstone of developer Samuel J. Lefrak’s massive network of privately owned real estate. The Lefrak Organization is now made up of over four hundred buildings in places as varied as Battery Park City and Newport, Jersey City, most of them functional and efficient but devoid of architectural innovation. The vision for this forty-acre lot in central Queens was to create a modern mini-city that residents would barely have to leave. It would have a movie theater, offices, retail space, tennis courts, basketball courts, swimming pools and parking all contained within the confines of the development.

As with many New York City neighborhoods, crime and vandalism became commonplace throughout the 1970s and ‘80s in Lefrak City. A 1981 New York Times article reported that residents were worried that their housing complex was destined to become a slum. But it never came to that. The crime rate in the 110th precinct, which includes Lefrak City, Corona and Elmhurst, has gone down steadily in the last two decades, according to the New York City Police Department. Only eight people were murdered in 2012, as opposed to thirty-six in 1990. Still, a steady stream of incidents has kept residents of Lefrak City feeling uneasy in their aging high-rises. In 2011, forty-six people were arrested for operating a drug ring out of a pre-school in one of the buildings, and in 2012 there was at least one murder and one rape on or very near the property.

Greene, who grew up in Queens, is only just over five feet tall, but her commanding voice and bright smile give her a presence. She moved to Lefrak City in 1984, not intending to stay long. She had Theodore in 1985 and Pernel in 1988. At that time, two-bedroom apartments rented for around $450 a month, and it was tough to find a better deal, so she stayed. When her boys were young in the early nineties, Greene, a single mom, heard reports of violence that confirmed her suspicions about the neighborhood. One man was shot near Lefrak City’s tennis courts. Another was shot in the basement of her building.

Hoping a parochial school would hold her sons to higher standards than a neighborhood school, Greene enrolled them in St. Gabriel’s School in East Elmhurst and then Monsignor Scanlan High School in the East Bronx. Her goal was to ensure they graduated and went to college. She told Theodore that someday she wanted him to earn enough money to own property in a safe neighborhood, not wanting him to have to rent in a place like Lefrak City.

Greene worked Friday and Saturday night shifts as a nurse at New York Presbyterian Hospital, leaving her sons to their own devices. This worried her, especially when they were in high school and became popular in their circle of friends, although they never got into any serious trouble. She and Theodore had a pact that he would get above a 75 in each class or he wouldn’t be able to stay in private school. This feat was sometimes hard in Spanish, his mother recalls, but easy in the sciences, where he excelled.

Theodore’s best friend was Tyshawn Bierria, another kid from Lefrak City who also went to St. Gabriel’s. For both boys, everything was about basketball. They played together at school, and both joined the TK All-Stars, a basketball team made up mostly of kids from Lefrak City.

“Theo was a laid-back, kind of quiet, unassuming kind of person. He liked to stay under the radar,” remembers Antonio Cannon, coach of the TK All-Stars and father of another close friend, Antonio Cannon Jr. “He’d rather pass the ball than shoot the ball.”

The team soon became known throughout Queens for its success on the court. Theodore went on to play for his high school team, and Tyshawn played for his, Newtown High School in Corona, Queens.

Greene was pleased when Theodore formed a close group of about ten friends, including Tyshawn and other members of the TK All-Stars. The boys looked out for each other, Greene recalls. When they were in high school, they started calling themselves the D.i.P. Fam for “dipped in purple family” because purple, they told her, represents royalty in the Bible. Some of the boys grew up going to church, and as another member Phil Murphy explains it, by referencing something holy they were separating themselves from the gang culture with which they did not want to be associated.

Despite Lefrak City’s troubles with drugs and shootings, Greene tried to believe hers was a different world. She did not consider herself part of the Lefrak City community. She was a nurse at a hospital in Manhattan, and her kids went to private school in the Bronx. She even did her grocery shopping outside the neighborhood. But as Theodore got older and Greene became a regular at her son’s Lefrak City basketball games, she started to recognize the names of teenagers involved in the local violence, which seemed to be closing in.

Theodore never gave her much reason to worry. He was quiet and polite with adults, holding doors and helpful with chores. But with his friends, he would laugh uncontrollably at jokes only they understood. Though his demeanor was cool and his tattoos made him look tough, Greene’s friend Shawn Williams said he had a “warm, inviting, welcoming” smile.

Tyshawn led the group by example. When he started working out and bulking up, the others did too. His mother, Sharon Bierria, a vivacious and enthusiastic minister, insisted that he go to Sunday school and Bible study classes. Instead of acting embarrassed about it, his mother recalls, he convinced his friends to come with him. As a young kid, he always objected when his mother stepped in to break up fights, but as he got older, he began to take on that role.

As the D.i.P. boys grew up, they learned how to balance their cool personas with the high expectations of their parents. They liked to party, work out and write rap songs, but they also had to go to college.

For members of the D.i.P. Fam, getting out of the neighborhood and going to college was considered a mark of success, and most of these boys achieved that. Theodore graduated from Bethune Cookman University in Daytona Beach in 2009 with a degree in biology. Tyshawn, a year younger, went to SUNY Delhi where he was on the basketball team. Theodore’s brother, Pernel, went to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

When Theodore and his friends were home for breaks, they would hang out and plot their post-college futures, including their dream to open a sports rehabilitation clinic and community center for a neighborhood that desperately needed one. Theodore’s plan was to get his license in massage therapy so he could treat athletes. Each of the boys had a passion or a skill that was given space in this dream, whether it was a studio for their friend who could dance or a basketball court for those who could play. All of them put pressure on each other to get their degrees.

Ever since those boys were in elementary school, they had found strength in numbers together. But that didn’t turn out to be enough.

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