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wral.com
Fla. Mother and Son Are Attacked
July 10, 2007
By Brian Skoloff and Jennifer Kay
A young girl plays on one of the
many clothes lines in Dunbar Village in West Palm ...
 WEST
PALM BEACH, Fla. - Mother and son huddled together, battered and
beaten, in the bathroom _ sobbing, wondering why no one came to
help. Surely the neighbors had heard their screams. The walls are
thin, the screen doors flimsy in this violence-plagued housing
project on the edge of downtown.
For three hours, the pair say, they
endured sheer terror as the 35-year-old Haitian immigrant was raped
and sodomized by up to 10 masked teenagers and her 12-year-old son
was beaten in another room.
Then, mother and son were reunited
to endure the unspeakable: At gunpoint, the woman was forced to
perform oral sex on the boy, she later told a TV station.
Afterward, they were doused with
household cleansers, perhaps in a haphazard attempt to scrub the
crime scene, or maybe simply to torture the victims even more. The
solutions burned the boy's eyes.
The thugs then fled, taking with
them a couple of hundred dollars' worth of cash, jewelry and cell
phones.
In the interview with WPTV, the
mother described how she and her son sobbed in the bathroom, too
shocked to move. Then, in the dark of night, they walked a mile to
the hospital because they had no phone to call for help.
Two teenagers _ a 14-year-old and a
16-year-old _ have been arrested. Eight others are being sought.
Welcome to Dunbar Village, a place
residents call hell.
___
"So a lady was raped. Big deal,"
resident Paticiea Matlock said with disgust. "There's too much other
crime happening here."
Built in 1940 to house poor blacks
in then-segregated West Palm Beach, Dunbar Village's 226 units sit
just blocks from million-dollar condos on the Intracoastal Waterway.
Billionaires lounge on beachfront property just a few miles away on
Palm Beach.
The public housing project's one-
and two-story barracks-style buildings are spread across 17 grassy,
tree-lined acres surrounded by an 8-foot iron fence. The average
rent is about $150 a month.
Almost 60 percent of the households
in the area that includes Dunbar Village were below the poverty
level in 2000, according to Census figures. Only 19 percent of the
area's residents had high school degrees. About 9 percent of the
adults were unemployed, nearly triple the state average.
Teenagers with gold-plated teeth
wander the streets. Drug dealers hang out on nearby sidewalks. Trash
bin lids are open. Flies hover over dirty diapers. Clothes dry on
sagging lines.
Since the June 18 attack, police
have increased patrols in the area, blocked off one entrance and
will soon install surveillance cameras.
"It took this to make that happen?"
Matlock, a 32-year-old single mother of three, snarled.
As in other blighted neighborhoods
across the country where criminals seem to have free rein, residents
here live in fear. Snitches get stitches, they say. Or worse.
"I try to be in my house no later
than 7, and I don't come out," said Citoya Greenwood, 33, who lives
in Dunbar with her 4-year-old daughter. "I don't even answer my door
anymore." On the Fourth of July, "we didn't know if we was hearing
gunshots or fireworks."
___
Avion Lawson, 14, and Nathan
Walker, 16, will be charged as adults in the assault and gang rape,
prosecutors said. They are jailed without bail.
Lawson's DNA was found in a condom
at the crime scene, and he admitted involvement, authorities say.
Police say Walker's palm print was discovered inside the home. He
denies being there. His attorney says he will plead not guilty.
Lawson's public defender did not return telephone messages.
Walker and Lawson did not live at
Dunbar but visited often. Lawson stayed with his grandmother there.
Walker came to hang out and play basketball. Dunbar has become the
place to be for wayward black teens, residents and neighborhood kids
say.
Walker and Lawson both grew up
mostly fatherless, bouncing between homes. Walker's family sometimes
lived in old cars or abandoned houses, said his mother, Ruby Nell
Walker.
"We've never really had a real
home," said Naporcha Walker, Nathan's 15-year-old sister.
He dropped out of school after
spending three years in seventh grade. The family lives on food
stamps and recently had to pawn their television and radio, Ruby
Walker said.
"I just feel like he was at the
wrong place at the wrong time. ... My son is not a rapist," she
said.
Ruby Walker said she herself was
raped twice, at ages 7 and 12. She said that just days before the
Dunbar attack, someone tried to rape her again, and "my son came to
me crying and said he wouldn't ever do that to anyone."
She has had her own problems with
the law _ at least nine arrests on charges such as disorderly
conduct, aggravated assault and battery, according to state records.
Avion Lawson was a headstrong kid,
never listening to his mother, said his cousin, Cassandra Ellis.
"I knew he was bad, but I never
pictured him to be that type of bad," Ellis said. She said one
traumatic experience may have scarred him _ watching his older
sister fatally stab a boyfriend.
"It was an accident. She killed her
boyfriend. They was fighting, there was a knife," Ellis said. "He
was there when it happened."
___
City officials are quick to note
that neither Lawson nor Walker lived at Dunbar, and say they are
doing their best to make the place safe.
As quickly as overhead lights can
be replaced, they are shot out, so officials are now considering
bulletproof lighting.
"Isn't that quite a commentary on
what the situation is there?" said City Commissioner Molly Douglas,
whose district includes part of Dunbar. "Dunbar Village is a hell
hole. They shouldn't have to live in fear."
More officers are hitting the
streets, but "I just bow my head sometimes and think we just
couldn't possibly have enough officers ever to take care of all of
this," Douglas said.
Laurel Robinson, head of the city's
housing authority, said that up until about four years ago, the
federal government provided the city with $160,000 a year for
security in public housing projects, but Congress did away with the
money.
"Every family housing project in
the country has suffered because of it," she said.
____
The rape victim and her son have
not returned to their apartment since the attack.
The woman fled Port-au-Prince,
Haiti, with her son seven years ago in search of a better life. With
no money, they landed in Dunbar. The two almost instantly became
targets for crime, standing out as Haitians among the mostly
American-born blacks in the housing project. Her car and the boy's
bicycle were stolen. Their house was ransacked.
On the night of the attack, she was
lured outside by a teenager who knocked on the door and said her car
had a flat. Nine more teens, their faces shrouded with T-shirts,
barged in, she told authorities. They brandished guns and demanded
money, then went beyond the imaginable.
"I was so scared," the woman told
WPTV. "Some of them had sex with me twice, some of them had sex with
me three times. They're beating me up. They make me do those things
over and over. The man with the big gun, he put the gun inside of
me."
She said that when she was forced
to perform oral sex on her own son, she told the boy: "I know you
love me, and I love you, too."
Investigators say it is not clear
exactly why the thugs picked her house.
The boy's sight has returned. Both
mother and son are seeking counseling.
"I have to try and talk to him
every day. He's so angry," the woman said. "He said we never should
have moved to Dunbar Village."
___
AP researchers Judith Ausuebel and
Monika Mathur contributed to this report.
(This version CORRECTS by deleting
number of times police were called to Dunbar Village; police now say
their figures were incorrect.)
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