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Home to 100,000 residents in 1960, Englewood's population has dwindled. It had dropped to about 40,000 in 2000 and to 30,000 just 10 years later. Part of the reason, Carter-Hill and others say, is that families moved out to safer places and others lost their homes when they lost jobs during the recession. According to the police department, there are more than 4,100 abandoned buildings in Englewood, nearly 600 of them vacated in just the last 15 months. One study found more vacant homes in Englewood and the community to the immediate west than anywhere in Chicago.
It all has created an atmosphere ripe for a category of people nobody wanted to see: Gang members who left the city's torn-down public housing high rises and found the abandoned houses magnets for crime.
"We've seen gangs come in, run cords from the house next door for electrical service and make it look like a regular house and they're using it as a gang house," said Leo Schmitz, commander of Englewood's police district.
Moore said the Hudson family still owns their now-empty house, but they've apparently stopped trying to remodel it after vandals broke in at least twice to steal construction materials. He sees Hudson's sister come by once in a while, but hasn't seen Jennifer Hudson, who even after she became famous came by to talk with people and even jump rope with kids outside.
But he does see gangbangers on the street all day, every day.
Among those, authorities say, was Balfour, the suspect in the Hudson family slayings. While prosecutors say the killings had a domestic motive, tied to his deteriorating marriage to the singer's sister, his life story is a familiar one in Englewood.
A high school drop-out, Balfour was a member of the Gangster Disciples and had a long rap sheet for drug offenses, stealing cars and ultimately a seven-year stint in prison for attempted murder and vehicular manslaughter. A little more than two years after his release, he was behind bars again, charged with first-degree murder in the deaths of Hudson's mother, brother and 7-year-old nephew.
McCarthy said the Englewood gangs are more rigid and territorial than the gangs he saw when he was a ranking member of the police department in New York and chief in Newark, N.J. That means a rival gang member on a street where the drug trade is controlled by another gang can mean only one thing: Likely gunfire.
In response, Schmitz said he has ordered intelligence about gangs distributed to all police officers, not just the anti-gang squad. And he's ordered officers out of their cars and walking the community more than ever before -- a practice Carter-Hill said is necessary to build trust where there has long been suspicion of police.
Antie Moore, who lives a few doors down from the Hudson house, said he thinks things have gotten worse since the national media arrived to interview people after the killings. A city clean-up crew came a few days ago, but Moore suspects it had more to do with news crews' return ahead of the trial than anything else.
"They only cleaned up the alley behind (the Hudson house) and a little bit of the lot next to it," he said. Then, he said, "They left."
[Associated
Press;
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
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