When crack was king, Flint paid � in blood

No one knows exactly when, but in the early 1980s a new form of cocaine came to town � cheap, smokable, mercilessly addictive � and practically cracked the foundations of Flint.

Crack was its name, and within months its booming trade ushered in a wave of violence: armed robberies, drive-by shootings, burglaries and murder.

One Flint investigator estimated that two-thirds of Flint robberies during the late 1980s were committed by “crackheads.”

The number of murders in the city rose from 32 in 1983 to an all-time high of 61 by 1986. The total fell to 52 in 1987 and then to 44 in 1988. But in 1989, 57 people were murdered � the third-highest total on record.

To many who saw the carnage first hand, the 1980s were the Decade of Crack. And nowhere was the devastation more brutal or more focused than at a north Flint address in 1987.

On Feb. 4 of that year, the bungalow at 1010 E. Russell Ave. became the site of the worst mass killing in the city’s history.

Donald “Juice” Williams, a street-level crack dealer who used the house as a base for his drug ring, was executed along with his mother and four teenage friends, allegedly by an associate bent on revenge.

The murders devastated the largely working-class neighborhood and helped brand Flint as Cracktown, USA.

Night of death

In the months before he was killed, Williams, 21, ran a small to medium-sized drug ring that competed with other drug gangs.

Bedecked in flashy rings, a gold medallion and designer sweat suits, he was known to tool around in a limousine like a street celebrity.

Although turf battles with other gangs sometimes led to violence, it was politics within his own ranks that apparently led to Williams’ demise.

Police said Terry “Head Man” Morris, a gang lieutenant and enforcer who was feuding with Williams over a series of recent incidents, shot Williams in the head as he lay on a couch.

Also killed were Williams’ mother, Mary L. Williams, 44, along with Darryol Humphrey, 20, Treasie Spicer, 18, Deaundric Collins, 18, and Andre Adams, 17. Some were shot numerous times.

Morris, then 17, allegedly owed Williams for smoking up crack he was supposed to be selling.

On the night of the murders, Williams had lined up Morris and several other operatives in a back bedroom of the bungalow and interrogated them about a missing sweat suit, firing shots at their feet. Later, a humiliated Morris shot Williams as he lay on the couch, then systematically gunned down the other victims, police said.

Based largely on circumstantial evidence and the testimony of a friend who said Morris told him he did the killings, Morris was convicted several months later in Genesee County Circuit Court. He was sentenced to eight life prison terms.

Creeping menace

Police and social workers trace crack’s arrival in Flint to 1983 or 1984. Its trade spawned turf battles among rival drug rings, and drive-by shootings were a daily occurrence, police said.

Murder victims typically were teenage males.

Dealers from Detroit ran crack houses on Flint’s north side, hoping to cash in on the higher crack prices here. Consequently, young men from Detroit and elsewhere began showing up dead on the street and in abandoned houses.

The late 1980s also marked the emergence of organized street gangs in Flint. And drugs were only part of their activity.

Emulating high-profile gangs in Los Angeles and New York, Flint gangs began wearing colors and staking out neighborhoods as territory.

Police identified groups known as the D-Boys, P-Boys (or Project Boys), Six-Os, Selby Hood and the South End Boys. Gangs often recruited their mostly teenaged membership through coercion and intimidation and put them through initiation rites. They often cruised the streets better armed than the police; some crime scenes were littered with shell casings.

But it was the brutality of the crack-driven murders that often stunned hardened cops, prosecutors and judges.

As the decade ended, three young Flint men and a juvenile were charged and convicted in the murder of a 19-year-old drug dealer who was tortured for days with hot knives and other objects, then bludgeoned with a concrete block after an assailant tried to hang him with a bedsheet.

Witnesses testified that Lawrence White was killed over a missing bag of crack and a missing handgun.

The murder rate did not fall significantly until 1995, reaching a modern low of 19 in 1997.

“I’ve seen a decline in the drug-related homicides and drive-by shootings,” said Flint Officer Harlon Green, who worked in street enforcement during the height of the crack boom.

“In ’85, ’86 and ’87, when we were dealing with Omar Spearman doing a drive-by a day, it was mostly gangs and drugs.

“There is still a lot of street dealing, but it’s not half as bad as it was in the ’80s and early ’90s,” Green said. “I don’t see the level of organization we had in the ’80s and early ’90s.”

Many of the players in the crack trade during the late 1980s and early ’90s have been convicted, killed or otherwise eliminated, police say.

Spearman, whom a federal agent once described as the most feared man in Flint, was sentenced to life in prison in 1996 for the drug-related murders of two people and operating a continuing criminal enterprise.

With the onset of laws boosting penalties for dealing crack, many peddlers switched to powder cocaine. Powder cocaine never brought the violence associated with the more intense and addictive high of crack, Green said.

“Back when I was really young working narcotics, I’d see the true crackheads walking down the street. You don’t see them much anymore.”

Fading legacy

Today, the scene in the neighborhood around E. Russell is different. Mary Rodriguez leaned through her armor-guarded front door, gazed toward the now-nondescript house across the street where Williams and the five others died and struggled to describe even a condensed version of the memory.

“It was just one of those awful times that something bad happened,” said Rodriguez, who asked that her real name not be used.

The former house of horrors looks clean and unremarkable, a fairly typical home in a usually quiet neighborhood. A new apartment complex is under construction to the north, literally touching the back yards along the north side of E. Russell.

As it often is these days, the house is vacant.

“Nobody stays there very long,” said Rodriguez. “Some don’t know about the killings and, sometimes, they find out later on. They should have tore it down. Nobody is going to stay there, especially when they find out that that’s the history of it.”

A handful of boarded-up homes dot the street, particularly near N. Saginaw Street. But neighbors today are more likely to complain about speeding cars than about crime and drug dealing.

 

Journal Photo / Steve Jessmore The north Flint house sits vacant now.

Back to top

Index
Starting point for the 20th Century series. Includes an overview of all of the decades.