Ever vigilant: Bonnie Stratton attended a candlelight ceremony this week in honor of her longtime partner, who was murdered in Port Richmond one year ago (photo by G.W. Miller III).

Murder Wrap

The numbers may be down, but homicide still plagues the city.

by G.W. Miller III

Bonnie Stratton’s order from JC Penney arrived in the mail a few weeks before Christmas. The box contained seat covers for her mother and underwear for her son, as well as curtains for herself. As she rifled through the package, she discovered another item–black ankle-high boots with 2-inch heels.

Stratton was confused because she hadn’t ordered shoes, and there was no mention of them on the itemized receipt.

The shoes were a size 8. They fit perfectly.

Then Stratton realized what happened.

“Seamus sent these to me,” she said, referring to her deceased boyfriend, Seamus O’Neill. “It’s like a miracle. Seamus got me shoes for Christmas.”

O’Neill, a longtime bartender at Port Richmond’s My Blue Heaven, was murdered on Jan. 3, 2008. The 60-year-old was beaten to death with a baseball bat, wrapped in a plastic tarp and left in the basement of McWhitey’s, another bar nearby.

Stratton and O’Neill’s brother discovered the body the next day.

“I can hardly get up in the morning now,” says Stratton, who also tends bar at My Blue Heaven. “He was my soulmate.” The couple had been together for 10 years.

Four days after the murder, Michael Nutter gave an inspiring inauguration speech, in which he vowed to reduce the city’s homicide rate 30 to 50 percent over the next three to five years.

Once in office, the new mayor declared a crime emergency, giving Police Commissioner Charles Ramsey and his staff three weeks to devise a plan of action to curb the violence that ended 1,523 lives during the previous four years.

Ramsey’s plan—which revolved around putting more officers on the street and capturing people with outstanding warrants—sought to reduce homicides by 25 percent.

If the latest crime statistics are a harbinger of things to come, Philadelphians can breathe a sigh of relief; violent crime in the city was down last year, though the reduction in homicides fell short of Ramsey’s goal. In 2008, 332 people were murdered, a 15 percent decrease from 2007’s 392.

“While we’ve had some success, our homicides are still way too high,” says Deputy Commissioner Richard Ross, who oversees field operations for the police department.

The department flooded the streets with 200 additional uniformed cops, including an entire police academy class of 90 new officers. The rookies spent the summer walking beats in high-crime neighborhoods.

As a sign of commitment and solidarity, the commissioner and other top brass donned uniforms rather than suits, and were assigned shifts on the beat.

“Everything revolves around patrol,” says Ross. “When everyone sees that patrol is truly the backbone and it’s not just rhetoric, then I think it goes a long way.”

According to Ross, one of the solutions to the crime crisis is removing the perpetrators from the streets, a process that helps save lives and eliminate the potential for retaliation. Police made arrests on more than 75 percent of 2008’s homicides, whereas the clearance rate for 2007 was around 58 percent.

None of these crime-fighting tactics—targeting historically violent areas and flooding the streets with police—are new, but Ross believes that applying all the strategies at once has had an impact.

“To me, the police do matter as it relates to violent crime,” he says. “I know some social scientists will make arguments to the contrary.”

As the police continue to analyze crime statistics, they’ll keep tweaking their patrolling, Ross says.

“There is nobody, including Commissioner Ramsey himself, who is satisfied with the success we’ve had,” he says.

Given the callousness of the violence carried out last year, some residents say it’s too soon to consider Killadelphia safe.

“The murder rate is down but it’s not down enough,” says Victoria Greene, the founder of the Germantown-based anticrime organization Every Murder Is Real (EMIR). “People are encouraged but they still don’t feel safe.”

And with good reason: Four police officers were killed in the city last year, including Highway Patrol Officer Patrick McDonald, who was shot multiple times by a convicted felon who was on the lam.

Miles Mack, the founder of a youth basketball league in Mantua, was murdered in front of 200 people during a championship ceremony in September.

Sixteen-year-old Tavin Rutledge was shot in the head in February after he struck a person with a snowball.

Four Simon Gratz High School students are in jail pending a murder trial after they allegedly pummeled a man on the subway platform at 13th and Market.

“We’ve got to wake up and work with these children,” Greene pleads. “They can either become predators or victims.”

Greene and her team counsel families dealing with murder and run programs for at-risk youth in an effort to prevent future violence. She started the organization in 1999, two years after her 20-year-old son, Emir Greene, was murdered in Germantown. The group now works with roughly 100 children every year.

The demand for Greene’s services hasn’t slowed, she says. To make matters worse, the economy has crippled federal, state and municipal spending.

“What’s really scary is the budget cuts and how that’s going to affect the streets,” she says. After all, Philadelphia’s poverty rate is already one of the highest of any major U.S. city.

Ultimately, statistics can’t properly tell the story of what’s lost to violence.

“I’ve been around the world three times,” Bonnie Stratton remembers Seamus O’Neill saying, “and this is the nicest place I’ve been to.”

A Belfast native, O’Neill came to Port Richmond more than 30 years ago when he couldn’t find work back home. Once in Philadelphia, he drove a truck for a while and then started tending bar.

Every St. Patrick’s Day O’Neill would sport a tuxedo with a green tie and stumble to all the bars in the neighborhood. He was the kind of guy who would walk into the room, grab a drink and start telling tales in his thick Irish brogue, Stratton says. Within a few minutes, a crowd would be gathered around him, laughing hysterically.

“If you didn’t have a good time around him, it was your own fault!” she says.

Their courtship never passed the honeymoon stage, Stratton says. They regularly went out to dinner, saw bands, danced and traveled. O’Neill frequently brought gifts home for her, and the two were always together.

“It was bliss,” Stratton says. “We were so in love.”