The Hope A Tire Changer Has

As if if two shootings that wounded a deputy and a suspect, and a fusillade that struck a woman's vehicle in the Village of the Arts on Wednesday was not enough, Friday saw an unarmed man gunned down by three other men at a garage at 3101 Third St. W., not far from the DeSoto Mall.

People who ask what's going on in Manatee County get some of the answers from both of the local papers, but none of the context. It's the eighth homicide in the county so far this year.

The Sarasota Herald-Tribune treats the story of the shooting of a 25-year old tire changer at a Bradenton garage pretty much as a matter-of-fact event, but at least it wasn't a new brief. The Trib has his name; the Herald doesn't - out of concern for his family - but it does humanize the victim and the scene.

Reporter Sylvia Lim, who cleaned up the mess of the Wednesday shootings in Friday's paper, quotes the owner as saying the young Puerto Rican was "family" to him and that he had worked there since coming here from Puerto Rico seven years ago.

Lim tells us that as was their tradition, 15 or so men (and probably their girlfriends) were planning to gather later and get haircuts at the garage as they drank and talked. The owner, a guy named Danny, said Jose's girlfriend, who was not named, "was a wreck" after she drove to the hospital and learned there of his death en route in an ambulance.

Who was he? The Trib says his parents are still in Puerto Rico, and that "his friend" Danny says he "liked to work." In the Herald, Danny is his boss and is quoted as saying, "I was his family here. He was like my son."

Herald photographer Grant Jefferies caught a moving image of three young women tearfully embracing outside the garage, and a strong one of detectives with guns drawn peering into a shed.

Police told the Herald they found a gun, bullet shells and a small quantity of drugs at the scene, and quote Sheriff's spokesman Randy Warren as saying "it's more than likely drugs were involved."

That's the end of the story for most readers, who once they learn drugs were involved don't care to know if the drugs and gun were his or not, or what role, if any, they played in his death.

The Trib notes that a man suffering from gunshot wounds was admitted to faraway Lakewood Ranch Medical Center in critical condition, and that it was too early to say if there was a link between the two shootings. The Herald has the story of that second shooting, but in an unrelated news brief.

Starting near the new Lowe's on 14th St. West, 30th Ave. W. is mainly an East-West connector to schools, churches, homes and small businesses where a man can still find affordable mechanics, feeding mostly into 9th St. W and the Green Bridge to Palmetto. I don't get over to the 3rd St. area except on Election Day, when the heavily Democratic precincts in the Samoset neighborhood are busy.

There are a lot of unhopeful possibilities the detectives will ponder. It well could be that if he was involved in the drug trade at all - which isn't known right now - the victim hadn't paid his "rent" to local gangs for the right to sell drugs, or that he'd borrowed drugs from a street-level distributor and not paid up when they were sold. It could have been that the drugs and gun were planted by the killers, or that he was killed by someone he knew over a girl - his girlfriend was in the garage at the time - and that the guns and drugs were irrelevant. Or anything else - and I'm not so sure that matters now.

The fact that a man's brains are blown out in broad daylight in front of his friends on a busy street has resonance immediately after the fact, but for not much longer. Readers know that Jose was preceded in his violent death by any number of young men who have been shot, beaten and stabbed in, around and outside of bars and nightclubs, in alleys and on street corners surrounding downtown Bradenton.

Having seen far more than my share of brains scattered on sidewalks in Hollywood, California - during the crack wars, it was one of the most violent places in America - I am not blase. Many of the people who were shot in my Ivar Hill neighborhood had come as kids to our Christmas posadas, or brought their own kids, and some were peole who secretly cheered our Neighborhood Watch patrols when we made arrests that took violent felons off the streets. I knew who they were, or someone who knew them; that was probably the reason they spared my life.

But when we first came to quiet and peaceful Bradenton, we noticed that drug-related violence was growing rapidly in what is a tiny city of just 53,000 people, albeit part of a fast-growing metropolitan region where the building permits flow like gravy.

We had to ask ourselves, after all, with the very large number of retired seniors here, where do all the customers to support a small army of crack and pot dealers come from? And where does that army come from, too?

The answer is that a mostly invisible population of low-income minorities and whites, the people who toil in garages and sweep beauty salons, who landscape our lawns, paint our homes and sheds, round up shopping carts and wash cars - if they get work at all - sometimes treat their dead-end lives like so much trash to be tossed away on $10 hits of crack, whether they use it themselves, sell it to others, or deal it to the rich kids from Sarasota and Lakewood Ranch. Inwardly, quietly, many of them know their lives may be worthless and their futures short.

The Herald and the Trib are not yet providing this needed context for the many aimless murders, fusillades and gunbattles, the robberies, burglaries and petty thefts that threaten even their own future; scared people don't read newspapers (they stay home and watch tv), and they don't go out much.

Here is the that missing context: These crimes are about hope, and the lack of it. And hope is an education.

Hope for this community, obviously, is not all that bright now, but county commision and school board officials are planning to move it even further away. While it may be too late for a tire changer from Puerto Rico to get a leg up on life, it's not too late for thousands of other low-income kids like him whose other option is to run in place - and fear - until they die.

Yet, while Jose and his friends are dying or going to jail downtown, Lakewood Ranch is getting the new $61 million Manatee Technical Institute for their sons and daughters, who live in relative luxury far from the communnities like West Samoset where low-income people like Jose live.

And these low-income people desperately need vocational training, and the opportunities it brings, while Lakewood Ranch parents hope their kids will get into a good college. In state tests this year, their school was rated "A" and Braden River High was rated "B," while over on 34th St. West, Bayshore High, like Palmetto High and Manatee High, was rated "D."

Downtown kids want to go to college, too, but often - way too often - they don't. At the NAACP Freedom Day Dinner last year, Superintendent Roger Dearing told us that only 10 percent of black seniors read at grade level; it's a shameful story of neglect that deprives black communities of a future.

But instead of tearing down the small, aging buildings on the present MTI campus on 34th Street West (whose neighbors welcome it, by the way - and my wife and daughter went there) and rebuilding the campus with new four-story buildings better equipped for training well-paid craftsmen and tradespeople, the school board and county commission are quietly conspiring to take this one precious resource away from poorer neighborhoods and into the bosom of wealthy Lakewood Ranch, where would-be neighbors are fighting against it tooth and nail.

The irony is that by bringing it there, the parents of Lakewood Ranch inadvertently have commissioned a portrait of their own childrens' future, because that's where many of them may end up when it turns out Florida's curriculum was insufficient to prepare them for the academic rigors of a good college.

And if the newspapers can't find more inspiration in the life a 25-year-old tire changer who worked hard and did a good job at a tire shop on 3rd Street, maybe their hearts are hardened to the poor. As for me, I know who Jose Rodriguez is - or someone just like him. I wish he could have gotten into MTI, learned auto repair, married his girlfriend, had children and moved to a better neighborhood.

I'll bet you that he did, too.