Life in Millerville
Rampant drug dealing, shootings and loitering drives residents, businesses and authorities to action
By J.M. BROWN/Times-Herald staff writer
Article Launched: 02/04/2007 08:36:08 AM PST
Vallejo police officers arrest a transient man in Millerville last week after finding three crackpipes in his possession. In a two-week crackdown of the troubled neighborhood, police made 61 arrests. Residents and business owners are now working together with law enforcement and community service agencies to clean up the area for good. (J.M. Brown/Times-Herald) As several kids bounce up and down inside an inflatable jumping house on the front lawn for a Thanksgiving weekend barbecue, shots suddenly ring out 50 yards away.
Panicked, Regina dashes outside to collect her children. As she looks up, she sees bullets crisscross Ohio Street like some Wild West shoot-out.
Donna, a neighbor on Springs Road in Vallejo, hits the floor of her apartment, afraid a stray bullet might shatter a window and strike her.
There were so many bullets "you couldn't even count," Donna recalls. "That night I saw my death."
* * * *
This is life in Millerville, a cluster of two dozen streets and alleys where drug dealers threaten residents, intimidate business owners and flagrantly
A map of Millerville, a section of Vallejo bordered by Tuolumne Street to the west, Tennessee Street to the north, Mariposa to the east and Solano Avenue to the south and south east. (J.M. Brown/Times-Herald) conduct their transactions regardless of who might see. Shootings, car burglaries, graffiti, public urination, fights, illegal dumping, loitering and transient camping are commonplace.
Police say it's easily one of the most dangerous parts of Vallejo. Officers made 61 arrests during a two-week crackdown in December, have shuttered several suspected drug dens and evicted problem tenants from other homes.
Past attempts to clean up Millerville have only temporarily pushed the crime elsewhere,
and then it returns "with a vengeance," as one activist put it. But there is new momentum for lasting change in Millerville.
For the first time, residents and business owners are partnering with City Hall, police, prosecutors and community service agencies to abate the widespread narcotics trade and pressure two merchants who many say either create refuge for criminals or turn a blind eye to them.
The private and public decision-makers who can affect the most change say they are committed
to fixing Millerville for good. Officials say tougher prosecution of drug and gang cases, public nuisance lawsuits, a neighborhood watch and code enforcement crackdowns are all in the works.
"I didn't think anybody could do anything for us," said Regina, who longs for the day her three children can play safely outside again.
Taking back the streets
Fighting Back Partnership, the city's non-profit community renewal arm, has initiated a revitalization effort in Millerville by bringing together the resident and business groups, and coordinating with law enforcement.
Officials say it could take more than six months to complete the agency's eight-point plan for renewal. The key will be getting more neighbors and business owners at future meetings to learn how to keep crime logs and form permanent watch groups.
"Hopefully, the residents and business community will learn from past mistakes," said John Allen, Fighting Back's health advocates project director. There has been past reluctance in the area to organize around fighting crime, he said.
Citizens in other areas - like Washington Park and the Westwood Avenue corridor - have had great success cleaning up their streets using Fighting Back's revitalization plan, Allen said. The process calls for block meetings, removing abandoned vehicles and citing neglected properties.
Police continue heavy patrols in Millerville, while code enforcement officers work to clean up illegal dumping, identify vacant houses, cite property owners for maintenance problems, fix shot-out street lights and wash over graffiti.
In Millerville last year, Code Enforcement investigated 143 illegal dumping cases and more than two dozen property maintenance issues, officials said. But with only three code enforcement investigators to cover nearly 40,000 properties in Vallejo, the department is stretched thin.
Senior Code Enforcement Officer Dong Yoo said if broken windows aren't repaired and trash is left to rot, drug dealers assume "nobody cares about that area" and make it their turf. "The more graffiti and trash you have, the more comfortable the bad elements are."
District Attorney David Paulson said he is trying to establish a community prosecutor focused on Vallejo. Funded partially by collected fines, the position would pursue civil and criminal cases involving drugs, gangs, environmental damage and consumer causes.
At Paulson's suggestion, business and property owners are also discussing public nuisance lawsuits against two Tuolumne Street stores - U-Know Smoke Shop and Town Market.
The smoke shop owner admittedly sells paraphernalia commonly used for using illicit drugs, but says the devices are for tobacco only. The Town Market's longtime owners bristle at accusations that they encourage crime by selling single cigarettes and ignoring loitering in front of their store.
It can be a 'nightmare'
Bordered by Tuolumne Street to the west, Tennessee Street to the north, Mariposa Street to the east and Solano Avenue to the south and south east, Millerville is named for a family who once lived in the neighborhood, those familiar with the area's history say.
Besides car repair shops, churches, law firms and a bar, the neighborhood is also home to the courthouse and probation and parole offices - making its high crime rate all the more alarming. Many of its working-class neighborhood homes are rental properties.
More than a dozen recent interviews with current and former Millerville residents, business owners and authorities paint a dismal picture. Many longtime folks say the neighborhood has always had its problems, but recent years have been among the worst.
Police recorded more than 1,700 service calls in Millerville - roughly five a day - during a one-year period ending in October. Of the 61 arrests during a two-week crackdown ordered by Chief Robert Nichelini, only nine of those people were from Millerville. Police say that means dealers and buyers use the neighborhood only as a rendezvous point.
The common sentiment among those pushing for the cleanup is that the crime and blight were "getting to the point where we had to do something," said former City Councilmember Dan Donahue, who runs a Millerville insurance firm. "We've just got to keep pressure on it," he said.
Donahue recently began organizing merchants along the Tuolumne Street corridor - Millerville's main drag - to meet with authorities. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the business group, a handful of residents were meeting with other officials to tackle the problems.
The groups learned about each other through Fighting Back Partnership and will soon join forces.
Regina, the Ohio Street mom, called Fighting Back last year. She brought a dozen neighbors with her to an initial meeting - twice the number Fighting Back says usually shows up to form a watch group. (Regina is not her real name. She and three residents were interviewed on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation from drug dealers. The Times-Herald assigned them names to better tell their stories.)
The residents complain of large groups of teenagers loitering or gambling in front of houses and in alleys every day. Drug-related traffic is brazen, usually in broad daylight.
Often, a teenager gets a cell phone call, then picks up something hidden in a palm tree or behind the tire of a parked car, residents say. Within minutes, a car passes by and the teen sticks his hand in the car. The deal is done. Sometimes, residents say, buyers have children in the car.
On a recent afternoon, the Times-Herald saw a similar scenario from inside a resident's Ohio Street home. Around 3:30 p.m., a half dozen young men began congregating on the sidewalk, spilling out into the street.
A car pulled up and blocked the street for five minutes, forcing other vehicles to drive around it. One man spoke to the driver, and then they parted ways. Although no drug deal was witnessed with certainty, the resident, Victoria, said she recognized at least one man who she has seen make other transactions.
Some residents, like Victoria, aggressively fend off dealers. She confronts them, takes their pictures and in plain view writes down license plates of their customers. Other residents, scared of retaliation, watch from their windows and call police when deals go down.
Fighting Back's Allen said Victoria's proactive approach is "the kind of involvement we could not get" previously from many Millerville residents.
When the city would address a residents' concern in the past, "they thought that their problems were fixed." They did not understand the neighborhood's "underlying social problems," Allen said.
Victoria said she does not care if dealers notice her vigilance. When one troublemaker sarcastically asked to pose for her camera, she said she shot back with an equally sarcastic "thank you" and snapped the photo.
Victoria runs an informal daycare center inside her home, and said, "I can't have parents come in and see this type of thing going on." She said she wants to tell the dealers: "This is where I have to live, and you are not going to take it over."
She cut down eight bushes in her front yard to keep dealers from hiding their drugs. She has also lodged numerous complaints about the dim light at a nearby intersection that she says gives dealers and buyers refuge.
Residents say the most disturbing incident in recent years was the Thanksgiving weekend shooting, casings from which were found in Victoria's front yard. Police said they responded to the incident, but were unable to make any arrests.
While the shooting was terrifying, Victoria's neighbor, Regina, said she also was frightened when she and her husband once returned from a late-night dance to find the street blocked with cars.
When the couple asked someone to move a car so they could pass through, she said a man stuck his hand in his jacket to suggest he had a gun. "What do you think about this?" she said, mimicking the motion.
Because she feels threatened, the most proactive thing Regina can do is recruit nearby neighbors like Donna to attend the revitalization meetings. Donna no longer allows her grandchildren to visit because of the danger, and said she lacks the nerve to confront dealers.
"You can't even look at them - then they think something is wrong," Donna said. "At certain times, we don't even think about going out of the house because we don't know what's going to happen."
Another neighbor, Sarah, said she no longer takes her 2-year-old daughter on stroller walks, and her 10-year-old brother doesn't ride his bike since being solicited by a dealer. Their father found casings in their yard from the November shooting, and his truck was struck by some of the bullets, Sarah said.
Pam Keith, a Solano Community College trustee and 17-year Millerville resident, hopes to add a public voice to her fellow residents' fight.
"I don't know why by both buyers and sellers come to Millerville," Keith said. "Someone coming from Glen Cove to buy drugs in my neighborhood, they won't if they see a black-and-white coming down the street."
Keith said many residents haven't organized in the past because they "feel so disempowered."
"When you've got drive-bys going on in your front yard, it's hard to go down (to City Hall) and talk about people," Keith said. "Even if they knew what to do, nobody would listen to them anyway."
Before she had political clout, Greater Vallejo Recreation District board member Liat Meitzenheimer took matters into her own hands years ago when she lived in Millerville. A drug dealer known to South Vallejo started coming into the neighborhood, buying kids ice cream and sucking up to their mothers.
"I knew what he was up to," she said, and told him, "'I don't want you buying my son anything.'"
Meitzenheimer started calling police when drug dealers congregated. But she said police dispatchers would call out her address over the radio, which dealers would hear on their scanners. "All of them start looking at my house," she said.
Punks threatened her then teenage son and shot out her front window with a pellet gun. Eventually, she said she walked outside and told one dealer, "Your beef is with me - my son doesn't have anything to do with this."
"My son thought I was losing my mind," she said.
Although living in Millerville "was a nightmare," she resisted suggestions to move. Instead, she kept her son at a relative's house in Fairfield until things cooled down.
"It was too nerve-racking," she said, "[but] I wanted them to know I am going to continue calling the police."
Meitzenheimer and Keith said they are glad businesses plan to work with residents to kick out Millerville's bad elements.
"A lot of businesses consider the residents a problem - we are not the problem," Keith said. "You lock your business and go home. We live with this 24-7."
Businesses fight back
Jim Boyle, owner of Regal Collision Repair, has lived with the crime just as intimately during the last two decades. Like many area business owners, he says years of drug dealing and blight have cut into his bottom line.
His windows have been shot out by stray bullets, he's seen too many drug deals to count, and the loitering in front of Town Market across the street keeps business away. He said insurance officials have called him to say their customers refused to visit his shop because, they said, "I am not going into that neighborhood."
Flagrant drug use and public urination are frequent eyesores. "You can smell them smoking weed all the way over here," he said, pointing across the street.
"We never used to be afraid in this neighborhood," said Boyle, who took over the business in 1998 after having worked there since the 1980s. "Now we're afraid. It's the worst we've ever seen here."
Ted Deeming and Ron Tiffany, partners in Vallejo German Car Clinic, said vehicles line up on the first and 15th of the month, payday, to buy drugs on Tuolumne Street. Dealers stand outside, flash a hand signal and pass off something to approaching vehicles.
"It was so obvious - if a blind man came along, he could see what they were doing," Tiffany said.
Nervous customers will no longer leave their vehicles overnight or drop them off early in the morning, Deeming said.
Deeming, whose shop is sandwiched between the U-Know Smoke Shop and Town Market, said he likes the smoke shop owner but said the store "really changed the atmosphere here" with "so many people hanging around."
Business owners are not unified about filing a public nuisance lawsuit against the smoke shop or Town Market. Some are considering it, while others want authorities to simply limit what the stores can sell.
Authorities say the smoke shop may sell paraphernalia commonly used for smoking illegal drugs because the owner claims the devices are for smoking tobacco only. However, there may be more authorities can do if they find either the Town Market or smoke shop is selling single cigarettes.
During a recent meeting, the Solano County district attorney encouraged local business owners to consider a suit, and said there are other ways he can pursue fines. He asked that those means not be disclosed publicly, citing an adverse affect on future investigations.
Two years ago, Vallejo residents successfully helped evict the owner of another smoke shop. A judge ruled that the owner of the former Zozo's shop on Tennessee Street had to pay $75,000 in damages to residents. Police backed the claims.
Stores on defensive
Mohamed Jallab, owner of U-Know Smoke Shop, said other Millerville business owners should not point the finger at him.
In an interview, he said he does not know "why they are blaming me." The neighborhood "had been bad for a long time" before he arrived around five years ago, he said.
Although the business owners have invited him to meetings, he said he cannot attend because he has no employees to mind the store.
"I work just like anybody else," said Jallab. "I work seven days a week 13 hours a day like everyone else."
All of the store's colorful bongs and pipes are for smoking tobacco only, he said. He has posted signs to reinforce the point. Jallab denied there is any loitering in front of his shop.
The Town Market owners also refute accusations that they attract a criminal element by allowing loitering and selling single cigarettes.
Owner Min Yun, who has run the store for 14 years with husband Kwan Yun, denied that she sells single cigarettes.
(But Boyle, who owns the car repair store across the street, said his employees have bought single cigarettes from the store. One of his employees confirmed it.)
As for loitering complaints, Min Yun said "of course there is a lot of traffic" because her market is a convenience store. Often, she said, she and her husband can't see what is happening outside their store.
If they see drug deals or other problems, she asks people to leave, but being too aggressive risks alienating customers and courting retaliation, they say. "If I holler at customers, I don't get any customers," Kwan Yun said.
Because Min Yun said her market caters to "low-income people," that sometimes means serving transients.
"All the time it doesn't look good, but that's the way it is," she said. "They have their ways to survive. I have my ways to survive."
Min Yun attended one recent meeting of Millerville business owners and said she has "tried to support the community in what they tried to do - that's why we try to keep the area clean."
She said she, too, is concerned about the smoke shop, saying the smoking devices "maybe looks bad for us, too. It looks suspicious."
Fighting Back's Allen said the smoke shop is "a front for paraphernalia. Customers don't go very far from the smoke shop before they start doing the drugs."
Ted Correy, who participated a decade ago in the city first's neighborhood revitalization program in the Washington Park area, said Fighting Back's formula of complete community cooperation will work for Millerville.
"We educate and empower them," said Correy, who is now part of the agency's neighborhood cleanup team. "They are starting to organize because they are fed up, and they see we are coming into help them."
AND SOMETHING HAPPEND BY BUDS ON SPRINGS TODAY....SOMEONE GOT SHOT...IT WAS TAPED OFF AT THE GAS STATION FOR A FEW HOURS...
Rampant drug dealing, shootings and loitering drives residents, businesses and authorities to action
By J.M. BROWN/Times-Herald staff writer
Article Launched: 02/04/2007 08:36:08 AM PST
Vallejo police officers arrest a transient man in Millerville last week after finding three crackpipes in his possession. In a two-week crackdown of the troubled neighborhood, police made 61 arrests. Residents and business owners are now working together with law enforcement and community service agencies to clean up the area for good. (J.M. Brown/Times-Herald) As several kids bounce up and down inside an inflatable jumping house on the front lawn for a Thanksgiving weekend barbecue, shots suddenly ring out 50 yards away.
Panicked, Regina dashes outside to collect her children. As she looks up, she sees bullets crisscross Ohio Street like some Wild West shoot-out.
Donna, a neighbor on Springs Road in Vallejo, hits the floor of her apartment, afraid a stray bullet might shatter a window and strike her.
There were so many bullets "you couldn't even count," Donna recalls. "That night I saw my death."
* * * *
This is life in Millerville, a cluster of two dozen streets and alleys where drug dealers threaten residents, intimidate business owners and flagrantly
A map of Millerville, a section of Vallejo bordered by Tuolumne Street to the west, Tennessee Street to the north, Mariposa to the east and Solano Avenue to the south and south east. (J.M. Brown/Times-Herald) conduct their transactions regardless of who might see. Shootings, car burglaries, graffiti, public urination, fights, illegal dumping, loitering and transient camping are commonplace.
Police say it's easily one of the most dangerous parts of Vallejo. Officers made 61 arrests during a two-week crackdown in December, have shuttered several suspected drug dens and evicted problem tenants from other homes.
Past attempts to clean up Millerville have only temporarily pushed the crime elsewhere,
and then it returns "with a vengeance," as one activist put it. But there is new momentum for lasting change in Millerville.
For the first time, residents and business owners are partnering with City Hall, police, prosecutors and community service agencies to abate the widespread narcotics trade and pressure two merchants who many say either create refuge for criminals or turn a blind eye to them.
The private and public decision-makers who can affect the most change say they are committed
to fixing Millerville for good. Officials say tougher prosecution of drug and gang cases, public nuisance lawsuits, a neighborhood watch and code enforcement crackdowns are all in the works.
"I didn't think anybody could do anything for us," said Regina, who longs for the day her three children can play safely outside again.
Taking back the streets
Fighting Back Partnership, the city's non-profit community renewal arm, has initiated a revitalization effort in Millerville by bringing together the resident and business groups, and coordinating with law enforcement.
Officials say it could take more than six months to complete the agency's eight-point plan for renewal. The key will be getting more neighbors and business owners at future meetings to learn how to keep crime logs and form permanent watch groups.
"Hopefully, the residents and business community will learn from past mistakes," said John Allen, Fighting Back's health advocates project director. There has been past reluctance in the area to organize around fighting crime, he said.
Citizens in other areas - like Washington Park and the Westwood Avenue corridor - have had great success cleaning up their streets using Fighting Back's revitalization plan, Allen said. The process calls for block meetings, removing abandoned vehicles and citing neglected properties.
Police continue heavy patrols in Millerville, while code enforcement officers work to clean up illegal dumping, identify vacant houses, cite property owners for maintenance problems, fix shot-out street lights and wash over graffiti.
In Millerville last year, Code Enforcement investigated 143 illegal dumping cases and more than two dozen property maintenance issues, officials said. But with only three code enforcement investigators to cover nearly 40,000 properties in Vallejo, the department is stretched thin.
Senior Code Enforcement Officer Dong Yoo said if broken windows aren't repaired and trash is left to rot, drug dealers assume "nobody cares about that area" and make it their turf. "The more graffiti and trash you have, the more comfortable the bad elements are."
District Attorney David Paulson said he is trying to establish a community prosecutor focused on Vallejo. Funded partially by collected fines, the position would pursue civil and criminal cases involving drugs, gangs, environmental damage and consumer causes.
At Paulson's suggestion, business and property owners are also discussing public nuisance lawsuits against two Tuolumne Street stores - U-Know Smoke Shop and Town Market.
The smoke shop owner admittedly sells paraphernalia commonly used for using illicit drugs, but says the devices are for tobacco only. The Town Market's longtime owners bristle at accusations that they encourage crime by selling single cigarettes and ignoring loitering in front of their store.
It can be a 'nightmare'
Bordered by Tuolumne Street to the west, Tennessee Street to the north, Mariposa Street to the east and Solano Avenue to the south and south east, Millerville is named for a family who once lived in the neighborhood, those familiar with the area's history say.
Besides car repair shops, churches, law firms and a bar, the neighborhood is also home to the courthouse and probation and parole offices - making its high crime rate all the more alarming. Many of its working-class neighborhood homes are rental properties.
More than a dozen recent interviews with current and former Millerville residents, business owners and authorities paint a dismal picture. Many longtime folks say the neighborhood has always had its problems, but recent years have been among the worst.
Police recorded more than 1,700 service calls in Millerville - roughly five a day - during a one-year period ending in October. Of the 61 arrests during a two-week crackdown ordered by Chief Robert Nichelini, only nine of those people were from Millerville. Police say that means dealers and buyers use the neighborhood only as a rendezvous point.
The common sentiment among those pushing for the cleanup is that the crime and blight were "getting to the point where we had to do something," said former City Councilmember Dan Donahue, who runs a Millerville insurance firm. "We've just got to keep pressure on it," he said.
Donahue recently began organizing merchants along the Tuolumne Street corridor - Millerville's main drag - to meet with authorities. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the business group, a handful of residents were meeting with other officials to tackle the problems.
The groups learned about each other through Fighting Back Partnership and will soon join forces.
Regina, the Ohio Street mom, called Fighting Back last year. She brought a dozen neighbors with her to an initial meeting - twice the number Fighting Back says usually shows up to form a watch group. (Regina is not her real name. She and three residents were interviewed on the condition of anonymity, citing fears of retaliation from drug dealers. The Times-Herald assigned them names to better tell their stories.)
The residents complain of large groups of teenagers loitering or gambling in front of houses and in alleys every day. Drug-related traffic is brazen, usually in broad daylight.
Often, a teenager gets a cell phone call, then picks up something hidden in a palm tree or behind the tire of a parked car, residents say. Within minutes, a car passes by and the teen sticks his hand in the car. The deal is done. Sometimes, residents say, buyers have children in the car.
On a recent afternoon, the Times-Herald saw a similar scenario from inside a resident's Ohio Street home. Around 3:30 p.m., a half dozen young men began congregating on the sidewalk, spilling out into the street.
A car pulled up and blocked the street for five minutes, forcing other vehicles to drive around it. One man spoke to the driver, and then they parted ways. Although no drug deal was witnessed with certainty, the resident, Victoria, said she recognized at least one man who she has seen make other transactions.
Some residents, like Victoria, aggressively fend off dealers. She confronts them, takes their pictures and in plain view writes down license plates of their customers. Other residents, scared of retaliation, watch from their windows and call police when deals go down.
Fighting Back's Allen said Victoria's proactive approach is "the kind of involvement we could not get" previously from many Millerville residents.
When the city would address a residents' concern in the past, "they thought that their problems were fixed." They did not understand the neighborhood's "underlying social problems," Allen said.
Victoria said she does not care if dealers notice her vigilance. When one troublemaker sarcastically asked to pose for her camera, she said she shot back with an equally sarcastic "thank you" and snapped the photo.
Victoria runs an informal daycare center inside her home, and said, "I can't have parents come in and see this type of thing going on." She said she wants to tell the dealers: "This is where I have to live, and you are not going to take it over."
She cut down eight bushes in her front yard to keep dealers from hiding their drugs. She has also lodged numerous complaints about the dim light at a nearby intersection that she says gives dealers and buyers refuge.
Residents say the most disturbing incident in recent years was the Thanksgiving weekend shooting, casings from which were found in Victoria's front yard. Police said they responded to the incident, but were unable to make any arrests.
While the shooting was terrifying, Victoria's neighbor, Regina, said she also was frightened when she and her husband once returned from a late-night dance to find the street blocked with cars.
When the couple asked someone to move a car so they could pass through, she said a man stuck his hand in his jacket to suggest he had a gun. "What do you think about this?" she said, mimicking the motion.
Because she feels threatened, the most proactive thing Regina can do is recruit nearby neighbors like Donna to attend the revitalization meetings. Donna no longer allows her grandchildren to visit because of the danger, and said she lacks the nerve to confront dealers.
"You can't even look at them - then they think something is wrong," Donna said. "At certain times, we don't even think about going out of the house because we don't know what's going to happen."
Another neighbor, Sarah, said she no longer takes her 2-year-old daughter on stroller walks, and her 10-year-old brother doesn't ride his bike since being solicited by a dealer. Their father found casings in their yard from the November shooting, and his truck was struck by some of the bullets, Sarah said.
Pam Keith, a Solano Community College trustee and 17-year Millerville resident, hopes to add a public voice to her fellow residents' fight.
"I don't know why by both buyers and sellers come to Millerville," Keith said. "Someone coming from Glen Cove to buy drugs in my neighborhood, they won't if they see a black-and-white coming down the street."
Keith said many residents haven't organized in the past because they "feel so disempowered."
"When you've got drive-bys going on in your front yard, it's hard to go down (to City Hall) and talk about people," Keith said. "Even if they knew what to do, nobody would listen to them anyway."
Before she had political clout, Greater Vallejo Recreation District board member Liat Meitzenheimer took matters into her own hands years ago when she lived in Millerville. A drug dealer known to South Vallejo started coming into the neighborhood, buying kids ice cream and sucking up to their mothers.
"I knew what he was up to," she said, and told him, "'I don't want you buying my son anything.'"
Meitzenheimer started calling police when drug dealers congregated. But she said police dispatchers would call out her address over the radio, which dealers would hear on their scanners. "All of them start looking at my house," she said.
Punks threatened her then teenage son and shot out her front window with a pellet gun. Eventually, she said she walked outside and told one dealer, "Your beef is with me - my son doesn't have anything to do with this."
"My son thought I was losing my mind," she said.
Although living in Millerville "was a nightmare," she resisted suggestions to move. Instead, she kept her son at a relative's house in Fairfield until things cooled down.
"It was too nerve-racking," she said, "[but] I wanted them to know I am going to continue calling the police."
Meitzenheimer and Keith said they are glad businesses plan to work with residents to kick out Millerville's bad elements.
"A lot of businesses consider the residents a problem - we are not the problem," Keith said. "You lock your business and go home. We live with this 24-7."
Businesses fight back
Jim Boyle, owner of Regal Collision Repair, has lived with the crime just as intimately during the last two decades. Like many area business owners, he says years of drug dealing and blight have cut into his bottom line.
His windows have been shot out by stray bullets, he's seen too many drug deals to count, and the loitering in front of Town Market across the street keeps business away. He said insurance officials have called him to say their customers refused to visit his shop because, they said, "I am not going into that neighborhood."
Flagrant drug use and public urination are frequent eyesores. "You can smell them smoking weed all the way over here," he said, pointing across the street.
"We never used to be afraid in this neighborhood," said Boyle, who took over the business in 1998 after having worked there since the 1980s. "Now we're afraid. It's the worst we've ever seen here."
Ted Deeming and Ron Tiffany, partners in Vallejo German Car Clinic, said vehicles line up on the first and 15th of the month, payday, to buy drugs on Tuolumne Street. Dealers stand outside, flash a hand signal and pass off something to approaching vehicles.
"It was so obvious - if a blind man came along, he could see what they were doing," Tiffany said.
Nervous customers will no longer leave their vehicles overnight or drop them off early in the morning, Deeming said.
Deeming, whose shop is sandwiched between the U-Know Smoke Shop and Town Market, said he likes the smoke shop owner but said the store "really changed the atmosphere here" with "so many people hanging around."
Business owners are not unified about filing a public nuisance lawsuit against the smoke shop or Town Market. Some are considering it, while others want authorities to simply limit what the stores can sell.
Authorities say the smoke shop may sell paraphernalia commonly used for smoking illegal drugs because the owner claims the devices are for smoking tobacco only. However, there may be more authorities can do if they find either the Town Market or smoke shop is selling single cigarettes.
During a recent meeting, the Solano County district attorney encouraged local business owners to consider a suit, and said there are other ways he can pursue fines. He asked that those means not be disclosed publicly, citing an adverse affect on future investigations.
Two years ago, Vallejo residents successfully helped evict the owner of another smoke shop. A judge ruled that the owner of the former Zozo's shop on Tennessee Street had to pay $75,000 in damages to residents. Police backed the claims.
Stores on defensive
Mohamed Jallab, owner of U-Know Smoke Shop, said other Millerville business owners should not point the finger at him.
In an interview, he said he does not know "why they are blaming me." The neighborhood "had been bad for a long time" before he arrived around five years ago, he said.
Although the business owners have invited him to meetings, he said he cannot attend because he has no employees to mind the store.
"I work just like anybody else," said Jallab. "I work seven days a week 13 hours a day like everyone else."
All of the store's colorful bongs and pipes are for smoking tobacco only, he said. He has posted signs to reinforce the point. Jallab denied there is any loitering in front of his shop.
The Town Market owners also refute accusations that they attract a criminal element by allowing loitering and selling single cigarettes.
Owner Min Yun, who has run the store for 14 years with husband Kwan Yun, denied that she sells single cigarettes.
(But Boyle, who owns the car repair store across the street, said his employees have bought single cigarettes from the store. One of his employees confirmed it.)
As for loitering complaints, Min Yun said "of course there is a lot of traffic" because her market is a convenience store. Often, she said, she and her husband can't see what is happening outside their store.
If they see drug deals or other problems, she asks people to leave, but being too aggressive risks alienating customers and courting retaliation, they say. "If I holler at customers, I don't get any customers," Kwan Yun said.
Because Min Yun said her market caters to "low-income people," that sometimes means serving transients.
"All the time it doesn't look good, but that's the way it is," she said. "They have their ways to survive. I have my ways to survive."
Min Yun attended one recent meeting of Millerville business owners and said she has "tried to support the community in what they tried to do - that's why we try to keep the area clean."
She said she, too, is concerned about the smoke shop, saying the smoking devices "maybe looks bad for us, too. It looks suspicious."
Fighting Back's Allen said the smoke shop is "a front for paraphernalia. Customers don't go very far from the smoke shop before they start doing the drugs."
Ted Correy, who participated a decade ago in the city first's neighborhood revitalization program in the Washington Park area, said Fighting Back's formula of complete community cooperation will work for Millerville.
"We educate and empower them," said Correy, who is now part of the agency's neighborhood cleanup team. "They are starting to organize because they are fed up, and they see we are coming into help them."
AND SOMETHING HAPPEND BY BUDS ON SPRINGS TODAY....SOMEONE GOT SHOT...IT WAS TAPED OFF AT THE GAS STATION FOR A FEW HOURS...
