June 7th, 2007, 7:45 pm

Three Shot, One Killed, Columbia Heights

WASHINGTON, DC, June 7, 2007

The shots rang out, staccato.

Four, in rapid succession.

DC’s Columbia Heights is a neighborhood of many noises: firecracker cackle, urgent sirens, basketball bounce, slow-fast-slow cadences - many noises, yes, but the sound of a gun is unmistakable.

Clear.

Certain.

Four shots - one tunneling into the arm of a man, another into the chest of a boy: Terry Cutchin, a 13-year-old boy near the park on the corner of 14th St. NW and Girard in Washington, DC.

It was around 10pm on Saturday, June 2, 2007. From my bathroom, I heard them - I exited to ask roommate and visitor - “Did you hear shots?”

They had; we stayed indoors, and Terry Cutchin died.

Terry was the third person shot outside of my house in less than 24 hours - the first, a 16-year-old girl shot in the ankle, at the same park, midnight, the day before. The patrol car that should have been parked along 14th St. NW was called away to Southeast D.C., where a woman high on crack plowed through a street festival, injuring 40.

And so, when the [allegedly] dark SUV rolled by, there were no cops around to stop it.

Three days later, on Tuesday night, I walked home to find an urban crime unit camped out on the corner. Squad cars, more unmarked vehicles, and street-clothed cops, decked out in bulletproof vests - all races, genders, and builds. I’d guess about 20-30 of them, a starter kit for any undercover cop movie. A few cops were wiping down a truck for prints, others had clipboards and questions for bystanders.

Last night, when I walked home, an ambulance raced ahead of me, to a mass of people gathered at the park. “Oh, fuck, what now?” I thought - and was relieved to see a vigil for Terry.

“Get back in the home! Fathers, stop smoking crack with they children!” a man addressed the crowd, a thickly-knit mix of neighbors and mourners, speckled with cops and politicians. Folks took turns speaking; on the periphery, I could only hear snippets.

I can only see slices; living next to the park for five months, walking by, head down, quickly. I miss more than I could ever see.

That day, I saw young girls crying, handmade signs being signed like yearbooks, recently printed t-shirts bearing Terry’s picture, tapered candles burning holes in wax-lined paper cups. The speeches held the community together for an instant; when they ended, folks spilled out like water, some shaking hands, hugging, crying, others joking and playing basketball, others sitting, like always, amid empty plastic bottles, on the concrete benches that constitute the tiny park.

A Fox News camera van waited along Girard for the 10 o’clock on-site broadcast, print reporters wandered, notebooks in hand, taking notes before their retreat home.

Mayor Adrian Fenty did his rounds, the circle of burly, mic-in-ear men around him growing tighter as the sun sunk lower. Fenty spotted me taking notes; as he answered a woman’s query, he looked up to make eye contact with me to deliver his line: “DC is great.”

Yes, great, Mayor Fenty - because you got into your black Lincoln Navigator and drove away, far from the gunfire I heard an hour later, a block away from the vigil, at 13th St. NW and Fairmont.