Mother Hunter walks the baddest three blocks in Avondale once a month, praying and singing her way through the street-corner offices of drug dealers, where angels fear to tread.

        “I tell them, "Now look, you're not doing the right thing. Your mother raised you and she didn't expect this out of you. Now turn yourself around.'”

        Her real name is Eula, but “Mother Hunter” fits her like a hymn fits Sunday. She's 5-feet-nothing and her hair is streaked with white. She walks slightly bent at the waist, as if climbing a steep hill through her 80s. And she's fearless.

        But her battle to save Burnet Avenue looked like a lost cause the day I visited. Where northbound Burnet crosses Erkenbrecher, it goes downhill — fast.

No fear

        Drug boys gather in a scruffy, vacant lot, standing in the shadows of a wall decorated with gang memos spray-painted on plywood.

        A block away, they have staked their claim in a parking lot, selling crack in broad daylight, with no fear. All along Burnet, at Northern, Rockdale and Forest, they sprout like dandelions.

        “They are out here at 6 a.m.,” says Tom Jones, president of the Burnet Avenue Business Association. He has collected 3,000 complaints to police to clean up drugs, prostitution, violence and other crimes on Burnet.

        As we walked the street, neighborhood people called out, “Keep it up, Tom.” But as we passed a dark doorway, he was called by name, cursed and threatened.

        “The police told me there are two factions in this neighborhood,” he said. “One wants to see you gone, and one wants to see you dead.”

After dark

        Members of both groups could be among the crowd at Uncle Milt's bar next to the Post Office. Sealed from daylight like a tomb, it squats across from Ronald McDonald House, which houses families of hospitalized children. Random bullets in the area are so hazardous, parents and sick children have been urged by police to take a shuttle to Cincinnati Children's Hospital Medical Center — right across the street.

        At night, the Milt's crowd foams into the street like a spilled beer. Police reports show shots fired, drug deals, brawls, assaults and disorderly conduct.

        “Post Office employees have been threatened by patrons of Uncle Milt's when they attempted to secure the lot at the end of their work day,” a report from District 4 said.

        “I'm scared,” said Debbie Pitts, a clerk at the office of the U.S. Postal Service next to Milt's. She was afraid to say more.

        Mr. Jones pointed to two steel yellow posts, bent like a pair of fat parentheses anchored in asphalt. A chain, padlocked to the posts to close the Post Office parking lot at night, hangs useless on the pavement.

        “They did this,” Mr. Jones said. “They have claimed ownership of these little territories and they will kill to keep it.”

        This is not about race. Everyone quoted here is black. It's about crime. And they are sick of it.

        Drug crime is spreading like a cancer. If the rest of our city had half the courage of Mother Hunter and Tom Jones, they would not be fighting it alone.
        E-mail pbronson@enquirer.com or call 768-8301.
       

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