The sign is gone, but discolored paint on the dingy wall of an abandoned building in Liberty City supplies a ghostly reminder. In 1996, this was a Shell station of murderous infamy.
A lost Dutch tourist was killed there, shot in the heart as she sat in the passenger seat of her rental car. Tosca Dieperink's husband, trying to find their way from Miami International Airport to Miami Beach, had taken a fatal left turn onto 22nd Avenue. He pulled into the service station at Northwest 79th Street and got out, map in hand, to ask for directions.
While one thug tried to rob her husband, another walked up to the parked car and simply shot 39-year-old Dieperink through the car window.
The killing, cold and utterly unprovoked, committed at 9:45 in the Friday morning sunshine, had awful international reverberations. Miami had only begun to recover from a brutal spate of tourist robberies, carjackings and murders in the early 1990s. And from headlines like that in a German tabloid in 1993: ``Miami: Death Trap Under the Palm Trees.''
IMAGE OF MAYHEM
Three young mindless criminals in Liberty City managed to reprise an image of mayhem in paradise. But tourism recovered. Europeans returned, though car rental agencies were careful to direct them away from the danger zones.
But in Liberty City, the violence and despair those unlucky visitors happened upon never abated. It's no better. It's just that the lost tourists stopped coming.
Two of Dieperink's killers were sent away in 1996 with long prison sentences. The getaway driver, Xaviein Bendross, was not so lucky. He was given probation after he agreed to testify against his accomplices and sent back to Liberty City. In those streets, that was tantamount to a death sentence.
On the sidewalk along 79th Street, a spontaneous roadside memorial Wednesday marked where Bendross and two friends were killed in a burst of gunfire Saturday morning. Bendross, 28, had been murdered just a half block east of the old Shell station, 12 years and 21 days after he and his other crew killed Dieperink.
In another neighborhood, that might have seemed ironic. Not so much in Liberty City. Edson Eugene just shrugged. ``What goes around comes around.''
YOUNG GANGBANGERS
Alvin Lamont, who works at a pet shop a few feet from the scene of Saturday's drive-by killing, said young gangbangers had become a constant presence. ''Walk up and down the streets. All night. Ain't got no job. Just out. Causing trouble.'' Lamont said just living or working in this neighborhood brought expectations of crime, violence and gunplay.
On Tuesday, the sterile chambers of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington were filled with abstract arguments over gun control, with references to aged legal precedents and English common law.
The justices should have convened at the corner of Northwest 79th Street and 22nd Avenue. Eugene would have lent them his motorcycle shop, where he suddenly has plenty of extra space. A few hours after Saturday's killing, a burglar made off with a dirt bike and a pair of four-wheelers. ''They're like wolves around here, waiting for an opportunity. And I guess I'm that opportunity,'' he said.
If the justices had gathered at his corner in Liberty City, there would have been evidence of the need for gun control that was as fresh as the blood on the sidewalk.
The historic references were marked with five stuffed animals, two candles and tattered yellow crime scene tape, fluttering in the wind.
