The Chase

It’s a Thursday night in November. Sgt. Danny Graves is cruising the narrow, hilly streets of an older, blue-collar neighborhood called Maple Park, near Worlds of Fun.

Graves grew up not far from here. He returned in late 2004, after spending 10 years on patrol in the urban core and working undercover narcotics with the Kansas City, Missouri, Police Department. He’s back to fight the growing methamphetamine trade north of the river.

It’s just after 9 p.m. when Graves and his six officers pull to a stop in the 5700 block of North Compton to check if a man they call Skip is there. (Graves has allowed the Pitch to watch his squad in action on the condition that the Pitch not print suspects’ real names.)

Graves, 36, and his squad have spent months staking out the place. Over the past year, they’ve arrested nearly a dozen people seen leaving the house. Most carried small, recreational amounts of meth; others had only pipes and syringes.

They’ve never caught Skip with drugs, though, so he has never been arrested on drug charges. But in November, a codes inspector who found that heat and electricity had been turned off in the trash-filled house posted an order for the occupants to vacate the property.

Tonight, Skip, 39, answers the door, his eyes blinking at the seven uniformed cops. Tall, with a gaunt, torn face, he steps outside. He says he has a permit to be there until 10 each night until he finishes moving out all of his stuff.

The cops walk into the home anyway. The living room is a mountain of junk — plastic toys, teddy bears, action figures, old Western figurines, license plates, collectibles, yellowing newspapers, boxes on top of boxes. In one corner, a large stuffed Elmo doll hangs by its neck from a hook in the ceiling. A narrow path winds to the kitchen and a bedroom.

Skip yells at the cops to get out, but Graves tells him to relax. Nobody’s getting into any trouble tonight.

Skip pauses. “Danny can stay,” he says, looking at Graves.

Three officers walk back out into the windy night — but two slip into the kitchen, which is filled with more junk. Meanwhile Graves sits and talks with Skip.

Everything has changed in the past few months, Skip tells him. The people who used to party together from different neighborhoods are turning into liars and back-stabbers. “They’re ripping each other off,” Skip says.

This is good news for the sergeant, proof that his team has made progress.

Then a cop starts yelling in another room. “Get down on the ground! Get down!”

A tense minute later, one of the officers escorts a teenage girl up from the basement.

The girl, police will discover, has been missing since the spring; she’s been living in this house for months. She was 15, already shooting meth, when she came here looking for a place to stay, Skip says. “I’ve always picked up strays. I can’t help it,” he says.

The girl is slender, with scraggly blond hair. Long earrings dangle at her cheeks. She’s barefoot.

“I can’t get her to wear shoes,” Skip says. “She’s like a wolf girl I found in the woods.”

“Look at where you are now,” Graves tells the girl, whose bloodshot eyes finally meet his. “You’ve been hanging out, living in a condemned house with needles sticking out of your arms for six months.”

His voice is calm. “Don’t you want to get your life together? You want to live here? You could end up dead.”

The girl looks down at her feet and says she doesn’t want to go home. She hates her mom. Her dad in Oklahoma is too strict.

Called into the kitchen to give a statement, the girl tells an officer that she’s been having sex with Skip. She says she’ll cooperate with police by giving them more information downtown.

Graves watches as one of his officers leads Skip toward a cruiser.

Meth is nothing new in the Northland. A strong police presence is.

Until July 2005, just 10 officers a shift patrolled the 150 square miles of Kansas City north of the Missouri River. (By contrast, about 40 officers work each shift covering the 19 square miles of the Central Patrol Division, which stretches from the river to the Plaza.) That left just four officers watching over Maple Park and its surrounding neighborhoods, 75 square miles with a population similar to the Central Patrol Division’s.

City Councilwoman Deb Hermann, who lives in the Gracemoor neighborhood just east of Maple Park, has been trying to get more cops on Northland streets since the early 1990s. That’s when residents noticed that longtime homeowners were moving away or dying off, replaced by landlords who often rented to trouble-making tenants. Fifties-era ranch homes were turning into dope houses, bringing a spike in burglaries and robberies. Yet the number of police was roughly the same as it had been in 1973.

In April 2002, after protests from the Northland Neighborhoods Inc. community organization and other angry residents, Hermann pushed for a sales tax to fund public safety. Voters passed the tax, earmarking $110 million for police services, including a new North Patrol station set to open this fall. Meanwhile, the KCPD is increasing its patrols to 20 officers east of North Oak Trafficway and another 20 to cover the neighborhoods west of the thoroughfare.

“One of the biggest challenges was convincing people there was an issue,” Hermann says. “I think in some cases, it’s just convenient to think the Northland doesn’t have a problem. It’s just a whole new world. They [residents] wouldn’t know meth if it hit him in the head.”

What those residents might not have known was that by the late 1990s, a string of motels off Parvin Road and Chouteau Trafficway — with their easy access to highways — had become a hub for meth trafficking. The Metropolitan Meth Unit, made up of investigators from state police and federal agencies, busted dozens of meth dealers inside the motels, along with the cooks who manufacture meth. Most of the criminals have fled to rural corners, where they continue to cook junk for personal use. But there’s a new phenomenon in the meth trade. In the past three years, cartel drug runners have brought hundreds of pounds of Mexican meth to town.

Capt. Kevin O’Sullivan of the Metropolitan Meth Unit says the work of Graves’ squad is invaluable. As detectives metrowide track the new wave of smugglers, Graves and his officers are charting the Northland’s demand side. “You need to get those users and the small-time dealers and the little people, because they’re the ones who are on the bottom of that [Mexican meth] pipeline that are getting it out on the street,” O’Sullivan says.

After spending a year on Northland patrol, this past November Graves took over a special team of officers. They had a simple strategy.

“We don’t want to take everybody to jail,” Graves says. “We want to gain intelligence. We want to make friends.”

The strategy worked from the beginning — partly because Graves could empathize with his new “friends.”

In sixth grade, Graves says, he ran away from home to escape an abusive, alcoholic stepfather who hated having him around. After he left home, Graves bounced around Gladstone and its surrounding neighborhoods, living with friends, uncertain of where he’d sleep week to week.

“My dad thought I was living at my mom’s,” Graves says. “My mom told my stepdad that I was at my dad’s. I lived elsewhere. I was just very fortunate that there were people who helped me. I had a lot of people who gave me chances.”

He returned the favor by becoming a cop.

People like Tami Montague, 34, say Graves always catches up with them. “It’s Danny Graves, he’s the man, he took down the Northland,” Montague sings with a cackle. “That’s my little cheer for him.”

One reason she cheers for Graves is because she knew him back in the day. When Montague was 12, she ran away from home and for a short time lived at a friend’s house where Graves was also staying. (Graves says he doesn’t remember staying with Montague but knows they had mutual friends in the same family.)

Montague says she got hooked on meth years later, after Darrell Stallings killed her husband. (Stallings was convicted in November 2004 of murdering five people in Kansas City, Kansas, in June 2002.) Last summer, Montague ran into Graves for the first time since they were kids. She says she was at rock bottom, shooting a dwindling supply of meth in a room at the Super Inn motel off Parvin Road.

“I was sick,” Montague recalls. “I was literally on my last leg, suicidal, no food, no place to stay, coming up with 30 bucks a night to stay in a motel.”

When cops raided the place, she says, “Danny was the first one I see. I didn’t know he was a cop. I said, ‘Danny?’ And he cared.”

Montague and her boyfriend had already shot the last of their dope, so there was only paraphernalia in the room.

“Danny gave me a break that day,” she says. “He threw it all away. He said, ‘Get your life together.’ That saved my life, in my opinion. From that point on, suicide wasn’t an option…. All the other cops, all they wanted to do was arrest me and put me in jail. Danny treated me like a person, was understanding, and gave me a fucking chance. He didn’t have to do that.”

Graves tells the Pitch that after he saw Montague at the motel last summer, he got her and her boyfriend on a waiting list for a drug treatment program at North Kansas City Hospital. But Montague never checked in, and when the Pitch spoke with her in January, she was running from her boyfriend, who she says has repeatedly threatened to kill her. She says she got clean on her own, but without a home, it hasn’t been easy. Living with addicts who took her in, she’d stay clean for a couple of days, then go on a binge. It was impossible to get away, she says.

“It started out all great and good, and everybody had lots of money and lots of stuff and nice things and everybody was happy about three years ago,” she says. “Then, slowly, everybody is losing their vehicles, their homes, their children, their jobs. Everybody I know is down and out now. The whole north of the river is ate up. I’ve never seen anything like this.”

But with heavy enforcement by Graves and his squad, the supply seemed to dry up overnight. “Here, for the last couple months, you couldn’t even find it. You couldn’t get it,” Montague says. “I’m not a cop lover. But Graves is a good man, and I will always, forever love him. He’s my angel.”

After Graves arrived back in the Northland to begin his patrols in late 2004, the first man he arrested blabbed about three addresses in Maple Park; the people who frequented those houses all had loose connections to one another. Graves would spend all of 2005 concentrating on those addresses.

Around 52nd Street and North Bristol, dispatchers logged constant complaints of disturbances and late-night parties. Homes, street signs and cars were pockmarked with bullet holes. Thieves were stealing metal from homes and yards. Christy Harris, a leader in the Northland Neighborhoods community group, remembers that one of her neighbors removed the gutters from her home to make repairs, and the next morning they were gone.

The cops heard that stolen metal was being melted and sold as scrap at 5228 North Bristol, a home that neighbors had nicknamed “the Cathedral.”
They started pulling over people they watched leave the house. In the first three months of last year, they arrested nearly two dozen suspects with drugs, paraphernalia or metal.

Graves turned over his files to the Clay County Drug Task Force and the Kansas City Police Drug Enforcement Unit, which raided the home in April 2005, confiscating meth, guns and scrap. A car motor and other stolen auto parts were found buried in the back yard near a pond of raw sewage.

The homeowner, Donald Jenkins, was charged in federal court with unlawful transport of firearms. He posted bond a few days later. In September, officers again took Jenkins into custody, arresting him on suspicion of an armed robbery in Northeast Kansas City. Graves says neighborhood complaints nearly ceased after the arrest.

On November 22, Jenkins pleaded guilty to a firearms charge; he’s awaiting sentencing.

Graves also concentrated on two other problem houses. Tips about 5504 Northeast 44th Terrace led police to Richie “Red” McMaken, a suspected dealer.

Staking out the home and stopping people as they left, an officer found one woman holding 38 grams of meth, a quantity more common for a dealer than a user. Graves began connecting relationships among the people he and the other officers had stopped. In August, he once again handed his investigative files to tactical teams. The Metropolitan Meth Unit and the Clay County Drug Task Force raided McMaken’s home, seizing guns and several stolen car parts.

On February 7, a federal grand jury indicted McMaken as “an unlawful user of methamphetamine.” He also was charged with unlawful transport and registration of firearms.

During the raid last August, investigators confiscated six shotguns, two pistols, a revolver and a rifle from McMaken’s house. That same night, Graves and about 10 officers knocked on every door in Maple Park, handing out 350 fliers announcing a new zero-tolerance policy in the neighborhood. Police would pull over people on minor traffic violations or for any reasonable suspicion.

Three months later, Skip received the code inspector’s orders to move out of his North Compton home. He has since been granted four permits to clean the place up, and the electricity and heat have been restored. Richard McKinley, a code enforcement officer, says two people have been arrested for trespassing since the home was inspected in November.

Throughout the year, Graves says, he watched a constant flow of addicts in and out of Skip’s house.

Nearly every suspicious driver he stopped pointed out Skip’s place as a safe spot to party and find drugs.

Graves worked to keep an open relationship with Skip. After Skip’s brother committed suicide last summer, Graves dropped by North Compton to pay his respects. This, he says, may have been why Skip let him stay inside during the squad’s last visit to the condemned house.

But that night in November, Graves wasn’t there to check on Skip’s occupancy permit. He’d heard from people in the neighborhood that Skip had a relationship with a 15-year-old girl and was feeding her dope.

Skip maintains his innocence. He says he only wanted to help her. “She was a pretty girl, and she probably weighed 100 pounds,” Skip tells the Pitch.

Sgt. Michael Hicks, a supervisor of the Juvenile Crimes section, says Skip was released from custody the night after the arrest because the girl lied to detectives downtown. She changed her story four times, he says, though he could not comment on her statements about her relationship with Skip. “She’s got a serious drug problem, no doubt about that,” he says. “She admitted that to us. There may have been sexual contact in a consensual way, but as far as being raped, we could never prove that.” The girl was released to her father.

Graves says Skip’s release isn’t so much a failure as a clear sign of the constant struggle his squad faces.

“I think it sucks,” Graves says of Skip’s case. “In my opinion, it’s probably dead in the water.”

The tables at Maple Park Middle School are covered in holiday decorations. A few dozen mostly older men and women are chatting over heaping plates of turkey, ham, potatoes, green beans and desserts. Four women calling themselves the Spare Parts are singing Christmas tunes. After the music, there’s a grab-bag game with gifts for everyone.

Everybody here knows Graves. People approach him, one at a time or in small groups, patting him on the shoulder and talking about how the neighborhood is starting to feel safer again.

Despite the festive spirit, Christy Harris says the drug houses and addicts that stole the charm from Maple Park have left a deep scar —the neighborhood is far from what it was in the 1990s.

“I’m a little bit concerned that people may not be aware of how much is going on in terms of the drug houses and the activity,” Harris says. “I never used to worry about safety, doors locked, that sort of thing. And it is becoming a reality that you need to be aware of the risks. I really feel bad about that. I miss that part about it, the fact that we felt safe in our homes, our yards and walking our streets.”

Those streets are now saturated with meth, Graves has discovered.

In mid-November, news broke that police had shot and killed 26-year-old Chet Vermillion after Vermillion pointed a pellet gun at them. It was Graves’ officers who had killed him. In the darkness that night, they couldn’t see that Vermillion’s gun was basically harmless; Vermillion’s autopsy revealed that he had meth in his bloodstream. (Administrators put the officers on leave while the department investigated the shooting; a grand jury later cleared the cops.)

In December, officers stopped a skinny 19-year-old girl who stood shivering in the cold, making excuses, saying she had started snorting meth to lose weight after having her first child when she was 17. In the car with her was a woman in her forties who said her husband had recently left after a meth binge.

On any given night, Graves and the four other Northland natives on his squad pull over people they knew growing up. One night last fall, an officer saw his old football team photograph on the wall of a house he was searching for meth; one of the residents had been his childhood teammate. Once, Graves ran into one of his high school class’s cheerleaders in an elevator at the Jackson County Courthouse, where she was battling charges of supplying a meth cook with boxes of cold medicine in exchange for money and drugs. “It literally looked like somebody stood up a corpse out of the morgue,” Graves recalls.

Graves says his team’s only real success has been disrupting the dopers’ sense of security. Many of the men and women he sought this past year have scattered north, into Gladstone, and south, mostly to Kansas City’s Northeast neighborhood. Meanwhile, his list of users who remain in Maple Park and its surrounding neighborhoods keeps growing.

And he’s encountering the next generation of addicts. In early January, the sergeant’s team pulled over a car full of high-schoolers — some as young as 14 — with guns and meth. The kids told him that people at school were dealing meth more than any other drug.

“It sucks,” Graves says of how the Northland’s neighborhoods have been overrun by meth in the past decade. “It makes you feel like there isn’t a safe place to live.”

Just ask 8-year-old Junior.

One night in January, Graves spots a red Chevy Tahoe with a passenger sitting alone inside as it idles in the driveway of a drug house that the squad has searched numerous times. (Months earlier, it had been the temporary home of Graves’ old acquaintance Tami Montague.)

After the Tahoe leaves, Graves’ officers stop it a few blocks away and find one of the occupants with $2,500 cash — reason to suspect they’ve just sold drugs in the home.

Graves knocks on the door. A young woman answers. “I’m watching the house for the person who lives here, and I’m not supposed to let you in,” she tells him.

Graves tells her about the man with the cash in the Tahoe. Hesitantly, she lets Graves inside.

He engages her in friendly conversation. She slowly warms up to him, mentioning the name of a man who recently had a run-in with Graves. “You guys used to go to school together,” the woman says.

Graves rolls his eyes. “A lot of people say that, but I don’t think we went to school together.”

While Graves chats with her, a pudgy kid walks into the room and sits on the bed. The woman introduces Graves to her son, Junior.

One of Graves’ men walks in, carrying a propane torch (commonly used to cook meth) he has found in Junior’s room.

Graves asks the woman to sign a consent form so they can search the house.

“I don’t want to leave dope under a bed with an 8-year-old in here,” he tells her.

“I’ve never found nothing in this house,” the kid says in his mother’s defense.

Junior’s mother grabs her son’s chin and turns his face to hers. “I love you too much,” she says.

Graves tells her he’s been watching the home for months and knows it’s not safe for Junior or any child. The woman looks ready to sign the consent form, but then Junior sits up straight on the bed.

“Right now, no one is here who owns it,” Junior says of any dope they might find.

“What’s your favorite subject in school?” Graves asks Junior.

“Nothing,” the second-grader says.

His mother signs the form.

One officer finds a loaded .45-caliber semiautomatic handgun under the woman’s bed. (The woman says it isn’t hers.) Stashed in the next room is a small wooden box with a syringe and a discolored spoon. The basement is piled with stained clothes and trash; Graves spots a loose needle on the floor and calls to his team to watch for syringes. An officer shows Graves a rafter where a pound of pot is stashed in a dusty bag next to a syringe. Graves takes the stash upstairs to the kitchen table.

“I haven’t been down there in 10 years,” the woman protests.

Junior looks up from the living room couch. “I’ve seen that pencil [the syringe] before but not that brick of weed,” the kid says.

An officer walks up from the basement with a box of rifle bullets in his hand. “Where did those come from?” Junior asks, looking surprised.

Graves slides on rubber gloves, pausing to play with the kid: “I’m Aquaman!” he says to him in a goofy voice, the glove’s fingertips flopping at Junior. “Ahhhhhh!”

Junior smiles. After collecting all of the evidence, Graves tells Junior’s mother they found 101 syringes in her bedroom. The house is a wreck, he adds. She assures him that it’s a mess because she and Junior are getting ready to move out.

Graves gives her a sideways look, then turns back to finish his inventory of bullets, pot, syringes and guns.

Junior walks over and takes the report out of Graves’ hand. He glances at it a moment, then hands it back, beaming.

“I can’t read cop,” he says.

The Chase

More cops are finally patrolling the Northland, but they’re hardly a match for meth

By Bryann Noonan