Almost two years since Eric Reese was shot to death after sending his teenage daughter home from watching a gang fight outside at Park Place Apartments, Reese’s sister and one of his friends are asking the city of Statesboro to make the complex safer.

A Bulloch County Superior Court jury trial is slated to begin June 14 for Lester Parrish Jr., who was 17 when he allegedly shot Reese, 46, the night of Aug. 15, 2014.  After presentations by District Attorney Richard Mallard and a Statesboro Police Department detective in November 2014, a grand jury indictment asserted Parrish was associated with a street gang called the Bloods, whose members went to Park Place to fight “the Crazy Eights, a rival gang.”

The indictment accuses Parrish of murder, aggravated assault, possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony and participating in criminal gang activity.

“When you lose a family member, the way that I lost my brother, out of silliness and gang activity that goes on in Park Place, it’s totally and utterly ridiculous,” Lisa Harrison, Reese’s sister, told the Statesboro City Council. “There’s children that’s running back and forth unsupervised. … There needs to be some kind of security.”

She and Lamar Webb, who lived in Park Place for about four years and was a resident there when Reese was killed, spoke during the May 17 council meeting.

What can police do?

Webb noted the presence of interim Police Chief Robert Bryan at the meeting and observed that, with a limited number of patrol officers, the police cannot spend all of their time at one apartment complex.

“How are y’all going to go about cleaning up Park Place?” Webb asked the mayor and council. “That man there, he’s got six police working day, six at night. … He can’t be everywhere with six police during the day and six at night.”

Webb was close to correct on the number of police with the rank of officer working a night shift. But with a lieutenant, a sergeant and two corporals also available, the actual number of police on patrol is typically nine or 10, Bryan said in a later interview.

Webb’s point was for the city to try something other than just having police make checks of the complex while on patrol. He noted that he had first spoken to city officials about Park Place in 2015. Webb, who is 61, also moved out of Park Place last year to another location in Statesboro. Reese’s death, and continued criminal incidents, including drug activity, prompted Webb to leave, he said in an interview.

“It seemed to be dangerous for any human being to live out there,” he said.

Harrison said her brother, “a family guy, a man who had had no run-ins with the law” rode his bicycle to demand that his daughter go home from attempting to watch the fight. The bicycle and Reese’s purpose of sending his daughter home are mentioned in transcripts of police officers’ statements filed for pretrial court proceedings. The indictment alleges that Parrish fired three times into the gathered crowd.

300 homes, one drive

Split by the entrance sign, the single drive into Park Place from Lanier Drive south of the bypass belies the size of the densely built complex behind it. Apartments in long rows, many with identical brick exteriors, comprise about 300 units. At least there’s a Number 1 and a Number 300, and many units in the sequence between, identifiable with the shared address 230 Lanier Drive on the county tax map.

“This is a city on its own out there in Park Place,” Webb said to City Council.

The Statesboro Herald cannot confirm a number Webb mentioned as the complex’s possible population. But it is true that if most of the units are occupied, and a significant portion by families with children, the population of Park Place easily exceeds that of some of Bulloch County’s smaller towns. As of the 2010 census, Portal, with 288 households, had 638 people.

Like a typical town, Park Place isn’t owned by one landlord, either. The tax map shows that there are clusters of units owned by limited-liability companies, but also units owned by individuals.

The single entrance street can pose a problem when people engaged in unlawful activities gather on the street or in parking areas and police are called, Mayor Jan Moore suggested at the meeting.

“I know one of the problems is the geography of Park Place,” she said. “It starts with that very long road and it goes all the way to the back. So by the time we get somebody to the back, they’ve already been notified that we’re on the way, for whatever they’re doing in the back.”

Recent police calls

Whether there has been recent gang activity like that on the night Reese was killed isn’t obvious from police reports. But logs of the Statesboro Police Departments calls for January through May, 2016, show there were 27 “fight or disorder” calls from Park Place, including two in February, nine  in March, eight in April, and eight in May.

There were also six “firearms discharged” calls there during the first five months of the year, including calls on Jan. 24, Feb. 18, Feb. 26, Feb. 28, May 2 and May 7. There were two “drug activity” calls, March 30 and April 3, and a strong-arm robbery call April 15.

These were among 235 total calls to Park Place for the period, many of them typical of goings-on in other residential areas, such as some domestic disputes and burglaries.

Speaking up at the May 17 meeting, Bryan, the interim police chief, said he had gone to Park Place himself on a call a few weekends earlier.

“Part of it is also the citizens becoming more engaged,” Bryan said. “When there is a shots-fired call and nobody has seen nothing, hears nothing, wants to say anything about anything, there’s only so much that the officers can do with that information,” he said. “So it’s all the stakeholders coming together to form a solution to the problem. … We need a solution.”

Property owner meeting

Harrison suggested a gated entrance and security personnel to check who goes into the complex and why. But Mayor Jan Moore told her that some things that might be more easily done at a public housing complex would be a challenge at a private complex with many owners.

“When it’s all privately held by different people, the only option we have on our side of the fence is to find something in our ordinances that will allow us to hold private owners accountable,” Moore said.

What she proposed to do is schedule a meeting and have City Hall issue notices to all Park Place property owners, encouraging them to attend. She asked Councilman Jeff Yawn, whose district includes Park Place, to work with her on this.

The city has taken a similar approach to concerns about the condition of properties of West Main Street. Property owners were summoned to a meeting in April, and a follow-up meeting about West Main is scheduled for June 22.

Moore hopes to hold the Park Place meeting the second week of July and that the process can be a model for addressing other problems, she said in an interview this week.

“We’re just going to have to begin to really look into what can be done,” Moore said. “This is private property, but if it’s private property that proves to be a nuisance, then we’re going to get very involved with those people as to what they should and could be doing.”

Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.