Chester slayings prompt state of emergency in city
Mayor's order: Nobody in public after 9 p.m. without good cause. Police will work long shifts.
By Cynthia Burton
Inquirer Staff Writer
Chester's mayor has put the struggling city of 37,000 under a state of emergency that started at 9 p.m. Saturday.
There have been four homicides in eight days, including that of a toddler killed by a bullet to his head.
In the latest, police found a young man dead Saturday morning with an unknown number of bullet wounds. That afternoon, as he issued his order, Mayor Wendell N. Butler Jr. said he was responding to "an unnerved community reaching out, saying, 'Enough is enough.' "
He has formalized the city's state of emergency until Wednesday, when he expects the full City Council will agree to extend restrictions for 30 more days.
The starkly worded mayoral proclamation says: "No person without a legitimate reason is allowed on any public street or in any other public place" between 9 p.m. and 6 a.m.
No more than three people can gather without obtaining a city permit. No one in the 96-member Police Department can take a vacation day. All are to work 12-hour shifts, and many of the city's beleaguered officers are to work 16 hours a day.
The mayor promised that anyone who violated the emergency orders would be prosecuted.
But under Saturday's searing afternoon heat, Chester already looked like a city on lockdown. No pedestrians walked its dusty downtown. Only the occasional car moved through.
So far this year, there have been 11 homicides, Police Chief Floyd Lewis said. By this time last year, there were seven. In all of last year, fewer than 20.
Butler had hoped that Thursday's community rally against violence, which drew 300, would send the message that Chester couldn't take more killings.
"There were a lot of tears," he said gravely. "A lot of people lost loved ones."
That included the family of 2-year-old Terrence Webster. The toddler was shot through the closed door of the family's home in a public housing development last Sunday. He died Monday at Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.
A gunman ambushed him and his family as they returned home around 2:30 a.m. They made it into the house and shut the door. But the gunman shot two bullets through the door; one struck the boy's father, Thomas, in a hand before it hit the child in his forehead, police said. At some point during a scuffle, the gunman shot Tisheta Green, the boy's mother, in a leg.
The U.S. Marshals Service has offered a $10,000 reward for information leading to an arrest and conviction.
The mayor said he was hoping for help from additional state troopers, detectives from the Delaware County District Attorney's Office, sheriff's deputies who have agreed to assist police on patrol, and additional federal law enforcement agents.
He wants to hire eight more police officers and to ask the City Council to approve a gun buyback program.
Every Thursday night for the next nine weeks, residents are scheduled to rally against violence. But more than anything, the mayor said he needed residents "to be our watchdogs" and asked them to call a police tip line at 610-447-7810 if they had information about the killings.
