A shooting on 13th street early Sunday morning went terribly wrong and left this house with at least 10 bullet holes in Chattanoogac on Monday.When police officers went to investigate the house where five people were shot during a party Sunday, they were surprised to find almost no furniture inside the home at 2412 E. 13th St.
Aside from a mattress in the bedroom and a TV in the corner of the living room, the house was empty, said Capt. Brian Cotter, who is in charge of the area.
"It looked like it was set up as, like, a party house and not a residence," Cotter said.
Of course, having no furniture is not a crime.
But neighbors say the house was at the center of criminal activity. Just after midnight on Sunday morning, a vehicle pulled up and passengers peppered the house with gunfire during a party. The partygoers inside the house then pulled out shotguns and chased the vehicles down the street, witnesses said, firing as they went.
As police investigated the shooting, neighbors in Ridgedale said over and over again that the house was a problem, Chattanooga Police Department Chief Fred Fletcher said.
So officers brought in the city's code inspectors, who toured the house and found multiple violations, including that the home had no permanent source of heat. Although the exterior of the home was well-kept, the interior showed a "general state of dilapidation," Cotter said.
The home was immediately condemned, he said.
The current tenant of the home, Reanita Carter, 34, wasn't home during the shooting. She told police that she was living in the home with several children via a public housing voucher. After the house was deemed unfit for occupation, officers provided her with information and connections to help her find a new place to live, Fletcher said.
The process, he said, is a clear example of the type of community policing he wants the department to focus on.
"The neighborhood was telling us that house was causing crime and disorder, so we used a partnership of nontraditional law enforcement to solve a problem to try to address the symptoms of crime," Fletcher said. "It was true problem-oriented policing."
It's not a new idea: Police officers often run into problems that fall into other agencies' realms and police often call those agencies to alert them to problems, Cotter said. But recently, Fletcher has ramped up the department's collaboration with code inspectors -- by inviting them to move in.
Two code inspectors have opened an office in the police department's headquarters on Amnicola Highway, Fletcher said, so that inspectors and officers can work directly together.
It's an idea he stumbled into in Austin, Texas, he said, when the city ran out of office space for some of their code inspectors and the inspectors ended up moving into an extra office in the police department out of necessity.
"But then the code enforcement guys were talking to officers in the halls," Fletcher said. "An officer would say, you know, I have a problem with this abandoned house, or this overgrown lot, and the inspector would then go out and do something about it. And there's an official process there, but I found when people interacted, it became personal and more productive."
Neighborhood leader Gary Ball, vice president of the Ridgedale Community Association, said he was torn about the decision to swiftly shut down the house.
On one hand, he doesn't believe the woman and her family were really living there. While Cotter said he has no evidence that Carter wasn't living in the house, Ball thinks the woman was illegally subletting the home for party purposes.
"That woman had a voucher and was evidently living somewhere else," he said.
Ball said that, while he's glad the parties will stop, having a condemned house in their neighborhood isn't entirely good for the community.
"It's a good thing it's not available right now for more of the same," he said, "but in the same token, it's a detriment to the street growing and prospering."
Contact staff writer Shelly Bradbury at 423-757-6525 or sbradbury@timesfreepress.com with tips or story ideas.
Contact staff writer Hannah Smith at hsmith@timesfreepress.com or at 423-757-6731.