Trial begins in the worst mass-murder in Indianapolis history: I’ll be your guide

The summer sky was darkening, the sun already set when neighbors on the 500 block of North Hamilton Avenue — known among the local kids as “H-Block” — heard the first shot. Witnesses say a small crowd had already gathered nearby before that first shot. They knew something was going down that night at the Albarran / Covarrubias home.

But no one knew how bad it was about to get.

There was the first shot, piercing the tension that had been mounting on the block all week. Then came a flurry of gunfire, maybe dozens more shots. The tension had broken through, the dam burst. There were screams.

“Not my babies,” came a woman’s voice. More shots, and the screams and the gunfire echoed, then went silent.

When the first police respondents arrived, they uncovered a grisly scene inside — the worst, single-incident mass-murder in Indianapolis history: seven family members dead, including three children, aged five, eight and eleven. The three children were found in a room at the back of the house, huddled together in a single bed. They had been shot in their heads and bodies at close range.

This June 1 marked the three year anniversary of the killings. As I write this on Sunday evening, Desmond Turner, the man who prosecutors believe was the main triggerman, finally faces a judge in the morning — the first day of the biggest criminal trial this town has seen in years. I will be there covering the trial each day, as I work to gather material for the documentary I’m pursuing about this horrible crime, and about the effects it has had on the surrounding community.

In the years since that June night in 2006, the Hamilton Avenue Massacre has continued to scar and divide Indianapolis’ Near East Side, a neighborhood that has suffered the effects of neglect, abandonment and poverty for generations. Suspicions, fear and paranoia run rampant. Neighbors mistrust one another, while some, in spite of the odds, and the overwhelming grief, attempt to rebuild.

On some blocks it seems like every other home is condemned and boarded up. Plots of land lie unoccupied and overgrown, as nature reclaims her losses to America’s 12th largest city plot by plot. From the house across the street from where the murders took place, Frank Dodson, a friend and neighbor to the Albarran / Covarrubias family, once pointed to me out five or six lots within our line of sight where homes had previously stood but had since been burned down, either by accident or by arsonists.

Indeed, last August, the home where the murders were committed was, likewise, torched by arsonists, the circumstances of which are still unclear, the motives and culprits still unknown. Today, the arson is just one of so many of the facts surrounding this case that remain shrouded in mystery, hinting at unseen collusion, at broader conspiracy.

When Desmond Turner and his alleged conspirator, James Stewart, were arrested in the days shortly following the massacre, the facts were obscured by assumptions. Turner and Stewart, both African-American, were believed to have murdered the Albarran / Covarrubias family, an Hispanic family. Hispanics were the fastest growing minority population in the city, but were almost non-existent 10 to 15 years before. Blacks in Indianapolis had long suffered from the crime, economic neglect and poor schooling that arises from strict, if de facto, segregation in a city that, only a few generations ago, counted Klan members among its elected officials.

Some believed the crime was just another example of black-on-brown crime — of minorities fighting each other for the scraps leftover from a WASPy smorgasbord. Police patrols were stepped up during Indiana Black Expo, because some believed that racial retaliation by Latino street gangs was imminent. From the beginning, it was believed that Turner and Stewart were looking for a large stash of money and drugs they wrongly thought was in the Hispanic family’s home. The facts as they were known at the time seemed to fit a prescribed narrative rather well. A terrible, tragic narrative. But one that, unfortunately, seemed designated for those who already suffer the most, that they may suffer even more, for all the usual reasons.

Drugs, minorities, violence, or self-violence. These, it was believed, were the ingredients, and it was a dish with which we were all abundantly familiar. It was the kind of narrative that fueled the basest, most unfortunate assumptions in both the fearful and the sympathetic.

In recent weeks, the City-County Prosecutor, Carl Brizzi, has taken the death penalty off the table in exchange for Turner’s waving his right to a jury. Though Brizzi’s initial concerns seemed revolve around the mounting costs of a capital trial, a recent AP report has Brizzi citing “evidentiary considerations” now as “the only reason” for dropping the possibility for the death penalty. Prosecutors don’t have a murder weapon, they don’t have DNA. Witness reports are sketchy and, some sources close to the case say, contradictory.

As important, perhaps, the guilt could be much wider-spread than originally believed. Whether intentional and conspiratorial or not, there are certain segments of “H-Block”  that may bear a large share of the responsibility for  events that preceded the massacre. This was no simple black-on-brown crime. Turner and Stewart were two black men who didn’t even live in the neighborhood — a neighborhood that is predominantly poor and white, though increasingly Latino, with all the tension that has the potential to invoke.

There is so much more to write. For over a year, I have researched this crime whenever possible, conducting interviews, poring over court documents, making contacts and even a few friends around the neighborhood. I have held back in my writing, always tried to be mindful that the information I’ve gathered, if published, could spoil relationships with my sources, could taint the potential jury pool, could poison the process.

But it is time to stop writing. Now that the jury has been dropped, and the trial is beginning, I’m free to simply report what I find. The story can now reveal itself through the daily drama that unfolds each day at trial. Hence do I leave off telling, to let the story tell itself.

It’s going to be a dark, strange and disturbing process, to be sure. Stay tuned for reports over the next few weeks.