Crime, Disease Plague Blythe Street : Open Drug Sales and Unsanitary Conditions Are Rampant in Van Nuys Barrio

On one side of Blythe Street, a scrawny-looking man shuffles nervously along the curb, waiting for a customer. Every minute or two, a car cruises up to him and, with a quick clasp of hands through the window, goods and money are exchanged.

Across the street, a smiling woman in a blue apron sells menudo from a large pot, seemingly unaware that she is facing a drug dealer. All around, teen-agers, toddlers, mothers and men are moving in and out of two-story apartment buildings along the street. The sidewalk is their front yard.

It is 4 o’clock in the afternoon and Van Nuys’ Blythe Street, both mean and gentle, is coming to life. Police storm an apartment unit on a drug raid as street vendors do a brisk business selling tortillas and pan dulce , and youngsters play ring-around-a-rosy near a crowd of men who are drinking and talking.

Just a block away, on busy Van Nuys Boulevard, scores of rush-hour motorists can catch only a glimpse of Blythe, which looks like many other tree-lined Valley streets.

But at its center, along the 14600 block, Blythe Street is an insular barrio of about 50 apartment complexes of various sizes spanning two blocks, a neighborhood known for its extraordinarily high rates of crime and disease.

Drugs, Disease Rampant

Police call Blythe a “supermarket” for drug dealers. Local public health officials say it is a “hotbed” for communicable diseases. Although some of the area’s apartment buildings are well-maintained, most are run-down and a few appear to be little more than dank dungeons. Apartments rent from about $210 to $500 a month.

The most obvious and foul hazard is the refuse that lines the street: broken and dirty refrigerators, stoves, a water heater, tattered furniture, a burned couch, overflowing garbage dumpsters. An open ditch that runs between two apartment buildings and drains onto the street is thick with black sludge and garbage.

Because few outsiders see or travel through Blythe Street, few complain about its condition. The east-west street is cut off from the community by Van Nuys Boulevard and the General Motors plant to the east and by industrial buildings and railroad tracks to the south. On the west and north, apartment buildings buffer it from the surrounding middle-class neighborhoods.

The blight has persisted for more than seven years on the street, and there will probably be no permanent and substantial improvements soon, city officials, police, residents and landlords agree.

“I don’t see how it can change,” said Carol Szabo, a landlord and former Blythe Street resident. “The only way to clean it up is to burn it and start over again.”

The problems are compelling:

Forty-two percent of all arrests within the 35-square-mile Van Nuys Division of the Police Department made from March 3 to Nov. 16 this year by a special crime task force came from a half-square-mile pocket that centers around Blythe Street, police statistics show.

The task force, known as Operation Second Place, made 471 of its 1,130 arrests in the Blythe Street area. The 152 narcotics-related arrests made in the Blythe Street area from April to June this year were the most for any area in the division. The second highest number of drug arrests in the division--71--occurred in an area that includes Woodley Park, a well-known drug trafficking center.

“Usually, an area is known for a certain type of drug--cocaine, heroin, PCP,” said Sgt. Ralph Krusey, head of the task force. “Blythe has got it all. It’s a supermarket out there.”

The Blythe Street area was the source of about 39% of all communicable diseases reported from the East Valley region served by Van Nuys Health Care Center. That region includes Van Nuys, North Hollywood, Panorama City and the nearby hillside communities, Los Angeles County Health Services Department officials said.

Those officials said that, in the past six months, they have investigated 94 cases of communicable disease in a five-square-mile area that includes Blythe Street. All but a few of those cases came from Blythe Street, they said.

“There is no other situation like this anywhere else in the district,” said Diane Pettit, public health nurse for the area. “It’s such a small area, one street, but there is so much: enteric (intestinal) disease, tuberculosis, hepatitis. It’s a hotbed of activity.”

Despite poor conditions in many of the buildings, a check of records of a cross-section of 25 buildings showed that only 18 complaints were filed during the past five years with the city Department of Building and Safety. The complaints were for cracked walls, plumbing and electrical problems and a leaky roof. In two cases, residents denied making the complaints when visited by an inspector.

“People living under these circumstances are afraid to complain,” said Dominic Rescineto, senior city building inspector. “Complaints are not necessarily an indication of the condition of the building.”

Many Illegal Aliens

Part of the fear stems from the fact that many tenants along Blythe are illegal aliens, said Jesse Avila, an aide to mid-Valley Councilman Ernani Bernardi.

“When there is a question of the legal resident status,” Avila said, “they are very intimidated to call governmental agencies.”

Bernardi, whose district includes Blythe Street, blames “slumlords” for run-down conditions that he says attract criminals. Landlords blame tenants and, for the most part, tenants do not blame anyone, choosing to live in silence.

“You really have to live on that street to see what is happening,” former resident Szabo said. “I’ve seen them walking down from Van Nuys Boulevard with suitcases to live with relatives. I’ve seen teen-agers break away and become part of a gang. We’ve had good families here, and I’ve had tenants destroy my property.

“Everyone seems to come home to a different life on Blythe Street.”

The five old cars, green and gray, might as well have been fully marked police cruisers as they turned down Blythe Street at 4 in the afternoon. The eyes of several men standing along the curb quickly widened as they spotted the five-car line of unmarked vehicles.

In the seconds it took the cars to reach 14606 Blythe St., a crowd of about 200 had converged in front of the two-story stucco apartment building to watch nine police officers, one with a hand-held ram, serve a search warrant at Apartment 4, suspected of being a drug-dealing center.

A man, running at full speed, burst through the crowd and ran into the path of the last police car to pull in front of the building. He tripped and fell in front of the car but got up and darted away. Two officers chased him, and in minutes they returned with the man, handcuffed, his neck and shirt drenched with blood from a gash in his head. Police said he hurt himself in the fall.

The three walked through the crowd, through the courtyard of 14606 and into Apartment 4. The suspect joined four other handcuffed men kneeling in the center of a tattered living room. A woman sat handcuffed on a dirty, ragged couch.

About 50 to 60 children, most of elementary-school age, ran around the courtyard laughing, screaming with excitement:

“Hey, is this a movie?” one asked.

“Are you good police or bad police? This is a big show!”

“This is Rambo. I’m Rambo.”

Money Stashed in Underwear

A small group of bold boys pushed near the front steps of the apartment to watch through an open door. Inside, officers searched each man. They recovered wads of money from pant and shirt pockets. One man had $1,002 stashed in his underwear, according to an affidavit later filed in Van Nuys Municipal Court.

While the police quietly turned over a sofa, ripped up pillows and rummaged through drawers, shelves, suitcases and the refrigerator, one of the boys asked a suspect in Spanish, “Te vas a la carcel ahorita?” (“Are you going to jail now?”). Police shooed the boy away, and the youth went back to his friends, gesturing as if he were injecting himself in his arm.

Court records show that police seized a plastic bag containing what is believed to be 49 grams of cocaine; 13 balloons rolled tightly, possibly containing heroin; nine neatly folded white papers containing a white, powdery substance, believed to be cocaine, and two bags of what appeared to be marijuana.

Also, police seized a photo album containing a snapshot of one of the suspects squatting in a macho pose with a tourniquet around his arm and a syringe in his hand.

It was dusk by the time police finished and the four suspects were taken away. The crowd in front was long gone. The smells of frying tortillas permeated the courtyard. The children were still running around, screaming, laughing.

“This is almost a daily occurrence here,” Sgt. Krusey said of the drug raid. “People here know what the cars are, they know what’s going to happen. We’ve tripled the number of drug arrests in a year on this street. And we can still go on serving search warrants every day.”

Pettit, the public health nurse, said she tries to stay away from Blythe Street during the crowded afternoons, instead going there during the quieter morning hours.

“No one will hassle me in the morning,” she said. “The guys on the street know me by now and kind of smile when I walk by. They stopped asking me to buy drugs.”

As she parked her sporty red car alongside a trash dumpster on the sidewalk, she pointed to a gutter filled with stagnant water and a nearby sludge-filled drainage ditch as the likely causes of the illness of the first patient she was to visit that morning.

Child Taken to Hospital

Weeks ago, Teresa Perez, a 30-year-old mother of three, took her 4-year-old son to the emergency room at Olive View Mid-Valley Hospital in Van Nuys. The child’s body was covered with infected, oozing insect bites. The boy was treated, and a home evaluation by a public health nurse was ordered.

Pettit found a modest, tidy two-bedroom apartment and a puzzled mother who thought her child had been bitten by cockroaches.

(The mother’s name and those of Pettit’s other patients have been changed to protect their confidentiality.)

“I told her they were fly bites, mosquito bites,” Pettit said. “There were no screens on the window and the doors. There is a rampant fly problem because of all the garbage. I see children playing in that ditch and with the gutter water all the time.”

During her visit, Pettit saw that Perez had followed instructions and had dressed her boy in long pants and a long-sleeved shirt. Perez said she had asked the landlord for window screens.

18 Share Apartment

Across the street, Pettit visited the Rios family--six brothers and sisters 15 to 25 years old, three spouses and nine children. All 18 share a two-bedroom apartment.

Pettit explained that she first saw the family in August, when a 2-year-old boy was taken to Olive View hospital with severe diarrhea. He was suffering from a communicable intestinal illness brought on by unsanitary living conditions, Pettit said.

The boy was later diagnosed as having cerebral palsy, she said. Pettit said she frequently checks on the family, hoping her repeated advice will sink in.

The eldest sister, 25-year-old Irma Rios, welcomed Pettit into the apartment, which was lined with three tattered couches and a flimsy kitchen table. Rios slipped panties onto two naked toddlers, their little hands, knees and feet charcoal black from playing on the dirty brown carpet. The walls were yellow-dirty.

Rios pointed beneath the bathroom sink, where a pipe had burst. She said the family has since used the kitchen sink for personal needs.

Squirrel on the Table

As Pettit began casual conversation, a squirrel jumped onto the kitchen table, grabbed a chunk of bread and scurried across the living room.

“You still have the pet squirrel?” Pettit asked.

Rios and her her sister nodded.

“That squirrel is bad; it carries germs,” Pettit said. “The squirrel goes outside and eats garbage. Where does it go poo-poo? In the house? Babies should not be crawling on the floor where the squirrel goes poo-poo.”

The young women and their 24-year-old brother said the squirrel does not go outside and is no trouble to take care of.

“Irma, have you been to the clinic for the class to prevent pregnancy?” Pettit asked in slow, simple Spanish.

Rios shook her head “no” as she and her sister-in-law nursed two babies.

“Too many babies are not good for this family,” Pettit said. “You can use your money to live in another apartment.”

The women giggled.

Protect Public Health

“It’s so frustrating,” Pettit said later. “My job is to protect the public health. That’s all. If I had the power to play God, I would force them to get rid of that damned squirrel. I would put the women on birth control.

“What seems so elementary to us--keeping the children’s hands clean--seems to be the hardest to teach,” she said. “The bottom line is that I can’t enforce good health habits. I can only suggest, encourage, teach.”

“You would have to be here night and day, 24 hours, to fix what they tear up,” said Carol Szabo, who for 10 years has owned and managed eight cottages and a large house on Blythe Street with her husband, Laszlo.

On a recent Saturday, the Szabos were cleaning and repairing the front house, where they had once lived, after the three-month process to evict the tenants.

Inside, furniture was heaved in one corner, an electrical outlet was blown out and extension cords hung from wall to wall. The kitchen floor and stove were thick with brown, greasy residue. The screens were ripped.

Surveying the Damage

“I’m so tired, irate and mad. It just burns me up,” Carol Szabo said, surveying the damage with a scrub brush in one hand and a bottle of liquid cleaner in the other.

The Szabos said that they are the exceptions among landlords on Blythe Street. They do repairs, cleaning and upkeep themselves. Four years ago, they said, deteriorating conditions on Blythe Street forced them to move their family to another part of the Valley.

“Blythe Street used to be such a precious little residential street,” Szabo said. She pulled out a scrapbook with photos of her house and cottages, with neatly trimmed lawns and flowers out front.

She said landlords can’t take all the blame for blight.

“You have to understand what someone is like under the influence” of drugs or alcohol, she said. “They come home drunk or high, and they tear things up. It takes a lot of money to paint, to put in new windows. We put up a fence, and the next week someone crashed into it.”

In her scrapbook are two newsletters for a short-lived Blythe Street Improvement Assn., formed by landlords in 1978 to try to organize a street beautification project with youths and a “clean sweep” day when junk would be hauled from the sidewalk.

Szabo said the owners seemed willing at first, “but nothing happened.”

Olivia Lopez, 42, is proud that she can speak English, and, even if she stumbles through some of her sentences, she talks about her family and the 12 years they lived in a Blythe Street apartment that she managed. In 1980, she and her husband bought a home in Arleta, where the family now lives.

“In 1975, many Mexican people began to come on Blythe,” Lopez said. “A lot of people try to live on Blythe because it is close to factories, close to schools, close to get the bus. It happened gradually, all the people moving in.

“I never had problems with nobody. I know many good families. I tried to help the people and tried to tell them that the rules for this country are different than our country. They are so very different.

‘Kids in the Gangs’

“I tell them to live clean, to try and keep the kids close to the father and mother, to not let children go out with bad children. I think some parents don’t understand that their children are bad, and they ignore them. Their kids are in the gangs and sell drugs.

“The reason I moved out of Blythe Street is that my children, when they grow up, they need to live in another place. All the time the police came to my building they told me, ‘Olivia, why are you living here? Why don’t you move out?’

“That’s why I moved out, not because there are a lot of Mexican people on Blythe; no, not for that reason. I moved out of Blythe because I love my children.”

At 4 p.m. Braulio Acevedo, carrying a lunch-sized ice chest, slowly walked up the driveway crowded with playing children. Latin music blared from his neighbor’s open door. A little man double-parked his blue van on the street so he could go door-to-door selling corn tortillas.

Acevedo, 38, who said he works at an Agoura construction site, came home to find four of his five children, ranging in age from 5 to 13, watching cartoons on the TV in the living room. His youngest daughter was coloring on the kitchen table.

Keep Children Inside

Acevedo shut the front door tightly.

“We don’t let our children see them sell drugs outside,” he said. “They play inside, watch television, do homework. It looks so bad outside with all the sofas, the garbage. I tell my children a different quality of people do things like that.”

The Acevedos have lived in their two-bedroom apartment on Blythe Street for 10 years. As their family grew, Acevedo said, it became harder to find another apartment that would allow five children. Several years ago he wanted to buy a house with government-subsidized financing, but could not come up with the $3,000 down payment.

Eva Acevedo, 44, drives her children and dozens of her neighbors’ children back and forth to Valerio Street Elementary School every day in her van. The Acevedo children sleep in two bunk beds and on a couch in one bedroom. The parents share the other bedroom.

They have neat, modest furniture, a double-door refrigerator and a videocassette recorder. The couple explained the latter luxury by saying that, if their children are comfortable inside, they will not want to go outside.

“My children are all Americans. I tell them there will be opportunities if they do their homework,” Braulio Acevedo said. “Me, I don’t have much schooling. I can’t understand their homework.

“But I tell my children, the Americans, they can fend for themselves in this country. I tell them there are other areas to live.”