Against Homeowner, Tenant : Civil Suit Filed in S.D. Drug Crackdown

Launching a new assault on drug dealers, the city attorney filed a civil lawsuit Monday against the owner and tenant of a Southeast San Diego house where 29 drug arrests have been made in the past nine months.

Deputy City Atty. Joseph Schilling filed suit under the state Drug Abatement Act against property owner King P. Johnson of Spring Valley and tenant Gloria Davis. The city obtained a temporary restraining order against further alleged drug sales on the property, which, Schilling charged, is “the focal point of a family-run drug operation.”

Since March, raids by San Diego police narcotics agents and members of the countywide Drug Enforcement Task Force have confiscated about $3,700 in rock cocaine and marijuana from the house on Olivewood Terrace in Southeast San Diego. Officials said the house is known locally as the Titus house because Davis’ son-in-law, Charles Titus, lives there.

Within a two-block radius of the property, more than 90 drug arrests have been made since March, the attorney said. The enforcement has done little to slow the drug trafficking, however, Schilling said, “because they just go right back into business again.”

Schilling said this is the first time the Drug Abatement Act has been used in San Diego, but it has been successfully used in Santa Ana and Los Angeles to evict drug dealers and confiscate their property.

The restraining order prohibits the tenants from dealing drugs and from removing any furniture or fixtures from the property.

At a Jan. 19 hearing, a Superior Court judge may order the property confiscated and furnishings sold at auction or order the building closed for as long as a year and order the owner to pay the city a reasonable amount of rent for that period.

Johnson, the property owner, is not a suspect in the drug dealing but does face more that 50 zoning and building code violations found by city inspectors, Schilling said.

The quasi-criminal, quasi-civil procedure being pursued by the city is aimed at ridding a neighborhood of suspected drug dealers and of penalizing the suspects by seizure of their personal property, he explained.

A similar law, the Red Light Abatement Act, has been used against four massage parlors in the city, Schilling said. Two have gone out of business and have been assessed $10,000 in fines. The other two have been closed by the courts for a year and face further legal action.