RIP Lee Nixon and Cody

Last week I was in an alley off Arsenal talking with some friends, drinking beer and watching kids play basketball. This is when I found that Lee Nixon, AKA the Rose Man died last weekend. This is so sad. He was gunned down in front of a club on the east side. An unintended victim of the insanity of violence that plagues our town.

I didn't know him well, but I would see him at the many different taverns in town, mostly up on the north side or east side. The Zodiac, My Way, Club Elite, the Imperial Palace, Wishing Well etc. Red Bones also told me about Nixon and how he had been doing this for decades. They were good friends from what I could tell. Red Bones also told me over at Palace that Nixon had done very well and didn't even need to sell flowers.

I remember chatting with Nixon at Red Bones(which according to RB had their last night of business tonight after 35 years). The Rose Man told me about his business. I told him to come down to the Royale. He never did that I know of, but he was friendly. He had a truck, a shop and was constantly out selling. He gave me a rather odd promotional calendar that had inspirational sayings on it along with short bio bits on his life including pictures of him from his tour of duty in Vietnam. It is people like Nixon is what I love about Saint Louis. The real character of Saint Louis.

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Such a tragic end for Nixon. So unnecessary. We really need to get a grip on this violence. It has been out of hand. Our murder rate is spiking again. We haven't seen murder like this since the early 90s. It was pretty awful in the 90s. I may jest from time to time about being a dangerous city or a murder capitol, but this is not something I am proud of. This is very serious and this really sucks about our city. Our town is violent. Our people are being gunned down wholesale.

When I was younger, when I was about 17 to the age of about 20, right when the murder rate had the spike in the early 90s I took notice. We were averaging well over 200 murders in the city alone every year- in fact we were well over 250 if I remember correctly.

I read the Post every day. And every day I would clip out the murders. Sometimes twice a day. Sometimes more. My closet door became covered with short news clips about murder. I am not sure exactly why I did this. I think I did it because it didn't seem to make any impact to me personally and I needed to remind myself what was going on around me.

These murders were hardly confined to the city. Back around '90 I had my car stolen in Kirkwood after a double murder just a few blocks from where I went to grade school. It was a beautiful 83 Chevy Impala. While the violence reached out geographically, the murders were primarily in the city. And the one thing that struck me most about the murders is who was getting killed.

For the most part young men were being killed. Young men, teenagers. Kids my age. 17, 18, 19. Not all that unlike me. But something was different. They did not have the same support structure. Every day kids were killed in our city and my life would continue w/o a beat. And all to show about this was just a few sentences on a clip taped on my closet door. Such news stories about a murdered kid would read something like this:

"Tuesday night around 11pm John Doe, 19, was
shot twice in the chest by an unknown assailant in front xxxx block
of xxxx street. Police are searching for a male 6 foot tall wearing a sweatshirt.
Doe was pronounced dead on arrival at midnight at the hospital."

That was it. Not unlike a petty crime report. This would happen over and over and over. And the small cut out articles would cover both sides of my door and into my closet.

Yet it still happens. It is happening again.

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As most people know I ran a boxing gym, the Panda AC for a few years. The operation is currently suspended. The Panda was located for most of our time in North Saint Louis near Cass and North Broadway. We had a youth team. I still stay in touch with many of the kids. It sucks that I don't run the gym anymore. I miss it.

I tried to more than I was able to keep up. The boxing game is not exactly lucrative. In fact it is the opposite of lucrative, even though everyone assumed I was making mad cash running a fight card every six months or so. And to properly manage a gym, we needed to pay intense attention to the kids. There was a lot to manage for we had attempted to start a tutoring program and more. These kids needed a lot of attention. Most were from the neighborhood, mostly Old North, Murphy Blair, O'Fallon, but we had kids from as far south as Carondelet and the county. The team was great. Dennis, Derron, Willie, Dan, Chase, Montrell, Demetrius, Lorenzo and more. It was a regular Our Gang. There are many great stories I could tell. But with all this awful violence in our town, there are some not so great stories I have to tell.

There was one kid that came down who I took notice. His name is Cody. He lived in the neighborhood. He was one of the few white kids that lived in this neighborhood of north Saint Louis who came to the gym. He was a good kid. I could tell he was troubled. He came in to the gym with the other kids. He wanted to box, but he never came in with enough consistency to compete.

I remember finding him down on the southside. He was also living near Hartford Coffee. I would see him down on Cherokee. I could tell that the path was not good. The older kids he was with, his brothers I think, were not a positive influence. And I had many discussions with him. He would hang out at the gym for a week straight. He would sweep up, put away the gloves and roll up the handwraps. We got to know each other.

Cody confided in me. He needed help. Cody couldn't read. He was only about 13 or 14 at the time. He would get in fights at school and get kicked out of all of them, but he was never trouble at the gym. He had a great attitude at the gym. He wanted help. I tried getting a tutor down to the gym, but the logistics of getting the tutor down there on the days he would show up was not easy. I tried. I would see him from time to time and I would ask him about school and what he was up to. He was always really pleasant to me. I think he sort of looked up to me. He was kicked out school regularly for fighting and he said he wasn't going to school, but I knew that you can't just not be in school at that age. They have to put you somewhere until you are old enough to drop out, but I don't know the exact ins and outs of schooling. Cody was not on a good path, but I knew he wanted to be in a better place in life.

So I got an update on Cody from Willie Little. Willie is another young man who I see around regularly, and he is now a going to Vashon. Willie is a good kid and comes from a good family and lives up in Old North. I have been trying to find Willie a job in the past few weeks. In fact he just left me another voice mail earlier tonight. So Willie told me about Cody about two weeks ago. Cody is in jail. Cody killed a kid. Willie told me Cody got upset. He got into an argument. According to Willie he went up to the guy and shot him in the back of the head and killed him over on Cass near 14th. I have been unable to find an official report of the murder. I think Cody's file is in my storage space with the rest of the boxing gear.

This is stupid. This is awful.

We talk as a society about how to reduce murder. More cops. Heavier sentencing. More prisons. More laws. But it is not that simple. That is passive and does little to stem future murders. We need to get to the roots first. There are many reasons why murders are up. Easy access to efficient illicit killing tools, stressed social/family structures, no social connections to help them out, schools that are unable to effectively handle the troubled kid's issues. We need a way to help vent the youth's frustrations effectively. That is why I love boxing. It is a great way for youth to learn how to deal with anger and a positive connection how you can control your own physical self and mind under duress. It is tough being young, and under rough circumstances it can go bad. We can do a much better job as a city, as a society, as Americans. We have particularly tough obstacles particular to a diverse historically divided town like ours, but if we really want to address these issues we have to get to get to the root. We really need to open up on a social and economic levels to embrace as one city. The rest will fall into place much easier and we have so much to gain if we really work together. Being divided will not help us.

We must do better.

the photo is by Kevin Manning of the Post-Dispatch, thanks Kevin