Justice walked out on Milton Colbert.
Moments before a coroner's hearing into his killing, the man who claimed he knew who shot Colbert stood up and walked out the door. In the morgue's hallway, surrounded by white marble and the faint stink of formaldehyde, the reluctant witness told the prosecutor he feared for his life.
He would not testify.
Colbert's mother, Carmen Davis, and her daughters, Aziza Wood and Tisha Colbert, came that morning expecting to see the courts take away the man who allegedly had taken Milton away two months earlier, on June 18, 2003. Instead, they watched, unbelieving, as sheriff's deputies led the accused man, Aaron Bundridge, to freedom.
Locked together, mother and daughters walked out behind him, into the crowded cracks of the justice system.
"They just let him go," said Davis, 43, of Homestead.
They hear from neither investigators nor witnesses. They ache, they weep and they hope every day for the dawn of a conviction.
They are not alone.
In the last 20 years, 48 percent of Allegheny County's unsolved murders happened in neighborhoods that are home to less than 12 percent of the county's population.
They are Western Pennsylvania's most notorious ZIP codes -- anchored by the neighborhoods of Homewood, the North Side and the Hill District, where Milton Colbert, 20, died.
A world away from courtrooms, most of the 145 unsolved homicides in these communities aren't mysteries.
Even police don't list cases like Colbert's as "unsolved." People here know; witnesses just won't testify.
Census figures tell these neighborhoods' stories with low graduation and employment numbers.
The boulevards brandish their grit.
In the Hill District, less than 40 percent of those older than 16 have a job. Glass and addicts litter the North Side's narrow streets; crumbling houses and abandoned businesses decompose along Homewood's broad avenues.
Unsolved homicides in these places act like lye on a corpse.
The 'G code'
The more murderers go unpunished, the more people become disillusioned, fed up with a system that seems to work for everyone else. The more disillusioned people become, the less likely they are to talk to police or prosecutors. The less people talk, the easier it is to get away with murder.
"It's like a license to kill," said Pittsburgh police Deputy Chief William Mullen, a former homicide detective.
Some fear payback. Some, burdened with bills and everyday terror, don't want a piece of someone else's problem. Others pledge allegiance to the street, choosing the devil they know.
Victims' families spit the words "G code," the phrase given to the code of silence that has become one of these neighborhoods' strongest threads. It's supposed to be about closing ranks and taking care of your own.
"Kids say, 'I'm going to die for my 'hood,'" said Richard Garland, a former Philadelphia gang leader who runs One Vision One Life, a county program that sends reformed criminals back into their neighborhoods to defuse conflicts. "I can take them to any penitentiary in the state of Pennsylvania where somebody responsible for a murder will tell them, 'There's nobody from the hood sending me money, sending my mom money, taking care of my family.'"
Sticking to that code restrains victims' families from ever moving on, said Mary Volker, a therapist at the Center for Victims of Violent Crime in Pittsburgh.
"I have a sense of justice and a sense of closure that the mother or the father that has an unsolved murder can never experience," said Adreinne Young, a victim's advocate whose son, Javon Thompson, was murdered in 1994. The murderer is serving a life sentence.
"It brings a sense of peace, it brings a sense of hope and it brings also the fact that your child meant something," Young said.
Most hurtful is the perception that the victims were drug dealers and thugs who had it coming.
"Everybody has that stereotype; that if your kid gets shot, they're into drugs or they're into crime. That doesn't make it so," Davis said. "My son had an education. He wanted to do something. ... My son was not just a body, whether they think so or not."
Make no assumptions
Colbert planned to attend Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania on a track scholarship in the fall of 2003. He wanted to be a gym teacher, said Davis, a quiet woman whose voice sinks just above a whisper when speaking of her son's last days and the time she spent helping him get ready for the move to college.
"He had his dorm room and everything."
"You can't assume that this person is worthless," said Young, who founded the victims' advocacy group Tree of Hope after her son's murder. "You can't assume that they were a drug dealer. You can't assume that their life didn't mean something and they weren't productive and they weren't somebody's father."
About 35 percent of the 145 victims have a criminal record, which is about the same percentage as unsolved murder victims in the county as a whole, according to a Tribune-Review analysis of court records.
Most were charged with drug possession.
Almost 89 percent of the victims are black, and 114 of them -- 79 percent -- are black males. From 1998 to 2003, blacks in Allegheny County were almost 43 times more likely than whites to be victims of an unsolved murder, according to the most recent statistics available.
The unsolved murder rate for blacks during that time was more than four times higher than the total murder rate -- solved and unsolved -- for whites.
"One of the biggest things in the African-American community, people don't report crime," Garland said.
Without that vindication of a conviction, family members say, they're trapped in the days just after the murder, a prison sentence for the killer their only hope for freedom.
"I know things will happen in God's time and not mine," Davis said. "But I'm getting a little restless."
Mute witnesses
Murder breeds where convictions are rarest, said Pittsburgh police Deputy Chief William Mullen. "But if you put yourself in (the witness') position, where you're going to be threatened or you're going to be killed or a member of your family is going to be killed -- that's what prevents them from coming forward."
Pittsburgh police run a witness protection program, but many don't want to exile themselves from the neighborhoods where they grew up, Mullen said.
"One of the things is, you can't return to the threat area," where the witness could run into someone gunning for them, said Sgt. Lavonnie Bickerstaff, who runs the program. "We let them know that if they do, they'll be deactivated (from the program) automatically."
More than 500 families have relocated since the program began in 1995, Bickerstaff said.
The city can't afford to do as much as the federal witness protection program. Bickerstaff's budget fell from $120,000 in 2004 to $87,000 this year. Witnesses don't get new identities, but the city can pay for job training, moving costs and temporary housing.
No one who's stuck to the rules has ever gotten killed, though several people were murdered after going back into their old neighborhoods, Mullen said. Bickerstaff, citing the program's policy of not confirming or denying whether any specific person ever was enrolled in the program, declined to give their names.
Witnesses who reject the program leave themselves with a choice: stay quiet and let your neighborhood shred itself, or testify and worry that your children will soon talk about you in the past tense.
Frustrated parents frequently accuse police of using unwilling witnesses as an excuse for what the victim's families see as laziness, racism or disregard for poor, powerless neighborhoods.
"How come there are so many murders in the African-American community?" Young said. "What other place can you get away with murder?"
'The system beats you up'
Sitting in his North Side office, behind a cherry-stained desk cluttered with reams of grim paperwork, Mullen discounts the complaint, but he doesn't dismiss it. Bad cops exist, he said, but the vast majority of police officers aren't racist or lazy, and they're dedicated enough that the job's dangers don't dampen their desire to help, he said.
"You just can't take it personally," he says. Pausing briefly, the 36-year veteran of some of Pittsburgh's hardest heartbreaks decides to drop the stoicism for a moment.
"You do take it personally. Solving cases, you take it personally."
In the beginning, he says, you're a young, idealistic lieutenant -- a crime fighter barrelling through the Fort Pitt Tunnels at 3 a.m. to get to a murder scene. Downtown bursts into view and a thrill courses through you as you realize you're the one they called while the rest of the city sleeps.
Time wears on, though, and the cases keep coming, and the guilty keep walking, he said. Eventually, it sinks in that your convictions -- legal or moral -- won't stop the city's bloodletting.
"You have no impact. It just continues to go, no matter how many cases you clear, no matter how many arrests you make," Mullen said. "You get beat up. The system beats you up, defense lawyers beat you up, judges beat you up."
The blame game
Garland gets worried when he hears people heaping blame too far outside their community.
"I go to community meetings and everybody's jumping up and down, hollering at the police," said Garland. "He ain't the problem. ... We talk racism, we talk class. When do we put the onus on the community⢠Why are you letting this stuff go on?"
"This stuff" goes beyond just the murders, Garland and others say. Homicide is where it ended, not where it began.
Murders in these communities go unsolved because so many people, including some families of victims, disconnect from the justice system, whether out of selfishness, self-preservation or self-delusion, said Garland.
"When momma needs rent money to be paid and there might not be any man in the home or she's working three jobs with no medical benefits, $500 may help. She might kind of turn her head from where little Johnny got that $500,"said Rashad Byrdsong, head of the Point Breeze nonprofit Community Empowerment Corp.
Police share the blame, Byrdsong said, but there is not one agency or group that can control the problems that result in unsolved murders.
"In some of these communities, public safety is nonexistent, and I'm not just talking about law enforcement," said Byrdsong. A Vietnam veteran who spent a decade in prison for bank robbery -- "I didn't have money, so I went and got some," he said -- Byrdsong has known hopelessness.
"Public safety to me means education for children. It means jobs and opportunity. It means businesses in the community," Byrdsong said. "Public safety can't just be an alien occupying army in your community."
Hope in history
History gives Byrdsong hope. These neighborhoods changed to become what they are. They can change again.
When Chuck Frazier, a Democratic ward chairman and constable in Homewood, grew up in the 1960s and '70s, there were plenty of fights, but the bruises healed, he said.
Crack changed everything.
Cheap and highly addictive, crack cocaine swept the city's poorest neighborhoods in the early 1990s, giving gangs an economic base and colossal cash incentives to control territory.
Fists became relics.
Bullets killed more than 120 of the 145 victims of unsolved murders.
The flood of guns moved murder outdoors, where physical evidence is harder to come by, Mullen said. Eyewitnesses became more important, even as neighborhoods became more withdrawn.
Crack fed that withdrawal by eroding the basic foundation of children's loyalty to their parents, Garland said.
"The drug dealers became these kids' best friends," Garland said. "They'd recruit these kids to be lookouts. The street raised these kids."
Testifying, for some, became treasonous.
"If I can get a 10-year-old a pair of Air Jordans, his allegiance is to me," Garland said.
Moving her child into that kind of neighborhood was the biggest mistake of Dorene Pittman's life, she said. Her son, Jamar Pittman, died in October when someone unleashed a torrent of gunfire into the stolen van Jamar was riding in near his North Side home. He was 13.
"I'm a bag of nerves about coming home and one of my other children might be hurt," she said. Needing money to support her remaining children, Pittman said, only truck driving school promised the kind of paycheck she needed. Two friends will watch the children while she's gone for up to a week at a time, but her family will eat and they won't lose their house, she said.
Others, even neighbors, sometimes distance themselves from murders by blaming the family and the victim, Volkar said. That just feeds the grief and guilt the survivors feel.
"Nobody deserves to be murdered," Volkar said. "Bottom line, I don't care what they're doing. If this kid's causing a problem, call the police and get something taken care of, but nobody has the right to murder anybody."
Seeking closure
Debra Germany talks freely of Raymond Germany being in and out of jail from the time he was 14 until his murder at 23, his final decade a cycle from drug dealer to inmate to low-wage worker and back again.
Germany never stopped trying to help, no matter how discouraging it got. She used whatever contacts she had to get him jobs. She helped him get an apartment, clothes and cable television. She called the police on him when it all failed.
Four years after someone shot him seven times during a botched drug deal, she still hasn't given up on him. Germany has, as much as she can, made peace with the tragedies of her son's life. But a resolution to his death eludes her, and she cannot make peace with that.
"Imagine being a mother by a phone that never rings," she said. "This one person holds the answer and they won't come forward."
