One woman prohibits her grandchildren from playing unattended outside their tiny gated yard. On a nearby street, a college student often leaves his laptop at home when he heads out for class, wary of being held up at gunpoint.
Residents of a section of Dorchester that has experienced a spike in homicides in recent months say they feel compelled to adjust their day-to-day routine, fearful that the violence and crime that all too often erupts on these streets will find them.
Since April 20, there have been seven homicides within the Police Department’s Area C-11, five within a 2-mile radius, near the Bowdoin Street and Columbia Road corridor. Three of the four fatal shootings over the Independence Day weekend were in the district.
On Norton Street - where Victor Gomes, 34, was shot Monday during a cookout with relatives and friends - several residents spoke yesterday about the recent rash of homicides.
Arkie Tadesse, 24, a film student at Emerson College, said he moved into a three-decker on Norton Street last year, three days before a gunman shot 14-year-old Nicholas Fomby-Davis, who had been riding on his older brother’s moped along Bowdoin Street. Fomby Davis’s family lives next door to the Gomes’s residence.
“The stuff that has been happening around here is maddening, and it does make me want to leave,’’ Tadesse said. “Nowadays, you get killed because someone looked at your girl the wrong way.’’
One teenager said she would like to see a greater police presence in the neighborhood, where immigrant families from Cape Verde, the West Indies, and elsewhere live in three-deckers tightly packed amid clusters of small businesses and ethnic restaurants.
Patricia MacFarland, 55, who has lived on Norton Street for about 40 years, sat on her porch watching two of grandchildren play in a small yard ringed by a chain-link fence.
When one of the children tossed a Frisbee onto the sidewalk, she kept him from retrieving it.
“It’s unfortunate, because I have seven grandchildren and they should be able to go outside and play and do things like jump rope and play ball,’’ MacFarland said. “But they don’t go out unless they’re with me or their parents’’ because of fears for their safety.
Northeastern University student Aristides Andrade, 19, lives on Olney Street, about a block from Norton Street. A vast memorial of candles, bottles, and fireworks dominates the sidewalk in front of his house, marking the spot where Nicholas Trotman, 38, was gunned down last week.
“Every time I go outside, I wonder if I’m going to get shot,’’ Andrade, a pre-med major, said yesterday afternoon. “I come outside and I’m like, ‘Wow, a guy died right here.’ I’m at home where I’m supposed to feel safe, and I don’t.’’
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