For some, crime overshadows Pennsylvania vote

By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - Sen. Hillary Clinton's new proposals on crime have put the issue on the agenda in next week's primary in Pennsylvania. But for families devastated by violence, the issue reaches well beyond politics.

Pennsylvania's largest city, Philadelphia, is one of America's most violent, with 391 murders in 2007. Particularly troubling to people who live here is that black murder victims outnumbered whites by more than four to one, and there were five times as many murders committed by blacks as whites.

Donna Giddings knows the pain behind the police statistics. Three years after her mother and son were murdered by the same man, she struggles to deal with the aftermath of the crime.

Richard Singletary, 18, shot Andre Giddings, 20, once in the back of the head with an illegal semi-automatic pistol on February 18, 2005, after they argued over a $1,000 debt Singletary owed Andre but which his mother says Andre had forgiven.

In an attempt to leave no witnesses, Singletary then fatally shot Andre's friend Kenneth Best, 17, and then turned his gun on Andre's 67-year-old grandmother, Willie Mae Alston, with whom Andre was living at the time.

It's when Giddings recounts how her mother was hiding in a closet in her home in north Philadelphia to evade Singletary's gun that tears roll down her cheeks. He killed her with two shots to the chest, she said.

"This kid was diabolical. He just wanted to kill somebody," said Giddings, 45, a single parent with a 15-year-old daughter at home. "He wasn't sorry for killing Andre."

Singletary was arrested four days later and is serving three consecutive life sentences. The murders shared common features with others that help give the United States one of the highest murder rates in the industrialized world.

They took place in an impoverished inner-city where drugs and illegal weapons are easily obtained, where codes of street machismo often override civil law and where both the victims and the perpetrator were black.

CYCLE OF VIOLENCE

Andre Giddings didn't have a gun but sold cocaine and marijuana and was in and out of juvenile detention because of truancy and drug dealing.

Like 42 percent of Philadelphia's public school students, he did not finish high school. He was unemployed when he died.

With a job, he might have survived because it would have given him an income outside the drug trade and sense of direction, said Giddings, a medical technician who said she always had enough money to give her son what he needed.

"If these young men had good-paying jobs, it would make a significant difference," she said. "Most of these young boys just want to be part of something. They just want to belong."

She also blames lax gun laws in a state where lawmakers have repeatedly rejected modest gun-control initiatives such as limiting handgun purchases to one a month per person, and, most recently, requiring owners to report lost or stolen weapons.