Tyrone didn't have his gun and he asked Russell for his. My little dumb mind said, 'I'm a gonna take it.'" As he later recounted: "This dude has more money than what we got. As Camp began to climb the stairs, a thought occurred to Tyrone. His own supply was depleted, so Tyrone went back upstairs and asked Russell if he had any crack. Camp asked if he had "something for $100." Tyrone watched him approach before walking down to meet Camp on the first floor. Camp, 39, got out of the car and sauntered up the walkway, evidently looking for the drug dealers who frequently loitered around 1108. So far, Russell had eluded arrest.Īround 9 p.m., as the brothers waited in their second-floor hideaway, an occasional customer of Tyrone's named Ronald Camp pulled up in a car with a woman and two other men. In the previous 18 months, he had also killed two people Anthony "Ant" Davis and Johnathan "John John" Ray. He used his gun to hold up drug dealers and participated in a long string of gang shootouts. Russell, on the other hand, had become part of the mayhem. Yet Tyrone disliked the neighborhood's frequent killings. The brothers carried pistols because guns symbolized manhood and power in the street culture of Little Vietnam for drug dealers, they also were tools of deterrence and self-protection.
#Dead cells fatal falls crack crack#
Tyrone specialized in crack while Russell, then 17, mostly sold "loveboat" or liquid PCP, which he dispensed in vanilla extract bottles.Īt first, the Wallaces had only flirted with violence. Even after Carolyn Wallace and her companion, Patricia Harris, had moved around the corner to an apartment on Maryland Avenue, the brothers returned daily to their spot on 21st Street to hang out with friends and peddle drugs. Russell often gave their address as "21st and Vietnam."īrothers Russell (left) and Tyrone Wallace in an interview cell (By Craig Herndon - The Washington Post)īoth boys were fixtures in the local drug scene. The shabby warren now was in one of the city's most violent neighborhoods. Originally built by a private developer in the 1940s to house the city's growing population of lower-income black families, Carver Terrace had fallen on hard times. NE in Carver Terrace, a low-slung, red brick complex that climbs a hill near Robert F. The apartment where they had lived with their mother for five years stood to the right, a stone's throw away.Ĭarolyn Wallace, the boys' mother, had moved into the neighborhood in 1989, renting a one-bedroom apartment at 1104 21st St. NE, where we usually went when it was cold, smoking weed." The landing had a large window overlooking the building entrance and the walkway from 21st Street. "Me and Russell were on the second landing of 1108 21st St. "The evening was chilly," Tyrone later recalled. With his business done and the winter day fading, Tyrone caught up with his kid brother, Russell, in one of their favorite haunts. Traffic was slow in the neighborhood known to police as "Little Vietnam" a half-mile square pocket of Northeast Washington ruled by warring street crews and armed drug dealers. Tyrone had been regularly selling drugs since he was 12, and he unloaded his $240 supply of crack rocks in a few hours. He ate a breakfast of Corn Pops with her two sons and set out across town in his 1976 blue Cadillac to deal crack on 21st Street NE, his place of business for five years. 22, 1994, at a girlfriend's apartment in Southeast Washington.
They committed, abetted or witnessed and await the parole eligibility that draws nearerĮighteen-year-old Tyrone Wallace woke up at noon on Nov. Theirs isĪ tale told from a cellblock, where the two killers serve their time mull the murders Prison, on probation or on parole, according to the American Civil Liberty Union's Sentencing Project. The harsh reality that nearly one-third of U.S. The story of brothers Tyrone and Russell Wallace illuminates a lost generation and Of the victims of young black male killers are other young black males. One in every three murders in this country during the decade before 1995.
population, they were responsible for almost
Although young black males age 14 through 24 This slaughter of the young by the young is especially devastating in the nation's In Washington, where the homicide rate of victims ages 15 to 19 increased 700 percent Juvenilization of violence," as criminologist James Alan Fox calls it, has been horrific Teenage murder rate soared and today remains higher than it was a decade ago.
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