In Cleveland, Killings Show Social Costs of Deterioration

On the blocks where the slain women were found, their bodies wrapped in plastic, nearly one in three homes is boarded up, some stripped of copper pipes and electrical wiring by scavengers that a Cleveland councilman compared to locusts.

Once again, a chilling crime has drawn national attention to Cleveland, exposing how violence festers in semi-abandoned neighborhoods where social bonds have weakened and women seem especially targeted as victims.

The police on Monday charged a registered sex offender with murdering three women and dumping their bodies in a garage, an overgrown field and the basement of a boarded-up house. The killings, in the suburb of East Cleveland, came two months after the escape of three women held captive for a decade by an unemployed bus driver in a boarded-up house in West Cleveland, an episode that plunged the city into introspection about how well people know their neighbors.

“This is what happens when you have poverty,” Gov. John R. Kasich, who was in Cleveland on Monday, told reporters. “It’s what happens when you have individuals who are very dangerous inside the community and somehow lose track of them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/25/us/in-cleveland-killings-show-social-costs-of-deterioration.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&hp