A neighborhood celebrates shuttering of suspected drug house

Getting a suspected drug dealer’s house boarded up wasn’t how Michael Paul wanted to meet his neighbors.

Paul has lived in his Emerson-Garfield home on Montgomery Avenue for nearly a decade and always has been friendly with a few of the families who live near him, he said. When a house across the street at 1824 W. Montgomery started causing problems a little over a year ago – loud fights, people coming and going at all hours, needles outside on the sidewalk – he was one of several neighbors who made a call to Crime Check.

Those calls eventually led to a neighborhood meeting over the summer, where 24 people came together at the West Central Community Oriented Policing Services Shop. Other neighbors described hearing gunshots, having tires slashed by residents of the house and living in constant fear of violence.

“The cool thing that happened as a result of this is we all got to know each other,” Paul said. Led by neighborhood conditions Officer Traci Ponto, Paul and others began documenting activity at the house on sheets provided by the police department. Along with dates, times and descriptions, the last column asked how the incident made him feel.

“I kept writing, ‘pissed off,’ ‘pissed off,’ ‘pissed off,’ ‘frustrated,’” he said.

The house aroused police interest because of its connection with drug dealers, and neighbors said police were quick to help them organize.

“Cops were parked … all around the neighborhood all the time,” said Judi Munro, who lives down the street from the problem house. “Those guys weren’t going to get away with anything.”

As a neighborhood conditions officer, much of Ponto’s work involves problem houses. Neighbors said her work allowed them to make a case for shutting the house down.

“She gave us the tools to present a case to get results,” Paul said. “Until then, we were kind of a loose-knit band of desperados.”

In early November, the Spokane Police Department’s Civil Enforcement Unit filed suit against the house’s owner, Lindsay Storch, and boarded the house up as a chronic drug nuisance. The unit works to target root causes of crime and works with neighbors on chronic problem houses. An abatement lawsuit is usually a last resort and prohibits anyone from occupying the house for one year.

By the time the house was boarded up, police had responded to the house more than 60 times in 2015. Storch has been in jail since October, awaiting trial on drug possession charges.

To celebrate the closure of the house, Paul and his wife, Stephanie Gamble, invited the neighborhood over for a Tuesday night potluck, where a dozen people mingled and talked about the windstorm and problem house. Many said their victory felt bittersweet – some feared retribution from regular visitors to the house, and others said they felt bad that Storch might be temporarily homeless when she gets out of jail.

Since the boarding, the house has quieted down, and neighbors said they feel safe being outside again.

“It felt empowering. We did it,” Munro said.

Erica Erickson, who lives behind the Montgomery house, said she’s taken to feeding Storch’s cat every day, since it still lives on the property.

She said the ordeal brought the neighborhood together, just in time for the windstorm that swept through Spokane last week. Everyone lost power on the night of the storm, though most houses had it restored within two days.

During the worst days following the storm, neighbors were helping each other clear trees, making coffee, and sharing batteries and other supplies.

“It was a lot of looking out for each other that I don’t think would have happened before,” Erickson said.