In the parking lot at McKeesport’s Renzie Park, Sally Humphreys talked to a friend as she put her dog Maggie in the car. They were talking about the same thing as many others in McKeesport on Thursday — the shootings Wednesday that killed three people.
Combined with the slaying of police Officer Sean Sluganski three weeks ago, a shooting Feb. 17 and another Friday night, McKeesport has already seen six homicides in 2023 — two more than in all of 2022.
“It’s terrible,” Ms. Humphreys said. “The cop just got killed. I thought maybe that would cool things off for a while, but no. McKeesport is like a war zone.”
Ms. Humphreys was in her backyard Wednesday afternoon with Maggie when she heard shots from Versailles Avenue, where emergency responders found a 47-year-old man, Robert Joyner, with a gunshot wound to the head. Three more men were shot in an apparently unrelated incident about an hour later in Crawford Village, police said, and two of those men died from their injuries.
Inside the senior center at Renzie Park, a group of retirees gathered Thursday, as they do most mornings, to drink coffee after a two-mile walk around the park. All morning, they talked about the shootings.
“It’s not, like, a shock anymore,” Louis Patil, 68, said of the violence. “You accept it, and it shouldn’t be that way.”
Most days, the men stay inside the senior center until about noon and head home when they hear the church bells. But Wednesday, the weather was so nice that they lingered outside on a bench in the park.
All of a sudden, “it sounded like you were at a gun range,” said Brian Kovaly, 70. “It was a lot of shots, a lot.”
Those shots — along with the others Wednesday and those that killed Officer Sluganski a few weeks earlier — came during the middle of the day.
“I don’t worry a whole lot because I’m not involved in it, but still, when bullets fly, innocent people get hit,” said Mr. Patil, who has lived in McKeesport since 1978. “I could just be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
Ms. Humphreys said she’s already made changes to her routine in response to all the crime. About a year ago, she switched from working the night shift to working days. She rarely goes out at night anymore, she said, and even in the daytime she walks Maggie, a Yorkie, at Renzie Park instead of through her neighborhood streets. When she recently called police about kids jumping on the hood of her car, the officers had to leave right after they arrived — to respond to a shooting.
Talking to Ms. Humphreys in the parking lot, her friend Ronald Reichenbach, 77, remembered how his mother and grandmother would get dressed up to go shopping in Downtown McKeesport.
“Sidewalks literally were packed with people,” he said. “Now, you go down Fifth Avenue, you could shoot a cannon down the street and not hit anyone.”
Mr. Reichenbach thinks things would improve if new businesses filled some of the city’s many empty storefronts, or the property where a U.S. Steel mill once stood. But he isn’t optimistic.
“They’re hoping somebody’s going to come in and build, but when? Who? Are they attracting anyone?” he said. “It’s not like Homestead where they’ve built the Waterfront. They’ve got that and we’ve got an empty lot.”
Inside the senior center, decorated with Steelers teddy bears and festive St. Patrick’s Day centerpieces, the retirees reminisced about the McKeesport of their childhood — and what has changed to lead to so much violence?
Is it too much time inside on phones and video games, and not enough talking things out in the streets? Too many guns instead of fists? Too many churches closing?
“If there were an easy solution, somebody would have come up with it,” Mr. Patil said. “There’s no easy solution to this problem.”
Anya Sostek: asostek@post-gazette.com
First Published: March 2, 2023, 9:45 p.m.
Updated: March 3, 2023, 11:12 a.m.