Statesman Journal from Salem, Oregon • Page 2

Page 2A Statesman Journal, Salem, Sunday, April 2, 1989 NEWS ROUNDUP NeighborhoodDmg dealers cut up peace in Salem community the battle. The hard-core drug scene is nothing new, Lt. Bill Sonderman, who heads the Salem Police Department's Street Crimes unit, says. "With some of the same faces and a lot of new ones, it's the same thing we saw first at Northgate Bowling Alley off Portland Road, then further south near the Lana Tavern, then on Lana Avenue by the Department of Motor Vehicles. Now it's moved into that neighborhood," he says.

"We're arresting them, but it's the same old story we've talked about before. There's no room in the jail, and they're back out in a matter of hours. "We used to say when the new county jail opens, things will get better. But my feeling is we'll fill that up too and be right back in the same boat." Increased police patrols are netting drugs, guns and criminals with numerous outstanding warrants, Lt. Mark Cailler, a patrol teams commander, says.

But the amounts being carried are small, and the people being arrested are small-time dealers many of them addicts trying to support their own habits, he says. "And we just keep dealing with the same guys over and over again," he says. "It doesn't seem like we're winning." Next: Who's to blame? house anyway. "But this just makes us want to move faster," she feel sorry for anyone who moves here. "I was having a birthday party for one of my children on the 20th, when suddenly four police cars came roaring up and all these police got out of their cars with rifles and guns and started running through the yards.

"The children were absolutely freaked out. And that was in the afternoon at night it's worse." But most of the residents appear to be digging in for the long haul. Lisa Engleson reminds the neighbors to keep their lights on and has taken her concerns to the governor's citizen representative and the police department. Her husband, bat in hand, orders parked cars away from in front of his and his neighbors' properties. And Ruth maintains her vigil.

Peering with binoculars from a second-floor vantage point, she writes down license plate numbers for the police. But they all wonder how and why this blight invaded their lives. "It's getting beyond us," Ruth says. "Why oh why can't somebody help us?" Residents give the police high marks for trying. But even the police admit that they seem to be losing duty." Residents have taken to blocking their driveways with cars and sawhorses to prevent drivers from using them as turnaround points.

Engleson says he plans to rip out the hedge that borders the sidewalk in front of his house, where dealers hide their supplies to limit losses in case of arrest. The bushes also catch junkies' used syringes, the needles tipped with the possibility of AIDS for the unwary hand of a gardener or curious child. Lisa Engleson says police have warned parents to not let their children play in their own front yards or ride their bicycles in the street. She didn't need the warning. A couple of weeks ago, her 8-year-old son was approached by a man who offered him a syringe and a can of beer.

Some residents are selling their homes, giving up to the dealers and addicts. One woman whose car is loaded down with household item9 takes time only to say "yes" when asked whether she is moving because of the drug dealing. With that, she rolls up her window and drives off. Another boy just down the street says he's "really, really glad we're moving." He sayi that he will miss his friends but that he won't miss the drug dealers who prevent him from playing in the street. His mother says they had been planning to sell the Continued from Page 1 A.

brewing a dangerous concoction of tension and vigilante extremes. Police are handcuffed; it takes longer to make an arrest and fill out the papers than it does for a pusher to get back out on the street. And the residents are so frightened that few are willing to be identified in a newspaper article. "If it keeps going, there's going to be somebody dead in the street," says Brad Engleson, a Duncan Street resident who went out and bought a baseball bat to chase intruders from his property. Engleson and his wife, Lisa, who is in charge of the area's Neighborhood Watch program, keep a vigil in the darkened dining room of their house every night.

With their children asleep in a back room, they watch through their picture window as dealers race to the cars and shadows chase other shadows with rifles and handguns in plain view. Voices call to each other from the darkness beneath trees where street and porch lights don't penetrate. "This is insane," Engleson, 34, says. "I used to come home at night and watch TV. Now I come home, and we just sit here and try to protect our property.

"This is my weekend, and I have to pull guard WalkerRose investigation spurs interest in Oregon con man's death "The guy rips off half of Southern Oregon, disappears with $7 million in sports stuff, ends up dead in a Las Vegas motel room without a clue to who he is. Who knows? But it sounds like a heck of a mystery to me." Wochnick said most people in sports memorabilia circles think that Walker was killed. Walker bought almost anything to do with a sports superstar. "But he didn't seem to have a very good idea of how much the stuff was worth," Wochnick said. "He'd pay two and three times what something was worth.

"And he spent a lot of money a lot of money. He usually just paid cash and didn't ask for receipts." It also appears that despite some real treasures such as some of the Rose material and a Babe Ruth uniform Walker, a former professor at Southern Oregon State College, didn't always know what he was buying. "I went to the museum a number of times," Wochnick said. "And there was some really bogus stuff in there stuff even a pretty good amateur should have been able to spot. "But he never asked questions and didn't seem to care.

Of course, in hindsight I guess you can afford to be that way when it isn't your money." An example, perhaps, of Walker's overestimation of the value of his purchases: He said the collection was worth between $18 million and $30 million. Collectors and the FBI place the value at $5 stances of Walker's death "more and more questionable." But except for small pieces from the missing collection, the case has been a frustrating tangle of false leads and dead ends, federal and Oregon officials said. Rose was the master-of-cere-monies when Walker opened his National Sports Hall of Fame off Interstate 5 in February 1985. Less than a year later, the memorabilia and Walker disappeared after the state Attorney General's Office won a lawsuit against him for swindling about $2.3 million from 300 people, Lemman said. Walker had been selling phony securities in South Pacific banks for which he had promised returns ranging from 25 to 35 percent, Lemman said.

State seeks memorabilia State officials think that Walker used the money to buy the sports memorabilia. The state placed a lien on the memorabilia and wants it to pay back the investors, Lemman said. Anyone with the memorabilia is in possession of stolen goods. Lemman said, "Of course, if Rose were to receive his items back, there might be some question to our claim on these items if he never received payment for them." When Walker left Oregon, he still owed $70,000 for memorabilia he purchased from Rose, according to an October 1987 article in Baseball Card News, a publication for sport items collectors. Walker and his family reappeared in New York in 1986, but he quickly disappeared again.

On July 3, 1987, the badly decomposed body of a man was discovered in a Las Vegas motel room. The body had been dead about three days before the discovery, according to the coroner's reports. There was no identification on the body, registered under the name of Charles Lee from a nonexistent Phoenix address. Unknown cause of death The autopsy report stated that the cause of death was unknown and inconclusive. It was several weeks before officials using dental records identified the body as Dennis Walker.

"I don't want to say another department made a mistake; God knows we've made enough of our own," Sgt. Don Severn of the Medford Police Department said. "And in reality they had a John Doe on their hands with no obvious signs of foul play. "Three weeks later they get the dental records back, and 'Bingo! Hey, this is the guy they've been looking for in By that time, it's too late to look harder for the cause of death; heck, the guy might have been cremated." Las Vegas police do not think that the death was a homicide, according to the Las Vegas detective. "It's their case," the FBI's Nicodemus said.

"We're not involved, except in trying to recover the stuff. But there certainly are a lot of interesting coincidences, aren't there? HEARING TEST Continued from Page 1A. some connection to Rose, also are asking questions. Officials from the Oregon Attorney General's Office, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies are looking for answers as well. But what everyone really wants to know is whatever happened to an estimated $7 million worth of sports memorabilia that Walker had in his National Sports Hall of Fame in Medford.

Included in the memorabilia were some of the most important awards of Rose's playing career. Rose, a former player and current manager of the Cincinnati Reds, is being investigated for questionable gambling practices by the Major League Baseball commissioner's office, according to published reports. In recent days, reports of extensive gambling debts, the selling off of memorabilia some of it of dubious authenticity and U.S. Customs violations for not reporting $46,197 in cash he was bringing into the country from Japan have swirled around the man who has more career hits than anyone. Rose won't discuss case Rose has refused to answer most questions about the investigation or other issues, saying at one point that he would wait until after the commissioner's report.

Rose was not available for comment, according to an unidentified man who answered the telephone at the Reds' Florida training camp. In recent days, the national media have joined the hunt with law enforcement officials in trying to find out exactly how much Rose memorabilia Walker possessed and where it might be now. The state Attorney General's Office has an inventory list found among Walker's papers at the Medford museum, Phil Lemman, an office spokesman, said. The list includes $350,000 worth of Rose material such as World Series rings, a Hall of Fame trophy and batting awards. "We cannot verify the accuracy of anything on this list except what we have in our possession," Lemman said.

State officials have managed so far to locate only one Cincinnati Reds jersey and one Philadelphia Phillies warm-up jacket that Rose sold to Walker. Rose played for the Phillies from 1979 to 1983. Our SnappiestDressers. AndNitsds.AndMirrors. million to $7 million.

Wochnick said that might have been Walker's undoing. "He couldn't have even sold the stuff for what he paid for it," Wochnick said. "If he had to pay someone back for spending money that wasn't his, he probably couldn't have covered his debts." Items may not resurface Most law enforcement officials, as well as memorabilia dealers and collectors, said there's not much of a chance that the best parts of the collection will surface in the near future. Hundreds of millions of dollars exchange hands every year in the sports memorabilia business, said Kathleen Kaye, who with her husband publishes the Baseball Card News in San Diego. But because much of it moves from one collector to another, or from a dealer who deals privately with a collector, it's hard to pinpoint exactly what pieces are where and how much is spent.

Wochnick said the word in collectors' circles is that the Walker collection is in the possession of wealthy East Coast collectors a that most law enforcement officers interviewed said is likely. "These are people who buy this stuff because they want to own it," Wochnick said. "They won't be selling it off. It's safe and sound in somebody's den. "The people who'll spend 50 grand on a championship ring are high-powered people with a lot of money.

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lit 111 APlaceTbDiscover. 1440 Lancaster N.E. 581-7437 it i 'J 1 lassos Not mentioned on the list, but known to have been bought and displayed by Walker, is the diamond-studded Hickok belt for Player of the Year that Rose was awarded in 1975. Walker was free spender Memorabilia collectors question the accuracy of the attorney general's list. Walker had a reputation for spending freely for almost anything connected to sports superstars and having almost total disregard for receipts, proofs of authenticity or paperwork.

"The only way they could ever know what he had would be to call everyone in the world together and ask what they sold him," said Rob Wochnick, a mail-order sports memorabilia dealer in Portland The bottom line is that many of the questions probably will never be answered, including the location of most of the collection and the circumstances of Walker's death, police and collectors said. How Walker, 43, actually died is not currently part of a police investigation, according to a homicide detective with the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department who refused to identify himself. "Unfortunately, Dennis Walker took a lot of the answers to the grave with him," Tom Nicodemus, an FBI spokesman in Las Vegas, said. Even the memorabilia case had been closed as far as the FBI was concerned until the showing earlier this month of an Unsolved Mysteries segment titled "Dead Sports Memorabilia CollectorSwindler," Nicodemus said. The show, which asks viewers to call with any information they might have about real crime stories, turned up several new leads worth pursuing.

TV show spurs interest Medford police Det. Charles Millard, who has worked on the case from the beginning, said, "We now think there are a couple of other people involved" in the disappearance of the Walker collection. Millard could not identify those people. The FBI has located some items thought to be part of the collection in North Carolina, Ohio and New York City, Millard said. Millard said law enforcement officials, himself included, were beginning to find the circum- different drawing each time.

"My father is a farmer." "My brother's name is Ben." All that talking must have made him hungry. He tapped his head to the transmitter and produced a command: "I want to eat." Ethan uses the Eval Pac computer from Adaptive Communication Systems Inc. It costs about $4,000. Vandecoevering's insurance policy did not cover it, so a Mount Angel charity, Kids With New Hope, gave the family the money. Ethan is the youngest child in the Salem area to use such a computer system.

Henighan said Ethan's mother instinctively knew there was a bright child imprisoned in the crippled body. Henighan describes Ethan as a clever child with a sense of humor. She remembers one of their sessions together when she asked Ethan to find a specific command for her on the board. He toyed with her a little, lighting up every command but the one she asked for. "He knows exactly what he's doing," she said.

As if on cue, Ethan looked at the board, lined up his lights and tapped his transmitter. "I'm finished," the voice said. Minn I X'' EthanComputer helps boy SPRING SPECIAL April 3 -April 7, 1989 ONLY FREE HEARING TEST AND CONSULTATION Complete evaluation of your hearing aid on the FRYE F0NIX 6500 Real-Ear Probe, the only one in the Willamette Valley. Professional Consulation with hearing aid specialist if you do have a hearing problem. Getting your hearing checked is EASY, PAINLESS, and gives you peace of mind! WE WANT YOU TO KNOW THAT: Nerve deafness can be helped.

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The dressers are built with wood frame construction and metal sliding drawers so they're extra sturdy. The matching wicker nightstand and mirror are just the accessories to complete the set. And at 20 off this week, this is one bedroom set you'll rest easy with. A it Iff 3f 3 Continued from Page 1 A. 30-pound boy behind it.

"He may look fragile," Henigh-an said, playfully patting the little boy's belly, "but he's not." Henighan is with the Mid-Willamette Valley Children's Guild in Salem. She works with Ethan once a week. "This is a system he can keep with him through life," she said. "As he grows and matures, the system will change to meet his needs." Although Ethan will have to be assisted for the rest of his life, Henighan said the computer offered some independence. "This is the first thing in Ethan's life that he has had any control over," she said.

"Ethan wants to talk, and the board benefits him, but if he had the gumption, he would talk." It worked. From the corner of the classroom where Ethan sat, the computer voice said, "I want to talk." "OK Ethan, let's talk," Henighan said. Ethan began his conversation by lining up the computer lights to a drawing of a face. "My name is Ethan," the computer said. For a little background, he offered information on his family, lining up the computer light to a CALL NOW FOR YOUR APPOINTMENT 581-6177 JikJ HEARING LANCASTER MALL 581-6177.