DETROIT (AP) — Stanley Allen mowed the lawn at a vacant house next to his Detroit home as teams of police and city workers scoured nearby empty houses as part of an investigation into a suspected serial killer who used similar structures as stash houses for the bodies of at least three women.
Later, Allen sat on the front porch of his west side home where he's lived for 12 years, surrounded by blight, and looked down the street as city workers boarded up another vacant house.
Police and city workers had been searching for bodies, or decomposed remnants of potential additional victims. And in their wake, they left behind boarded-up houses to keep trespassers out.
Deangelo Martin, 34, was arrested last week and charged in a separate case in which a 26-year-old woman was stabbed and sexually assaulted, but escaped. He has not been charged in the slayings.
"What we're talking about right now is nothing new" ," the 70-year-old Allen said of Detroit's decades-long battle against abandonment and other blight as the city's population plummeted by more than one million people. "Now, it's reached somebody's nerve that they want to do something."
Allen's own small, tidy home on Derby Street is flanked by an empty lot and another vacant house near Detroit's northern city limits. Still another vacant home stands two doors down. Across the street, two lots sit barren but for a thicket of overgrown weeds and mangled trees that throw heavy shade on a squatter-occupied house.
Further south is more of the same, occupied homes adjacent to rotting houses with forbidding darkened doorways and broken-out windows sheltering shadows and gloom.
Responding to the bodies found between March and last week, the city has added more urgency to an existing program that already has boarded up...
