The Accidental Life of Cannon Point

By Kenny Malone, WLRN Miami Herald News

It's 6 a.m. in Lauderhill, a working class city of 70,000 people in Broward County. The sun is not yet up.

Lauderhill Police Officer Tom Merenda walks past drab stucco buildings crammed into one block in the city's Cannon Point neighborhood.

Ten assisted living facilities are packed onto this U-shaped block. ALFs in Florida house two of the state's most vulnerable populations: the elderly and the mentally ill. All ten of Cannon Point's facilities cater specifically to people with mental illness. The neighborhood has the highest concentration of mental-health ALFs in Florida.

A year-long collaborative investigation by the Miami Herald and WLRN found that the rate of abuse and neglect in Florida ALFs that cater to people with mental illness is twice as high as the rate in ALFs that serve only the elderly.

At this hour, Cannon Point is relatively quiet. Merenda points to the right at a beige one-story building, Briarwood Manor, the most heavily fined ALF in Florida.

"This facility here, Briarwood Manor, has one of our more prominent residents. His name is Stephen King," Merenda says. "He's not the famous book writer, he's a famous panhandler. But he's the nicest guy you ever meet. Except for when he's on crack."

For Officer Merenda, Stephen King is the embodiment of Cannon Point: A guy as complex and explosive as the place itself.

King suffers from a mental illness. And like many of the residents of Cannon Point, King uses the drugs sold by neighborhood dealers as a way to self-medicate.

Merenda often runs into King on his patrol. A normal interaction would start with King saying, "Hey Officer Tom!" And Merenda would ask, "How are you and your girlfriend doing?" King would say, "Oh, we're okay." Merenda would warn King, "Stay off the street corner! Don't be beggin' for money here!" And King would respond, "Oh, don't worry I'll go into Lauderdale Lakes and do that."

Merenda chuckles. He knows how harmless this interaction sounds - and about how fast things in Cannon Point can change.

Two years ago, Merenda was dispatched to Cannon Point because Stephen King had gone on a drug-fueled rampage and was holed up in his room in Briarwood. Merenda knocked on the door, calling his name. King, high on crack, lets fly a string of curses. King had stabbed another resident with a large knife. He had punched through a television set. When Merenda finally got into King's room, blood was everywhere.

"And you just have to put on some latex gloves and just go in there and try to subdue them without getting blood in your mouth or in your eyes or whatever," Merenda says. His eyes soften. "But he needs help."

Briarwood had an on-duty caretaker. Residents told police she was asleep during the stabbing.

Our investigation found that caretakers at other mental health ALFs in Florida have been routinely caught drunk on the job or abandoning their posts entirely.

We found that Florida's requirements to run a home for people with mental illnesses are among the lowest in the nation. The state requires just a high school diploma and 26 hours of training. That's less than the state credentials for barbers, beauticians and auctioneers.

Nowhere in Florida exemplifies the challenges of mental health ALFs better than Cannon Point. Police get a call from Cannon Point on average once every 4 hours. That's 14,000 calls over the last 8 years.

Cannon Point has just one percent of Lauderhill's population. Yet it accounts for one in four calls city-wide about missing persons. And it is the source of one in three calls about the mentally ill - known in police jargon as signal 20s. Police call the neighborhood Signal 20 ville.

Locals have a different name for it: U-Street. The neighborhood has its own YouTube channel featuring videos of street-fights and homemade rap anthems.

Tom Merenda polices Cannon Point more than almost anyone else in the Lauderhill Police Department. He has his own nickname for the place: "I call it home. Because it's my home away from home."

Though the morning is dark and drizzly, Merenda's wearing short shorts with his uniform. His white knee caps peek out. Merenda's mom says he has nice legs. His colleagues make fun of his "chicken legs" - as well as his affection for the characters of Cannon Point. The other officers call Merenda the Signal-20 whisperer.

A figure shuffles up to Merenda in the dark, screaming something unintelligible. Merenda can just make out the man's grubby hat and stained sweatshirt.

Merenda smiles. "Top of the morning to ya!"

The man says, "I used to be a police out here, I used to be a police for Hialeah Westland."

The man is unsteady on his feet. A lone car approaches. "Watch out for the car," Merenda warns. "Are you retired now?"

The man says, "I've been working for 'em for 50 years."

"Well, it's about time to take a retirement."

Merenda calls men like this "our mental health consumers."

This was not the city's vision for Cannon Point.

Merenda has no idea how the neighborhood became a haven for drugs, violence, and signal-20s. Earl Hahn, the current planning and zoning director for Lauderhill, has a few ideas about how this happened. That's because he's spent hundreds of hours trying to undo it.

"What's that saying? The road to hell is full of good intentions?" Hahn says.

In 1996, Lauderhill planners hatched a plan: to turn Cannon Point into a haven for the middle-class elderly. The city spent over $400,000 in infrastructure improvements to make the area look nicer. They repaired its drainage problems. They turned the two-way streets into a one-way "U". They added landscaping, benches, trash cans.

The most important change was new zoning to allow ALFs into Cannon Point.

"I hoped that it could become a safe place for the people that needed to live there," said Kelly Carpenter, the city's Planning and Zoning Director in 1996. "People that end up in ALFs are often people that have family that can't afford to take them or don't want to take them or are unable to take them. And I think it was a superior effort of a local government to do that work."

Carpenter now works as a planner in Baytown, Texas. But she told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel in 1996 that Cannon Point has "been very well thought out." She called Cannon Point one of her proudest achievement as a planner.

But things did not turn out as the city planned. Instead of elderly residents, the area filled with people with mental illness. Just one in three ALFs in Florida currently have a mental health license. All ten facilities in Cannon Point do.

"You know it's hard to establish mental health facilities and many people don't want them in their neighborhoods," Hahn says. "Once we opened it up and said, 'Welcome! Welcome all!' then you've opened up the door. Owners say, here we can locate without the problems."

Now, 15 years later, Cannon Point has become a source of problems. But Officer Merenda says Cannon Point is also a home.

"If it wasn't for these ALFs," he says, "either somebody would be on the street or they would be with a relative that can't take care of their loved one that's having problems."

I ask Merenda, "But would you send your grandparent to one of these ALFs?"

He says, "Sometimes you don't have a choice."

This is where Merenda's story gets complicated. In uniform, Officer Merenda symbolizes everything that can go wrong with mental health ALFs. When he's off the clock, he exhibits the pressing need for them.

His mother, Christine, is in a mental health ALF. She suffers from Paranoid Schizophrenia.

One morning, Merenda visits his mom. He knocks on the door and whispers to me, "She hasn't seen me in a while, so she's gonna be freaking out."

Christine Merenda opens the door. "Hi mom!" Merenda says. Her face lights up. "Oh, Tommy! Honey! Oh, I love you. I missed you." She hugs him.

Her room smells like smoke. Her bed has one sheet. The walls are bare, except for a blue and green finger painting by one of Tom's two daughters.

After the visit, I asked Merenda if his mother's mental illness is why is so affectionate for the characters of Cannon Point. "It just so happens that I have personal knowledge of it. And, you know, it's personal for me." Merenda pauses. "I hope that's not why I care so much. But it may be."

Merenda admits he feels guilty every time he visits his mom in that drab room. "But I know it's the only option I have," he says. "I can't afford to keep her where I'm living. And when she is off her meds, I have kids at home and things like that. I just can't have them grow up in that type of environment."

Merenda thinks Cannon Point can be saved: "I mean…I could always try."

City leaders, though, have given up. Lauderhill recently passed an ordinance to remove all ALFs from Cannon point by the year 2016.

The Miami Herald investigative team of Mike Sallah, Rob Barry and Carol Marbin Miller contributed to this story.