Jackie Lane didn’t expect anything unusual when she left her house in Pittsburgh’s Garfield neighborhood the morning of Aug. 23, leaving her pets at home as she normally would. The home she returned to later that day — after police stationed on her block finally allowed her back in — seemed out of an alternate reality.
“It looked like a bomb went off in my house,” she said.
While she was out that day, Allegheny County Sheriff’s deputies attempted to serve an ejectment notice at the house next door. William Hardison Jr., 63, had moved into the residence at 4817 Broad St. earlier in the year. Hardison’s brother, who died in 2021, once owned the house, but, in February, it was purchased by a company that sells and rehabs homes.
When deputies arrived to serve Hardison — who was living in the home without permission — he began firing at officers. An hours-long standoff ensued. “Thousands” of rounds were fired with Hardison eventually shot and killed.
Lane returned to the aftermath where she was left to survey the damage: four gaping bullet holes in her living room and dining room walls; a damaged water pipe; two broken windows. There were bullet holes in her gutters and gazebo and on her roof. Orange cement debris was everywhere.
When Lane spoke with WESA more than six weeks later, her home was still in disrepair. She had been unable to get her insurance company to send her money to begin repairs. In the meantime, some meat in the empty home next door had gone bad; the rancid smell wafted into her living room through the unpatched bullet holes.
Although she wasn’t there when the shooting began, Lane said she is still dealing with the fallout, both practical and emotional. And she was not the only one working through the trauma. Lane said she and other neighbors who attended a September meeting organized by the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation all cried when they talked about what they had been through.
Pamela Schon, the chief operations officer at the BGC, said that many residents were still dealing with the shootout’s aftereffects. A backfiring car could trigger memories of gunshots, some told her. Others, like Lane, have found themselves further affected by the time taken to fix their homes and remove the reminders of what happened that day.
“Think about how that traumatizes the residents again,” Schon said. “Not only do you have to wait for maybe some financial assistance from the city, but you wake up every morning to those same bullet holes.”
A community group steps in
The day after the shooting, officials from the city of Pittsburgh knocked on doors in the neighborhood and offered counseling resources, Lane said. The city has also promised to help neighbors pay for the deductibles on their insurance claims.
When asked about the status of that assistance, Maria Montaño, a spokesperson for Pittsburgh Mayor Ed Gainey, said the city has received eight claims stemming from the August shootout and is currently reviewing the paperwork.
Rivera was in the hospital when she started receiving text messages from friends about a shooting. They wanted to know if she was OK. “I started panicking because I was already hopped up on pain meds and already going through something very traumatic,” she said.
In the near term, the Bloomfield-Garfield Corporation has been helping residents fix their homes right away. Lane said that someone at the BGC has been checking in on her regularly and even offered to help her work through her problems with her insurance company.
The BGC has been providing some money to residents to put down a deposit for contractors, so they can begin to fix up their homes, the corporation’s Pamela Schon said. “They've been submitting invoices to us and we were able to help some of the neighbors out to put the deposits down and get some of that work started,” she said. That way, Schon added, they can get the smell of the gunpowder out of their carpets sooner than later.
Rick Swartz, the executive director of the BGC, said that community organizations can move more quickly than the city can. Because of the city’s legal requirements, he said, it can take months for assistance to come through. “And if you're going to be of immediate assistance to people, it can't be that long, drawn out process,” Swartz said.
By the end of October, after she’d initially spoken with WESA, Lane said her insurance company finally began to move on claims she had submitted. She said State Farm contacted her the day after she was featured in a story aired by WPXI-TV. She has since received insurance money to begin repairs. As of the beginning of November, Lane was living in a bed and breakfast while a contractor patched the walls and fixed her floors, although she’s still haggling with the insurance company over her windows and roof and hasn’t yet received money for her damaged hearing aids.
“Just look how long it's been,” she said. “It's going to be Thanksgiving before it's done.”
Lane is hoping the city follows through with its promise to help. Her insurance deductible, she told WESA, is $6,900.
“Help to find its future”
In September, Swartz said, the BGC held a meeting, in part to help clear the air about what happened at the home Hardison had been living in. According to Swartz, Hardison’s brother, Joseph, had died in 2021 without a will. Unclear who to contact about purchasing the home, representatives of a local limited liability corporation reached out to Hardison’s father about buying it. Hardison’s father ultimately accepted compensation for the residence, which, according to Allegheny County real estate records, was sold for $25,000 in February. Hardison only moved in, Swartz told those in attendance, after the home had been sold.
But rumors that spread shortly after the shootout painted a different picture: that deputies were there to remove Hardison, who was Black, because he had failed to pay his rent or mortgage. While that turned out not to be true, it was given credence by a very real trend playing out in the neighborhood — the cost of renting or owning a home in Garfield has risen significantly in recent years.
“We have developers right now all over who want to build new homes in Garfield and sell them for $550,000 and $600,000. And we've never seen homes in Garfield sold for as much as that,” Swartz said.
Residents have been worried that the rising costs of homes is changing the nature of the neighborhood and pricing out some long-term residents, Swartz said. According to census data analyzed by the Center for Social and Urban Research at Pitt, the Black population in Garfield fell by 24% between 2010 and 2020. The approximately 712 fewer Black residents living in Garfield represented the third largest such decline for a Pittsburgh neighborhood during that time.
The issue of gentrification came up at the BGC’s September meeting, alongside questions about the shooting. And it’s an issue, Swartz said, that the BGC is paying attention to. According to Swartz, there will be three affordable housing units built in Garfield for every market rate home built, due, he said, to the efforts of the BGC and other supportive housing groups and government organizations such as the Pittsburgh Urban Redevelopment Authority.
Schon said the shooting has brought renewed interest from the community. “The meeting that we had back in early September was packed. And it's been a little while since we've had a meeting that packed. And they are engaged and they’re talking to me and wanting to be a part of the committees and asking how they can help,” she said.
Swartz hopes that interest generated after the shooting will continue, encouraging residents to get involved and to reach out to the BGC with concerns.
“I think the message from us that comes in the wake of this incident is that if you can be engaged in this neighborhood and help to find its future, all the better,” he said. “Because at some point, if we have people from all the different blocks in Garfield who know where to call when something is happening … we can respond accordingly.”
