Complex manager upset over disruptive teens

Dennis Manchester has had enough.

After photographing students smoking marijuana last month near an apartment complex he manages across from the high school, Manchester took it a step further and set up a video camera in a tenant's apartment.

On Wednesday, four teens were recorded doing the same thing, he said. But when he turned the tape over to police, the response he got was not what he had hoped for.

"When I call the school, they say there's nothing they can do," said Manchester. "These kids are going to class stoned out of their gourds. Now the school knows. They know where it's happening ... and no one can do anything?"

In the video, shot just before

7:30 a.m. by Phyllis Gafford through her apartment blinds, four boys gather behind the Mills Park Wungnema House across Saliman Road from Carson High, often referred to as the "rock house" or "smoker's corner."

The camera clearly records two of the boys passing something back and forth and plumes of smoke rising periodically around all four of them. At points throughout the four-minute recording, the two boys can be seen holding lighters to their faces with their heads cocked to the side, presumably to relight whatever they are passing around. At one point, one of the teens tosses something on the ground.

The camera is too far away and what the boys are handing back and forth cannot be seen clearly, nor can their identities be determined.

Manchester said when Gafford called him to tell him she got video, he hurried to her apartment to collect the evidence.

He said when he walked by he could smell marijuana. Gafford said she smelled it too.

As he came out of the apartment carrying the videotape, he told the teens they'd been filmed, he said.

"They scattered pretty quick," he said.

Gafford, who's lived in the complex for a year, said she is afraid to take her 3-year-old grandson into the yard because she's seen the pot smokers thrown items down.

"If he goes out there to play and there's any of that stuff left there laying around, he's going to pick it up and be hurt," she said.

While none of the students have harassed her as she comes and goes from her property, Gafford said she refuses to take her grandson outside because of the foul language they use.

"I hear them in the morning calling girls dirty whores and stuff like that," she said. "They are just unruly."

In addition to the drug problem, Manchester said the students throw trash onto his property and tear down a chain-link fence that separates the Wungnema House from the complex "two or three times a week."

"We've got to get it to stop," he said. "Somebody's got to be able to do something. What they do away from here is not my concern, but what they do here is."

Carson High Principal Ron Beck did not immediately return a call for comment.

Sheriff Ken Furlong said the problem with the Wednesday video is that it can't be proven what the teens were doing. By the time officers were called out, the group was gone and their identities were unknown.

But Furlong said he was sympathetic to Manchester's plight.

"That area is problematic to us all. It was problematic (which is why) we said no more parking over there. But we're concerned if we push the kids from there, where are they going to go to next? We just stay on top of it as best we can," he said.

In January the school district, parks department and sheriff's department made student parking in Mills Park off limits.

"It places the sheriff's department in an awkward position," said Furlong. "We do not have the ability to stop kids from going to the park. But we've taken great efforts in the last year to reduce the number of kids going across that street and creating issues that ultimately end up in problems."

"We're going to have the drug dog out there for the next several weeks to keep an eye on the area, as they are available," he said.

Manchester just wants the riffraff to go away.

"One way or the other, I've got to get it to stop," he said.