Crack House "Reporters Perspective"

Yesterday morning Bud Nesrallah returned to the building his family owns on Catherine St., accompanied, as he said he needed to be, by a couple of police officers and a sheriff. I tagged along as well.

Waiting for us inside Apartment 1 at 331 Catherine St. was a scene few people in Ottawa have ever seen. For those of you who believe hell is something temporal, prepare to be surprised.

For several months now, this apartment has been a crack house -- a place where people come to buy crack cocaine, use crack cocaine, and as we were about to find out, come up with the money you need to buy crack cocaine.

Last month, Nesrallah got an eviction order for the tenants, and yesterday morning at 8:30 the police and the sheriff arrived to execute the order. (It was an expedited order, by the way, although expedited in this province means he still had to wait 12 days to regain possession of the apartment.)

The police knocked on the door and after a long pause a tired-sounding voice asked why the police were there. They explained and the voice on the other side of the door said the tenants weren't there. "It doesn't matter if they're here," answered Const. Steven Lewis. "You need to open the door."

A minute later the door was opened. If you are of a sensitive disposition, or have a weak stomach, you may want to stop reading now.

There was a young man inside the apartment, although it was hard to say how old he was. We had clearly awakened him, his hair a mess, the bed he had been sleeping on pushed against a wall of what I'll call the living room.

"Where are the tenants?" asked Const. Lewis.

"They left last night."

"All right, you're going to have to leave now as well. Do you have a place to go?"

"No."

"Do you want to go to a shelter? I can have the Sally Ann van come and pick you up."

"No, I'll just go."

He threw a packsack on his back and on the way out the door said he might head out West.

"I have a brother in Calgary," he told the cop.

Then he was gone. One moment he's asleep. The next moment he's on his way to Calgary. His life as permanent and stable as a gust of wind.

CLOTHES EVERYWHERE

I looked around then, although even now, hours later, I don't know how to start describing the scene. There were mattresses on the floor and clothes strewn everywhere -- winter jackets, underwear, a pair of women's high-heeled shoes.

How in the world do you leave behind shoes? How do you show up with shoes (the tenants were two men) and leave without them? I wish I had an answer to that.

There were liquor bottles mixed up with the clothes, and cigarette butts mixed up with the liquor bottles. None of the mattresses had blankets or sheets. People must have slept under the clothes.

The walls had graffiti on them and the fridge held nothing more than salad dressing, a ketchup bottle and a bowl of macaroni, in there so long it had started to change colour. In the cupboard was a bag of instant oats. There was no other food.

In the back of the apartment, not seen right away, was a young woman. The police knew her and told me later she had been pregnant last fall, although thank God the child was taken from her.

"You have to go," Const. Lewis told her. "We're here with an eviction order."

It didn't seem to faze her. She walked out the door without even a packsack.

When the apartment was empty the police officers started to look around. Within minutes, they had found a cupboard, the contents of which you can see in the photo to the left.

You are looking at boxes of condoms, syringes, crack pipes, the cooker kit you need to mix up drugs for a syringe, a reference book on drugs, legal and illegal.

With the exception of the book, every other item in the photo appears to have come from the City of Ottawa. How anyone can get boxes of syringes and crack pipes from the crack pipe distribution program or the needle exchange program is another mystery inside this apartment.

"Obviously, there was prostitution and a lot of drug-taking going on here," said Const. Lewis, and I looked at the mattresses on the floor with a renewed sense of dread. My God, there aren't even doors in here.

DAMAGE TO PROPERTY

Within half-an-hour, Nesrallah was changing the locks on the front door and estimating the damage to his property.

"It's thousands of dollars" he said, shaking his head at the scene around him. "I don't even know where to begin cleaning up."

Another 30 minutes and I'm on my way, anxious to leave this place, more anxious than I've even been to leave a place. It's all I can do not to break into a run.

On the way out, I jotted notes on what was inside the apartment, in the fridge, on the walls. I noticed there were two posters in the largest room. One was for the movie Sin City. The other was for a movie called From Hell.

It was the only bit of decor that made any sense to me.