THE GREAT ESCAPE - TIME

(4 of 10)

A pediatrician with a direct, matter-of-fact manner, Ruth and her lanky husband Mike had abandoned Spokane, Wash., six months before and settled in the exclusive Cincinnati suburb of Beckett Ridge. A pilot at Airborne, Mike had been commuting by plane to Wilmington for his seven-day work stints, but a terrifying incident had taken place at the Spokane military hospital where Ruth was working: a gunman rampaged through the place, killing five and wounding 23. "I was in Wilmington when it happened," says Mike, 39. "And I said, 'Enough.'" Beckett Ridge was safer, but to Ruth, 35, the place by day was a ghost town abandoned by couples who spent all their time working "to pay for all the crap they bought to fill up their big houses."

So the Dooleys left Beckett Ridge for a modest, rented ranch house in Wilmington, sure they had found a community that was safe and had its values straight. But then last winter, two white supremacists, brothers named Chevie and Cheyne Kehoe, got into a shoot-out with police outside the Crispie Creme doughnut shop--right across the street from Ruth's new medical practice. A passerby was wounded. "You move to quiet little Wilmington," says Mike, "and the craziness follows right behind."

The Dooleys didn't know it, but Wilmington's felony-crime rate had nearly doubled in the five years before they got to town. Armed robbery and crack-cocaine use are on the rise. "We've heard bad things about the high school," says Ruth. "They say there are racial problems." She pauses. "I'm not even sure how diverse this area is."

Before the Civil War, Wilmington was a station on the Underground Railroad; today about 5% of its population is black. But its Quaker tradition of tolerance is being tested by uglier habits of mind, because the town has been buffeted by a series of racial incidents. In 1992 a bloody fight broke out between black and white students at an off-campus Wilmington College party. In 1993 and 1995 the Ku Klux Klan staged rallies at the courthouse; though fewer than 50 sympathizers showed up each time, black leaders were understandably concerned--and their fears were heightened last year when the Aryan Nation set up its Ohio headquarters in New Vienna, 10 miles from town. The high school has been dealing with its own racial tensions--bigoted remarks hurled between groups of students--as well as a budding gang problem. A crew claiming affiliation with the L.A.-based Crips has been committing armed robberies and assaults, including an attack last summer that left a 13-year-old white boy with permanent brain damage.

Wilmingtonians rarely discuss such issues, which is why Ruth Dooley has heard only vague mentions of "racial problems." Because if Wilmington isn't quite so safe as the Dooleys had hoped, it isn't quite so open and welcoming as they had imagined either. In their first two years in town, says Mike, strangers waved from passing cars, and everyone seemed to know everyone else, "but we were on the outside looking in. People were outwardly friendly, but that was like a mask. 'Hello, how you doing? Come over anytime.' Slam--here comes the door." Some of their neighbors simply resent newcomers. An elderly woman across the street has two dogs that relieve themselves in the Dooleys' front yard. Politely and repeatedly, Mike asked her to control them. Finally, the woman blew up at him. "We don't like you," she hissed. "You're one of those pilots."

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