Two South Silver Spring motels have agreed to mop up the drugs, guns and illicit sex that trash their $90-per-night operations, assistant state’s attorney Maura Lynch announced Wednesday night.
Management with the Days Inn and Travelodge motels (both at 8040 13th St) is on the move to hire more security guards, roll a closed-circuit camera feed into the third police district’s station house, and keep a closer eye on who’s coming and going, Lynch told a dozen South Silver Springers during a community meeting.
It was that, or have the motel properties seized — even demolished — under the state’s nuisance abatement law. That legal nugget allows community organizations (in this case, the South Silver Spring Neighborhood Association) or the state’s attorney’s office to sue landlords or their tenants if the drug dealing gets out of hand.
And DAMN! Did it get out of hand at the Days Inn and Travelodge!
According to a stuffed, three-ring binder that Lynch shared with residents, all kinds of crazy shit was shaking on 13th Street. A guesstimated 200 pages of evidence documented drug deals, overdoses and online pimping, all leading back to motel visitors.
In one section of the binder, vivid color photos showed a topless woman folded over her knees, her face pressed into the carpeted motel-room floor, her panty-clad ass in the air. She had died at one of the motels of a heroin overdose, documents stated. The photo montage included shots of syringes and used condoms scattered around her body.
In another chapter, notes from the state’s crime lab listed evidence gathered from the motels on different occassions — sandwich bags containing a green, plant-like substance, white rocks, a soft yellow powder. The lab notes later identified the stash as marihuana (their spelling), crack cocaine and heroin. Crystal meth was mentioned in one lab report, for a little variety.
Still another chapter contained printouts of Craigslist ads showing big butts in G strings. Accompanying text described female masseurs for hire as “100 percent fuckable” without directly demanding cash for sex. However, the advertiser’s location was listed as “inn call”, which translates to “hooker”, Lynch explained.
To top it off, the ladies of ill repute weren’t ladies — they were underaged girls, Lynch said. According to her, a pimp daddy in a purple Cadillac cruised 13th Street while girls watched porn in the back seat. Later, he would send the girls into the motels to re-enact those porn scenes with johns answering the Craigslist ad. The purple Caddie has since been impounded by police, and the child-prostitution ring quashed.
New measures hammered out between police and motel management could chase away more of the criminal element, Lynch went on. Motel guests must register their rides with the front desk and rock a parking permit, or else get towed off the porous front lot. The idea is to dissuade johns and junkies from pulling a quick drug-and-dash at the motel.
The motels were also ordered to submit logs of their weekend guests, a move that came close to stomping on the Fourth Amendment, Lynch said. The family of four from Ohio probably wouldn’t raise a red flag, but the single guy visiting from Briggs Chaney Road would. In fact, almost half the motels’ visitors live within a two-mile radius of South Silver Spring, third-district police officer Joy Patil said.
“If they came from Wheaton, that was far away,” Patil quipped.
While the motels are under no deadline to bleach the place up, Lynch said the state’s attorney’s office and the PD would review the motels’ new security measures in January.
Photo courtesy of Flickr user Arturo Ponciarelli.
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I feel bad for out-of-towners who book rooms there not knowing any better. These hotels are on par with the ones lining Route 50 as you come into DC from PG County.
I say bulldoze them anyway. Eminent domain, bitches.
Not to be a party pooper, but I find the humorous tone of this story a little tasteless considering the things being described. I know you’re trying to keep it real, and normally I find that funny, but not this time.
Not sure where you see attempts at humor in this piece. God knows I wasn’t laughing when I saw crime scene photos last night of the undignified way that junkie died.
The Office of the State’s Attorney is extremely grateful for everyone’s support in this unique endeavor. We do wish to ask that the numerous victims of crime which has occurred at the Inn be treated with respect. It is our position, that every victim of crime, regardless of any circumstance, is an individual to be treated with dignity.
Also would like to emphasize that the Days Inn/Travelodge is being extremely cooperative in putting in place numerous security remedies. Therefore, eminent domain does not apply, the government and the management are working together to make the inn a much better place.
thank you again.
I thought a strip club on the south side was a good business idea. Based on this article, I still hold on to that belief.
The Office of the State’s Attorney and the Montgomery County Police Department should be commended for their thorough investigation into the illegal activities happening in these motels and the subsequent enforcement of better business practices to make the motels and the surrounding community safer.
They didn’t need to do a whole lot of investigating. These activities have been right out in the open for years. Wasn’t that Days Inn the home base for a robbery ring a few years back? A maid found a room full of TV’s and VCR’s and reported it?
“ads showing big butts in G strings”
“pimp daddy in a purple Cadillac”
“her panty-clad ass in the air”
That woman who died with her underwear on was someone’s daughter.
Like I said, I like your blog a lot, it’s the tone of these descriptions that I found tasteless. It’s probably just me.
These descriptors are not hyperbole. This is how stuff rolled at that site. You may take offense at my vivid imagery, but I take far greater offense at pimps turning out young girls, young adults snuffed out by addiction, and 13th Street being used as a shooting gallery.
The hotel management bears full responsibility for this crap. I mean…the hotels allowed this shit to go on for years. YEARS! The night managers knew damn well that johns, junkies and hookers were meeting up in those sleeping rooms. They took the money anyway knowing full well that illegal sex and drug activity was happening on the premis.
This could be the death knell for Days Inn though. Most business travelers and families will reserve rooms at the downtown hotel locations such as the Hilton, Courtyard Marriott, and Holiday Inn. Days Inn is too far away from the Metro Station, shopping and restaurants. Convenient to liquor stores and pawn shops though.
Days Inn made their money from one-night rate customers: the adulterers, the junkies, the johns, the hookers. You take that away and the place will have a hard time filling sleeping rooms.
I say good riddance to that filthy rat hole of a motel.
Thank you, thank you, Ms Lynch, Mr Glass, etc. I’m not sure where they’ll find willing AND ABLE security guards for this job, but I hope MCPD (and MPD) are going to be close by.
No little girl or boy says: “When I grow up I wanna be a Ho!” These kids must have been on the run from some wretched home environments. Yeah, this mess should have been busted long ago, and those kids given major help to reivent themselves into young people with the promise of a full life ahead.
I don’t have a problem with the descriptions; this blog is pretty irreverent. However, I do take issue with the comment about eminent domain. Eminent domain is the nuclear option. Its history around the USA is bad enough, but the US Supreme Court’s 2005 decision in the Kelo case in New London, CT, made matters worse. Just about every place needs affordable motel rooms, including Silver Spring.
…the numerous victims of crime which has occurred at the Inn be treated with respect. It is our position, that every victim of crime, regardless of any circumstance, is an individual to be treated with dignity…”
What victims? The prostitute who overdosed on drugs is a victim? Really? The underage kids, sure, that’s horrible, but adult people who make decisions in life need to live by them. This isn’t the Washington Post or NY Times, it’s a blog. The writing is and should be less formal. I didn’t see the “humorous tone” others did, I think people should relax.
I went to a Greater Silver Spring Chamber of Commerce mix and mingle there in 1996 and there were hookers all over the place and the same stuff was going on then. I recall an article in the Gazette back then saying the same thing as these folks said the other night.
It’s the Hotel Managements fault that this stuff goes on there I don’t care how much lip service they are giving Ms Lynch or the police department it’s the kind of place they choose to run.
Interesting article. I must admit I’m glad to hear that something is being done about security at these motels. They are a complete stain on such a great community. I would personally prefer for them to be completely shutdown but increased security is a nice compromise – for now.
FYI,the motels are under new management.
I’m in agreement with Thayer-D’s explicit and with Maura Lynch’s implicit concerns over the language used in this story. I’m not offended by the description of the victim’s “panty clad ass-in the air” but I don’t find it professional either. Most of the stories in the Penguin read like they might have been published in the Post or the Gazette. This one reads like a piece of noir fiction (” it was a dark night, in a city that knows how to keep it’s secrets…”)
The world would be a lot more secure if the pimps were behind bars. I have absolutely no sympathy for them, nor for the drug kingpins. But what about the “hookers” and the addicts, is there a chance for meaningful rehab and support in developing a halfway decent “straight” life?
Anyone who has watched “The Wire” knows how hard it is to become a member of the upright citizens brigade when you are born into a quagmire.
I hope the clean-up works this time. This has been going on for years and was “cleaned-up” before. Having said that, I want to thank the State’s Attorney’s Office for trying. The easy thing for them to do would have been to continue to ignore the situation. They deserve a tremendous amount of credit for trying, and hopefully, succeeding. If the clean-up is successful, we have to make sure that the problem doesn’t just reappear somewhere else.
I would like to express my thanks and appreciation to the State’s Attorney’s Office, Montgomery County Police and the Maryland Police Department, and commend them for making our community a safe place to live, and dealing with such a difficult issue. Special thanks to Ms Lynch, and Mr. Glass for the time and effort they have they have taken to find a resolution to the ongoing issues. I have watched and seen some very suspect individuals coming and going from the hotels and it is depressing and alarming.
I am having a little difficulty with the descriptions in the article. The women/girls involved obviously have serious substance abuse problems and deserve to be treated with dignity. Are there any options for them after they are arrested? Are they directed to social workers/counselors who can provide them with resources/programs that can help them deal with the substance abuse issues or are they just getting lost in the system?
I didn’t really care for the language used in the article either. It seemed really unprofessional to me. Could you imagine if the AP wrote like this?
Is this a fun neighborhood blog, or is this a serious news blog? Death is a serious topic and deserves to be treated soberly. I don’t remember any jokes cracked in the story of Tai Lam. This should be no different.
There was no intention to be humorous with this article. I merely described what Ms Lynch circulated throughout the room that evening: photo after gruesome photo of that dead woman.
She appeared exactly as described in the article: topless, in frilly purple panties, her ass in the air. As I said previously, an undignified way to die.
Upon first seeing the photos (there were quite a few of them), I found myself offended at Ms Lynch’s audacity to circulate such material at a community meeting. Later, I realized my anger was misdirected, that I was angry with the fact that this tragedy had played itself out down the block from where I live.
That’s okay if you’re disgusted with the ar
Sorry, was texting in car earlier. Forgotten what I wanted to say.
I don’t know, Jennifer’s writing didn’t bother me. If you want serious journalistic language, read the Washington Post.
I think people should be more angry what happened at the Days Inn in the first place. Chip Py is right by the way. I don’t trust the management to enforce the clean up of this location. I don’t care whether it’s new or old management: the motel makes the bulk of their money from the shady crowd. No way will families and business travelers stay at the Days Inn.
Maybe Day’s Inn will go out of business and the county planning board can research housing options for low-income families at the location.
Good information but the sarcastic, snide, & mean-spirited tone about beaten down, DEAD people is worse than sophomoric. This was tone-deaf. Serious journalistic language? At the Post? Crass, callow, shallow writing abounds there as well the last few years. I can be good & angry about the goings-on(& have been for many years) & still wish for better writing. The two are not mutually exclusive. There’s a time & a place, Jennifer. This wasn’t it. I enjoy your spirited writing in other areas of the site…the “I was just reporting what went down” business doesn’t cut it. At all.
Susan Sears
Seriously you people need to get over yourselves. This is a blog, not a newspaper. Do you really not understand the difference? Everyone take a deep breath, count to ten and relax.
I hope the hotels turn around, though I’m doubtful that they will. Glad something is finally being done about them nevertheless and I hope that the State’s Attorney stays on top of it. If this were happening in Bethesda there would be outrage and the hotels would have been bulldozed years ago.
I did not see any attempt at humor nor did I see any snide, sarcastic or mean-spirited “tones” in the article. I believe that people are upset by the vivid descriptions used in the article. People need to redirect their outrage towards what is happening in the community and not shoot the messenger.
I stayed at the Travelodge two years ago when visiting from California to interview for a job in Silver Spring. I was kept awake nearly all night thanks to a screeching junkie in the parking lot. I got the job anyway, and moved to Silver Spring in the hopeful belief that the entire city couldn’t all be as bad as that stretch of 13th Street. Happily, it isn’t, but I inwardly shudder a little every time I drive past there.
I feel dirty for having stayed there, even though I was utterly unaware of the surrounding activities.
I didn’t read this as an attempt at humor, and I didn’t read anything snide or mean spirited, either. But I could see how somebody might.
Maybe I would have chosen different words. But to me, the words are not the issue and there is a far more important question: Why is there a full three ring binder at this point?
I would hope that 200 pages of evidence is not the threshold for achieving this kind of progress, but what might have we (collectively) done differently?
No trying to blame — just wondering aloud …
I can’t believe people came on here to try to scold Jennifer for her tone in the article. Anyone who reads the Penguin knows her tone is prevalent in any article, regardless of the subject. She clearly wasn’t attempted to get a few cheap laughs at a victim, she was writing under the same style that she writes for other articles. The “tisk-tisk” attitude of some of the commenters is hilarious. If you don’t like what you are reading close the window, click the back button, or go to another website. This isn’t even a paid service where you have cause to demand a refund, it’s a free blog. No one’s forcing you to read it.
Keep writing however you want Jen, it’s your blog.
Right on, Corona.
I say bulldoze them. If you have to worry about bedbugs at a $300-a night hotel on Park Avenue in Manhattan, I don’t even want to think about what you could pick up staying in these places.
Sarah indicates that the motels are a public health hazard, and should be bulldozed. What next? If they were whacked, could they be replaced with clean, well-managed reasonably-priced motels that feature some affordable meeting space?
As SaucySauce notes, there are real reasons for decent, affordable motels.
I see all of the people that took issue with Ms Deseo’s tone in the article, and I have to tell you: when you first try to write about this sort of horror, you have to put some distance between yourself and the subject matter or you will just crack like a dropped vase. Sometimes that distancing mechanism comes across as humor or irreverance, but it’s not; it’s an attempt to maintain equinamity or equilibrium. You have to almost laugh or you might never stop crying.
Death is rarely dignified and overdosed or poisoned junkie prostitutes’ deaths are about as undignified as you can get. Living downtown, I once spent most of a night sleeplessly listening to a prostitute on the street railing at someone in the Pitts Motor Lodge next door for selling her a bag of Ajax instead of heroin. In the morning, leaving for work, I had to push past the ambulance crew just packing her up for transport to the morgue. Cause of death? Injection of Ajax, as best as the paramedics could tell. Dead at age 30 or so, but looking much older, on a front porch in northwest Washington DC. It had been freezing cold out, so at least she died with some clothes on.
I should mention to y’all that you are in good hands if you are working with Maura Lynch. She has been instrumental for a few years now up here in Aspen Hill, in dealing with what problems we have up here, which thankfully don’t include a Cheap Hotel O’ Smack ‘n’ Crack Prostitution. “Props” to Maura even though she and I don’t always agree on everything, she knows how to “go get ‘em” and if you’ve got a steaming pile of crap in your neighborhood, she knows who to call and I suspect she doesn’t much need or like to sleep when the scary monsters are after your kids, or driving kids around in a purple Cadillac, turning them into something no child should ever be.
Congratulations to Silver Spring and all of the LE and SA folks involved, that place has been a festering pox on the neighborhood for about 20 years now.
well said.
Hopefully Maura shared with you that a cop was killed on this very same property a few years ago and they didn’t clean it up then. As a lifelong Silver Springer, since 1956, these properties have always been bad news. Good for the States Attorny’s office — but the “broken window syndrome” philosophy (which cleaned up Times Square will only work if the cops stay all over that place and all the other contributing factors in our hood….the SS chamber should also be all over this too, showing zero support for such sleazy managment. Good progress tho….
It may be that a contributing factor is the presence nearby of Walter Reed Army Medical Center just down Georgia Avenue. Anyplace you have a base of comparable size, you’re going to have a certain amount of sleaze that’s trying to part the soldiers and staff from their paychecks. Also, any place you have a jurisdictional borderline, you’re likely to see comparable problems. For example, I suppose that Shepard’s Park strip club is still there right across the District Line, and that whole strip right there around Georgia and Eastern Avenues has a reputation for sketchiness that looms deep into the past. Despite a lot of new construction in that area, the same sketchy types are still there, just on nicer sidewalks now.
I have to admit, I am blown away by all the interest this article has gotten. I can’t thank everyone enough for their support, especially Jennifer. I really don’t want ANYONE to think that I am criticizing her. This is a blog, it is not CNN. That said, to me, and to the community, the blog is probably as important as CNN. This may sound pompous, but as a prosecutor, it is my job to speak and protect crime victims. My boss (John McCarthy), has made that clear, and it is something we all believe in. Those children, prostitutes and drug addicts can’t speak or protect themselves, and I tend to be overprotective and hypersensitive when ANYONE speaks of them.
That said, thanks again, and we will stay on top of it. You have the commitment of my boss and the police.
THere should be an article in the Gazette about the Inn, please read it, and know it is because of the community, the South Silver Spring Citizens Association in particular run by Evan Glass that we all were able to try and solve this problem.
Maura, why be surprised? Those “no tell motels” have been a seeping wound in south Silver Spring for decades. They’re a commonplace all over the country and all over the world. There’s generally not even much of a problem finding them, they anger as many people as they “service”, and it’s not just the moralists and bible-thumpers that they anger; they anger everyone from their victims to the passers-by on the street.
The first thing you have to do, as you have doubtless found out, is to put the pressure on the management. Quite frequently, these will turn out to be really sketchy people who have a personality perfectly capable of telling you how much they deplore the situation and how much they’ve done to remedy it, and in the meantime they will do everything they can to obfuscate and halt your progress. The harder you work, the more they are in the center of things making sure that nothing much actually gets done. Once you remove them from the equation, progress will begin to be made. Just keep in mind that such people are generally just the front person for organizations that will replace them, when they are removed, with someone far better at doing the same thing. These places don’t exist in a vacuum. They require a lot of organization and make lots of money for those organizations.
All of this being said, what better to fight such things than other organizations? Our most excellent Assistant State’s Attorney rightly points out that thanks to the South Silver Spring Citizens’ Association, that organization moved the State Attorney and Law Enforcement organizations to move against criminal organizations. Some might think that this only goes to show that we, as individuals, are ineffective and thus inconsequential, though nobody here is saying that. Yet we see some statements of surprise that so many people here in the blogosphere take this so seriously, and display such interest.
Perhaps the blogosphere is coming of age, as it were. The people posting here are posting elsewhere, and I do know for a fact that there is a lot of information found in the blogosphere that makes it into the Real Life and there’s a lot that happens in Real Life that gets heavily discussed in the blogosphere.
So, I propose that in the same way what happens in neighborhoods becomes fat on the fire (so to speak) in the Civic Associations, what happens in the neighborhoods and the County and the Greater Washington Metropolitan Region, that lights a spark in the blogosphere and we get around, we bloggers do. And people from Real Life are getting around in the blogosphere. We have Mr Evan Glass and ASA Maura Lynch and who knows who else.
And if a Silver Spring civic association can get significant action to happen in their neighborhood, what could a region-wide blogger association get?
Thus, I propose that We the Bloggers of the area start constituting ourselves as a sort of county-wide or region-wide Civic Association, only we don’t meet in some drafty rented room, we meet online. Some of us don’t have the time to go to meetings and some of us would rather just take care of business the fast and modern electronic way, saves gasoline, don’tcha know, and you can actually say what you want without getting all stuck in proceduralism or Robert’s Rules of Order.
To some degree we already do this… but let’s just find or make a way to make it official, or as official as any neighborhood Civic Association.
Ideas?
Interesting discussion. The comments on the writing point up the interaction between an author’s intent and the perceptions, experiences, etc. that the reader brings.
More importantly are the expressions of concern about the human cost of the crimes taking place at these hotels. Cleaning up the hotels is an important step. More important and further reaching is to create a wider community and society that reduces the likelihood of people getting involved in such hopeless acts.
Editor’s note: This comment has been deleted. — JD (Jan 2, 2009)
“It may be that a contributing factor is the presence nearby of Walter Reed Army Medical Center just down Georgia Avenue.”
There’s a whole lot of territory between that Days Inn and Walter Reed. This is NOT a case of cheap motels, pawn shops, and tattoo parlors just outside the gates of a military base.
Interesting info, I hope it only improves the area. My husband and I were certainly deterred from a home for sale on Eastern in recent history; simply due to the proximity to these motels….
I am wondering why this has been allowed to go on for so long because I know about this property in that I’ve been invited to and know people who have attended huge weekly sex parties in these rooms.
If they do tear it down that would only lead to a vacant property, they wont develop housing since the housing market is so bad and the new condos in the area cant sell and a vacant motel strip would only lead to more of these people, a perfect breeding ground exploded by the fact theres a vacant lot across the street.
If its torn down lets get a futuristic bowling alley built!