GREEN BAY, WI (WTAQ) – A pair of shootings targeting the same house at nearly the exact same time, just two days apart, has neighbors along Hubbard Street on Green Bay’s near-west side very concerned.
“Last night we heard it, and we weren’t exactly sure what it was,” said Lori, who lives down the street. “Safety is a priority. This has been always a really nice neighborhood, and we did contact our city aldermen. We wanna make safety a priority in this beautiful city we live in.”
We rang a few doorbells on Friday to speak to neighbors. However, most of their ‘Ring’ doorbell cameras aren’t pointed at the street, and didn’t catch the vehicle speeding away.
But even with a little comfort from security and surveillance cameras, neighbors like Lori are still worried about safety in a community they’ve lived in for over a decade.
“We talk about if it’s safe to live in this neighborhood anymore. This is a wonderful neighborhood, we’ve lived here for almost 20 years,” Lori told WTAQ News.
“I’ve lived here for 13 years and it’s always been a reasonably good neighborhood, but yeah, you there’s a certain bad element that the city really needs to pick up on,” said Eric Gabrielson. “It woke my girlfriend up, it woke some of the neighbors up. A neighbor down on Oakland was woken up both times by it.”
For Eric and Lori, the area is what they called a ‘regular, working-class’ neighborhood. But Eric says there is a block along Hubbard that makes him a bit uncomfortable.
“There’s inspection problems down on that block, there’s problems with, quite honestly, slumlords. There’s a lot of things that just aren’t really caught unless you know the neighborhood,” he said. “Systemically, it’s targeted neighborhood enforcement of inspection codes, it’s holding landlords accountable. Generally these types of things tend to happen at low income rentals where the landlords don’t live in or even around town.”
And he’s not alone in that concern. Even the neighborhood mail lady, Sheila, is worried.
“I don’t feel comfortable, I’ll tell you that. Because when I do that part, it’s usually getting dark – whether it be morning or night – it’s a very uneasy feeling for sure,” Sheila said. “First of all, it’s a rental. So the landlords should be mandatory to kick them out, and the police should be involved with that. Second of all, I feel like there should be surveillance…Waking up to gunshots is not fun anywhere you live, but in a nice neighborhood like that, you get one bad apple that moves in and it creates an absolute disaster.”
Sheila also provided WTAQ with footage from a Nest security camera that a neighbor sent to her.
A bit closer to the action is Shannon Moore. He owns a few multi-plexes across the street from where the bullets hit.
“It happened and we were like ‘Oh that’s scary!’ But then we thought, well this is going to be the safest neighborhood in the city for a week because they’re not going to come back. Then two days later, boom, they’re back again. Then it’s like ‘Okay, now that is scary!’ Now it’s like you want a cop parked out front 24 hours a day,” Moore said. “After these two events, we’ve had one tenant already say that they’re moving out. A lot of them have small children. They said ‘we left last night, my kids aren’t coming back here.’ And you know, I can’t blame them.”
Moore says the resident in the targeted home is relatively new to the neighborhood, and it seems problems from the past followed them to Hubbard Street. And that’s something that is a rising concern for other residents.
“I’ve never seen anything like this. This is more frequent than I’ve ever seen. The neighborhood isn’t without its problems, crime honestly has gotten worse since COVID started around the near west side. Just anecdotally from what I see on Hubbard, Woodlawn, or Norwood, it’s getting worse,” Gabrielson said. “Honestly, my concerns are related to drugs. They’re related to small-time criminals. And it all seems to be kind of petty stuff.”
But other than the questionable backgrounds of landlords and tenants, the biggest concern is the communication from Green Bay Police regarding the situation.
“I’d feel a lot safer if the police were openly communicating thing to the people that live here and that are concerned. After the shooting overnight on Tuesday into Wednesday, a police officer stopped by on Wednesday morning and just asked if my Ring had seen anything. I haven’t heard anything from the police or gotten anything from them since,” Gabrielson said.
“The thing that’s concerning is that we’re seeing less patrol officers. We used to see officers, they would walk around our neighborhood and say hello. We don’t see any of that anymore. We don’t see officers on the street. That’s a big concern, because things are getting escalated,” Lori added. “We just want to make sure that the city’s taking notice. Especially with the new police chief in town that said ‘we want to make safety and outreach important,’ we want to see that go to work. We want to make sure everybody stays safe, especially during the holidays.”
Sheila says going back to shoot at the same place at nearly the exact same time is ‘gutsy.’
“I have that whole entire block, going all the way up to Allard Street, that are worried sick,” she said. “For the sake of that neighborhood and that whole area, I hope to God there’s more police involvement. I hope they figure out what’s going on. I hope they do surveillance. I hope they do something, because people are afraid to come out of their house whether it’s morning, noon, or night.”
Nobody was injured in either shooting. The person living at the home has reportedly not been cooperating with police.
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