Lauren never saw it coming.

She was near the entrance of her small business in a north Lake Highlands strip center, waving to a regular client who had just pulled up. Her heavy glass door slammed open with a bang and in flew a young woman with a phone in one hand and a handgun in the other. The intruder grabbed the door handle and held it closed, screaming, “Call the police! He’s gonna kill me!”

A man banged into the door. He gripped a handgun, too, as he jerked back on the door in a tug-of-war with the screaming woman.

Lauren spun and ran toward the rear of the clinic, dialing 911 as she fled, expecting every second that a big-caliber bullet would hammer into her back. Then it was over — the pursuer hightailed it and the woman, who Lauren recognized as a neighborhood drug dealer, also took off before police could arrive. Lauren still does not know what was going on. Her client never made it inside the clinic, and never came back, either.

Nobody fired their guns that day, but Lauren is no stranger to gunfire. Like the time a couple of stray bullets crashed through her plate glass front window and thudded into the opposite wall. And there was the early morning she opened at 7 a.m. to meet a customer. The two found themselves scrambling for cover when a man in the parking lot started shooting at a nearby group of people.

The intersection of Forest and Audelia has long been ground zero for dope dealing, break-ins and all sorts of mayhem in Dallas Police’s turbulent Beats 255 and 256. Drug dealers drift in around mid-morning most days, and tend to cluster near stores at each end of the Bent Creek Shopping Center. There are not as many of them as a year ago and most of them clock out by late afternoon. That is when a pair of off-duty Dallas police officers settle in to watch the place until closing time.

The stressed-out shop owners do not hear gunfire outside every day as they once did. The past year saw only one significant drive-by shooting, and that was across the street, where two men were shot, one of whom died. Then in January at the same location

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Enhanced crime fighting measures at Bent Creek seem to have, quite literally, pushed the problem down the road.

Nearby homeowners, who for years could see the bedlam unfold from their back porches agree, things have been quieter since Bent Creek principal Mohammed Khanani started paying those off-duty cops, along with more security lighting, cameras and fencing. Khanani’s Rooha Realty, Inc. agreed in March to step up security after the city called the center a public nuisance and sued him. The city agreed to back off from the lawsuit, to give the plan a chance to produce results.

It’s been an uneasy truce — Khanani says each month he spends well over $20,000 on these security measures, a price he says is not sustainable.

The dealers know that too, and they are planning for a return to their glory days. “The cops are gonna leave,” exhausted shop owners have heard dealers hiss. “When they’re gone, we’ll be back.”

The city is in mediation with Khanani to come up with a workable long-term plan, and there are hopes that money and smart thinking from a new Public Improvement District (PID) will help keep the lid on. But those who live and work in the area are fearful crime will indeed surge again.

Neighboring Chaos

Shane Douglas gazes over his back fence to the Audelia Creek underpass on Forest Lane. “A homeless guy was living under there for a long time, and when they finally got him out, they had to bring in a U-Haul truck,” Douglas chuckles. “He had an oriental rug down there, more furniture than I had in my house.”

Douglas’ sleek two-story is closer to the troubles at Forest and Audelia than any single-family home. His pool is about 150 yards from the EZ Trip Food Store parking lot, where more than a couple of people have

Enhanced security measures at Bent Creek Shopping Center have led to a drop in crime.

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Douglas and his wife, Rebecca, were at the Forest and Audelia traffic light one mid-afternoon in January last year when Rebecca says two groups of people — five or six on each side — began “acting weird” in the Bent Creek Shopping Center parking lot.

“You could tell, something bad was going to happen,” Rebecca recalls. “Then they were shooting at each other.”

She saw more than one person hit by gunfire. Police showed up when the Douglas’ called 911, but the combatants had scattered. The police incident report shows only that officers arrested a 20-year-old guy for shooting a 21-year-old guy. He was badly injured, but lived. Like many dark misadventures that have unfolded here, the awareness of this shootout quickly faded. The gun battle got lost in the noise. It’s already forgotten.

Business In The Battlefield

Most days, Mohammed Khanani stands behind bulletproof glass at the EZ Trip check-cashing station on Walnut near Plano Road in Richardson. This is his headquarters, as well as the principal address for at least nine small corporations. Khanani and his various partners started buying and running small shopping centers and convenience stores in Dallas, Richardson, Mesquite and Carrollton in 1994.

Khanani’s corporations own three of the four corners of the Forest and Audelia intersection. He would like to buy the fourth corner, home to the legendary Big Mama’s Fried Chicken and Waffles (until they took down the retro clock atop Big Mama’s, the hands were frozen at 4:20 for some time). But for now, he has his hands full keeping the shopping center across the street from becoming an official public nuisance.

“I own seven other convenience stores here,” Khanani told me, “and none of them have any problems like this.”

He says he has lived quietly here for 30 years, raising a family (two kids in local universities, one at Richardson High School) and is steadily building a portfolio of modest properties and stores. But the city’s lawsuit in March 2017, which called Bent Creek a public nuisance, threatened to shut down the whole shopping center for one year. It claimed his corporation, Rooha Realty, has maintained Bent Creek as a “hub for drug use and sales and related violent crime,” and that they knew what was going on but did not take measures to stop the illicit behaviors.

The lawsuit states that in the 22 months before March 2017, police made 66 drug arrests at Bent Creek. That, plus seven aggravated assaults, two robberies, seven weapons charges and two arrests for reckless discharge of a firearm.

The idea of only two firearms arrests in 22 months elicits eyerolls from Shane and Rebecca Douglas’ neighbors. People there call 911 at least one

“Shooting! I mean, bullets flying! They feel nothing. They are not afraid of the police.”

Drop In Crime

Community Prosecutor Kristen Kramer or two nights a week when they hear the familiar barrage of semiautomatic gunfire, usually from the direction of the Bent Creek intersection.

Bent Creek veteran Lia Berhe opened her Hair Plus Beauty Supply store nearly a decade ago.

“Gunfire was the order of the day,” she says of the time before the lawsuit. Berhe says she heard gunfire just about every day. She immigrated to North Carolina from Egypt in 1992, and after a few years moved to Dallas and opened her first shop. Then she moved the store to Bent Creek, hoping for better traffic. But she was stunned by the crime.

“In Egypt, in North Carolina, and when I first moved to Dallas, we saw shoplifting, burglaries. But you wouldn’t see open drug activity,” she says.

Her business neighbor Lauren adds, “Without fear,” she declares.

worked with Khanani, Dallas PD, business owners, neighborhood groups and others to draw up the aggressive crime-fighting plan for Bent Creek that launched in late spring last year. Kramer is on a team of legaltroubleshooters in the City Attorney’s office. The website says these lawyers use “strategic code enforcement and creative problem solving” to get things going in neighborhoods that are under stress. She is the sole lawyer in the office who is dedicated to only one City Council district; Councilmember Adam McGough’s District 10, home of Bent Creek Shopping Center.

When Khanani agreed to her plan and a review in three months, Kramer held off on the public nuisance lawsuit against the center — for now.

Under the high points of the program, Khanani would pay for two uniformed off-duty police officers to patrol on-site eight hours a day, seven days a week. He agreed to install security cameras to cover all the common areas of the shopping center. The court order specified that he also install enough cameras to clearly see all publicly accessible areas of the EZ Trip convenience store and the American Dollar Store. These two stores bookend the shopping center and see a lot of in-and-out traffic. Khanani agreed to install security fencing to keep people out of the back alley. He also had to seal off an irksome rabbit hole around back that makes it easy for a fugitive on foot to disappear into