THE COASTAL BEND MAGAZINE • Late Summer 2018 29 TheCoastalBend.com near the old Memorial Medical Center, is one of the poorest in the city—in fact, it is among the 5% poorest neighborhoods in the United States, where 53% of all chil- dren live below the poverty level. Most of the homes in the Laredo/17th St. area were built between 1940 and 1969, and the median home value is $52,505, among the bottom 5% of all residential neigh- borhoods in Texas. When two 19-year-old young men were found shot outside the house at 2010 Coleman Ave. in the noon hour of Wednesday, March 14, 2018, neighbors were alarmed but none sur- prised, and neither was the Corpus Christi Police Dept. In recent years, a wooden fence had been built around the entire home of about 1,000 square feet, and residents and, eventually, authorities, began to notice the high level of traffic into and out of the house on an ongoing basis. So much so, that CCPD narcotics agents had sent in confidential informants to make drug purchases at the house within two months of the March 14th shootings. Deandre Mathis, a 19-year-old who was popular in his former north side neigh- borhood before moving to the near west side with his mother and siblings, died at the hospital. The young man shot at his side survived. Witnesses reported seeing a gold, 2001 Buick, driven by a woman with long, black hair, park at the corner of 19th and Coleman, one block from the victims’ home. Two men were said to have exited the vehicle while the driver waited, one with what appeared to be an assault rifle. They were seen entering the front gate at the Coleman house, exiting a few minutes later and returning to the car, after which the three sped away. While the loss was a tragedy for Deandre’s friends and family, the home invasion, robbery, shootings and murder on Coleman Ave. were common in a neighborhood that has been among Corpus Christi’s poorest and most violent for generations. Nueces County is huge. Of its 838 square miles on land (327 sq. miles are wa- ter), the city of Corpus Christi encompasses only 175 square miles, less than 21%. What was exclusively vast farmland west of the Crosstown Expressway extension (TX Hwy. 258) has become dotted with new, high-end neighborhoods of oversized A typical street-level drug bust in Corpus Christi will generally yield several ounces of metham- phetamines, cocaine and pounds of marijuana along with guns and a few thousand in cash.