Margary Butts can ignore the pain of her 10 stitches, black eye and high blood pressure if it draws attention to her fight for better police pay and more officers, she says.
Butts, her husband and her 25-year-old son were beaten Friday in their Angelo Avenue yard by a group of four boys and men, some of them suspected gang members. Four others watched.Other neighbors reportedly turned away from Butts' screams, closing their window shades and turning off their lights, she learned.
The Friday fight is a benchmark in the woman's private war against gangs and drugs in her neighborhood. Ironically, Butts' neat, well-groomed home is posted as a McGruff House. She's a member of the local community council and completed a citizen police academy class conducted by the South Salt Lake Police Department.
Friday, she was struck until bloody by the group, many of whom she knows only in passing.
The attack on the Butts family, along with other recent gang violence, spurred residents to call a meeting with city officials Wednesday. They asked for more police and better pay to prevent veteran officers from leaving the force. The group even offered to pay higher property taxes to compensate.
Moments before the meeting, police closed down their third suspected gang house this week. Using a trespass ordinance, the city evicted three boys and a girl from a house that prominently displays graffiti of a Los Angeles gang.
Police arrested one of the boys for illegal discharge of a firearm and gave the renter two weeks to get out. Another boy, a possible illegal alien, was turned over to Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Margary Butts believes her relationship with local officers is what has prevented her from being a target previously.
"At first I was afraid to let (my neighbors) know (about my crime-prevention activities), but what good did it do me to take the citizens academy?" she said. "Our police department is terrific. We are losing our officers to other cities for better pay."
The attack at her house Friday started over a beer bottle one boy left in her driveway.
From his vantage point at the front door, Butts's husband told the boy to pick up the bottle.
"He opened the door and leaned out and said, `Pick up your bottle and take it with you,' " she recalled. The boy replied with curses and threats and started walking toward West Temple with his friends.
"The one juvenile . . . came running back, jumped the gate and got to the bottom of the step," she said. Butts' son and three of the boys fought as her husband tried to break it up.
"I grabbed one by the hair who was kicking (my son) and pulled him back," she said. "I looked up and another (boy) was coming across the gate."
She tried to push him back also but ended up on the ground with a bleeding head. A neighbor across the street saw the fight and came at the boys with a golf club, Butts said. But the boy got the club away from the man and repeatedly struck him with it.
"I look out and my neighbor is down on the ground, and they're beating him," she said. Police arrived at that point and took several of the group into custody. They located a fifth suspect over the weekend. Butts estimates at least eight men and boys were involved in the attack.
Her husband sustained a neck injury, and her son has two black eyes, multiple abrasions and bruises. All three were taken to the hospital.
"The gang has overall left us alone, other than when they've gotten mouthy with us, like kids get," she said. "It was an opportunity (Friday) and they took it."
She's not as much afraid of retribution now as she is frustrated. Those believed responsible for the Friday attack were taken to detention but released and back on the street Monday, she said.
"This can happen at your house," Butts said. "This is all over, not just here on this street. And most of the ones who were here (during the attack), don't live here. They're from someplace else."