INDIANAPOLIS — "If it's taking this homicide for people to get the attention to what this building has been experiencing for the past 18 months of his ownership. It's really terrible that someone had to pass away," Lauren Bushman said.
Irvington residents are searching for solutions after a man was killed in the hallway of a local apartment.
Police say early Tuesday morning, the man was found unresponsive in the hallway of Irvington Arms Apartments. No arrests have been made.
WRTV's Amber Grigley found out there's an effort in the neighborhood to get the city to take action about safety concerns, but not everyone is on board.
"We really need to think about and consider, if this was my brother, or my sister, or my niece or my nephew living in this type of place — where there are broken windows, and people sleeping in hallways, and there's really dangerous activity happening — how would I respond?" Bushman said.
For a little more than a year and a half, Bushman said she and other people living near Irvington Arms Apartments had seen the complex at its worst. In August, she reached out to the investment group over the building, hoping to find a solution.
“They weren't certain how or when they would be the remedy and that this was the East side of Indianapolis, that these are things to be expected," Bushman said.
An assumption Bushman found offensive, igniting a different fight to change how people view Irvington. She started a petition asking the city to step in fast.
"This is the responsibility of an out-of-state slumlord who is capitalizing on people living in poverty and creating unsafe living conditions, and it's up to him to clean up," Bushman said.
Tuesday, WRTV requested incident report records from IMPD and discovered there had been more than 50 police runs to Irvington Arms Apartments since the first of the year.
"I would not sign a petition like that," Diana McClure said.
McClure lives nearby and says she doesn't find Irvington Arms to be a problem. She said it could use a few thousand dollars to be fixed up, but she thinks this petition will ultimately cause more harm than good for the people it serves.
"I think that perhaps those people don't like the individuals that live in that building more than the fact that they don't like the building," McClure said. “Signing a petition is basically signing a petition against all of those human beings that live in that building, and that's what they can afford."
So far, the petition has more than 300 signatures and comments.
Tuesday evening, WRTV tried to get answers from the property owner but had trouble finding who owned it. The few companies listed on the internet in connection to Irvington Arms told her that it was not their property.
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