After dark, Beach bike path becomes crime corridor

VIRGINIA BEACH

On paper, the Norfolk Avenue bike path looks safe.

Police reports for the tree-lined stretch of pavement – which links North Birdneck Road to the Oceanfront along Norfolk Avenue – show just one robbery and four assaults occurring there since the beginning of the year.

But residents who regularly bike, run and walk their dogs along the path say it isn’t as safe as it looks, especially once the sun sets. Over the past few years, it’s become increasingly common to hear of muggings and robberies on the trail, sometimes as often as five times in a week, residents said. But many of the incidents go unreported.

“The police reports don’t support all these claims,” said Officer Jimmy Barnes, a spokesman for the Police Department. “If they don’t report it, we don’t know about it.”

Myra Spano, 33, who lives near the path, said she uses it to bike to the Oceanfront several times a week during warm weather. In the daytime, the path is friendly and appears well-maintained, she said. But at night, there are dark stretches bordered by overgrown brush where assailants can take passers-by by surprise.

“It’s pretty during the day,” she said. “But at night it’s kind of scary. ”

Spano said she’s thankful that no one’s ever bothered her. But another resident, a man in his 40s, was mugged early this month as he walked on the path.

It was a little after 10 p.m. when a group of five or six people stopped him and asked for the time, said Officer Margie Hobbs, a police spokeswoman. That’s when one of the men began hitting him in the face and demanded his property. He handed over his cell phone, and the group fled toward the Atlantis Apartments, on the other side of the brush.

The man called the police, but they’ve been unable to find his attacker.

A similar incident happened to 26-year-old Jon Edwards as he biked from dinner one night last summer. A group of men on bicycles came up behind him and struck him in the back of the head, sending him face-first into the pavement, he said. Then they kicked and beat him before fleeing without taking anything.

“It was almost like I was just jumped out of no reason,” he said. “It was just obviously wrong place, wrong time for me.”

In other incidents, people have been pulled off their bikes or struck with flying objects as they’ve ridden by.

Residents have started circulating petitions calling on the city to add more lighting and increase police presence along the trail. They’ve gathered about 3,500 signatures and nearly 1,000 Facebook fans.

Their hope is to restore the trail to the safe thoroughfare envisioned by city officials when it was constructed in 2003. The project cost nearly $525,000 then. At the time, residents living near the path, like Kelly Bullock, said they enjoyed the trail but thought it needed more lighting.

“I think they did a really good job,” she said at the time.

Residents’ efforts have caught the city’s attention. Councilman John Uhrin, who represents the Oceanfront, has requested that Dominion Virginia Power fix any broken lights and install new ones along the route. The city’s Landscape Management Division has been working with the sheriff’s Community Work Force to clear overgrown brush. And police have stepped up their patrols along Norfolk Avenue.

The city plans to eventually extend the path all the way to Town Center, Uhrin said.

“I think that we’re providing the resources to make sure that it is the family-friendly bike path that it was meant to be,” he said. “I think it’s important that we maintain it as a safe, nice area for people.”

Edwards said he no longer takes the bike path alone at night.

“What I’ve always been told is that there’s not enough money in the police budget to be able to patrol it at night,” he said.

But “you’ve got four or five cops on each corner of the Oceanfront at night. I don’t understand why one or two of those cops can’t be placed on the bike path.”

He and other residents said they hope the efforts continue, especially as the tourist season pulls resources to the Oceanfront and away from other communities.

“It’s great to make public officials aware,” Edwards said, “because it’s almost as if they turned a blind eye to this for the past couple years, and this is becoming a major issue.”

Kathy Adams, (757) 222-5155, kathy.adams@pilotonline.com