Violent incidents jar Chapel Hill community

CHAPEL HILL -- Pine Knolls residents were already planning a meeting to discuss an armed robbery that occurred 10 days ago.

Then one teenager allegedly shot another Monday evening in the neighborhood near downtown Chapel Hill.

On Thursday at 7:30 p.m., the Pines Community Center will host the neighborhood's first Crimewatch meeting in years.

"Our community had become so quiet, so safe, that there really was not a feeling that we had to go out of our way," said the center's president, Ted Parrish. Parrish, a professor at N.C. Central University, said, "We are now reinvigorating it because of these two incidents."

Parrish owns the rental duplex at 105 Johnson St., in front of which David Earl Ellis Jr., 17, is alleged to have shot Calvin Chavis, 16. Chavis was in stable condition at UNC Hospitals Tuesday with a gunshot wound to the abdomen.

Police say Ellis shot Chavis with a small-caliber handgun. Ellis is charged with attempted first-degree murder and jailed in lieu of $200,000 bail. He is scheduled to appear in court March 10.

Chavis has no criminal record. Before the shooting, Ellis was scheduled to go to trial March 24 on two counts each of breaking and entering and larceny from separate incidents last year.

His mother came to court Tuesday as Ellis had his first appearance via closed-circuit television from the Orange County jail. She did not give her name but said she was there to support her son and was praying for Chavis and his family.

Ellis lives on Rock Haven Road in Carrboro. Parrish said Chavis also does not live in the Pine Knolls neighborhood.

Still, Parrish said, the incident underscores why he has four students interning with the local agency EmPOWERment Inc. to connect Knolls teens to career-development programs.

"They're going to try to link the kids to opportunities so that they do not end up like the one-third of black men who have some connection to the criminal justice system," Parrish said. "We certainly do have teenagers in our community just like the teenagers involved in this incident."

Last Sunday, a 28-year-old man was robbed at gunpoint in his home at 109 Park Road, part of the Pine Knolls neighborhood on the opposite side of Merritt Mill Road from Johnson Street. The robber took $75 in cash and a $400 video game system.