Cops, D.A. pledge to shutter club where gunfire killed 2, injured 2

THE EVENT HALL at Park and Chew avenues in Fern Rock has a sign outside that says it's a day-care, so its promoters need all the help they can get to draw attention to the hall's pay-at-the-door weekend parties.

But now the hall, which sometimes markets itself as the Nifiji Club, is getting a lot of special attention - from the Philadelphia Police Department and the District Attorney's Office.

Officials met with concerned neighborhood residents last night - two weeks after a wild shootout following a motorcycle club's party at the hall left two people dead and two injured - and pledged that if they have anything to do with it, the hall's doors won't be open much longer.

"It represents a clear and present danger to the community," Capt. Joe Fredericksdorf, commander of the 35th District, which covers Fern Rock, told about three dozen people at Love Missionary Baptist Fellowship, on Ogontz Avenue.

Fredericksdorf said police were called to the property 428 times from Jan. 1 to Sept. 21. "This is no good, and we're going to stop it," the police captain promised.

Since the Sept. 20 quadruple shooting, which also left houses and cars on Park Avenue pockmarked by bullets and neighbors shaken, Fredericksdorf has been working to find ways to get the hall - the backdrop for another shooting in June - shut down, he and Northwest Police Division Inspector James Kelly said.

The block captain on Park Avenue, who asked that the Daily News withhold her name for safety, said that just yesterday she found holes from the 30 to 50 bullets police say were fired that night in the facade of her tidy rowhouse.

Fredericksdorf said he is requesting that the Department of Licenses & Inspections deny the club's special-assembly license because of the shootings. He said state liquor-enforcement officers also arrested two bartenders at the club last weekend for illegally selling alcohol. The club does not have a liquor license.

Beth Grossman, chief of the District Attorney's Public Nuisance Task Force, also joined the fight last night. She handed out affidavits for neighbors to fill out, saying she plans to petition a judge for a temporary injunction to shut the club's doors in the next few weeks while the D.A.'s Office works to have the property officially declared a nuisance and shut down for a year.

Grossman told neighbors that there's strength in numbers: The more resident affidavits she can provide and the more who attend the injunction hearing, the better. "This is easily apparent to me how much of a problem this is," she said.

For the block captain whose house was struck by gunfire, the officials' help is a relief.

"I've lived here since 1976, and that's the first time I've seen anything like this," she said on the day after the shooting. "We don't need that, because someone could've been shot through the window."

Blog: PhillyConfidential.com