The Holly : five bullets, one gun, and the struggle to save an American neighborhood / Julian Rubinstein.

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

An award-winning journalist's dramatic account of a shooting that shook a community to its core, with important implications for the future On the last Friday evening of the summer of 2013, five shots rang out in the parking lot of a new Boys & Girls Club in the northeast Denver neighborhood known as the Holly. Long a destination for African American families fleeing the Jim Crow South, the Holly had become an "invisible city" within a city, a cradle of civil rights activism in a historically white metropolis that in recent decades had struggled under the weight of gang violence and urban blight. While shootings weren't uncommon, the identity of the shooter came as a shock to Denver's mayor and members of the city's donor class who had supported him. His name was Terrance Roberts, and he was a third-generation resident of the Holly, a former member of the Bloods, and the community's most revered--and controversial--anti-gang activist. In The Holly, the award-winning journalist and Denver native Julian Rubinstein reconstructs the events leading up to the fateful confrontation that left a local gang member paralyzed and sparked a two-year legal battle in which Roberts tried to clear his name by proving that he acted in self-defense. Much more than the story of a shooting, The Holly is a sociopolitical saga that explores the porous boundaries between a city's elites and its most disadvantaged citizens, as well as the fraught interactions of police, confidential informants, activists, gang members, and ex-gang members trying--or not--to put their pasts behind them. It shows how well-intentioned urban renewal may hasten gentrification, and what happens when overzealous policing collides with gang members who conceive of themselves as defenders, however imperfect, of a neighborhood.Above all, Rubinstein offers a nuanced and humane portrait of a man whose life is emblematic of a city, and a country, that at times supported him and at other times pinned him down. He chronicles the rise and fall of the nonviolence organization Roberts founded, and maps the tangled web of connections between community organizers, clergymen, politicians, and everyday people navigating the rocky channel between precarity and the lure of gangs. Full of urgent lessons at a time when American cities are under threat like never before, The Holly is an unforgettable, deeply affecting story about the triumphs and failures of an effort to transform a neighborhood.