When I saw that the young landlord from California was shot and killed on Beniteau Street this week-end, I started to think that perhaps that street might be somehow cursed. Recall that Ayanna Jones died last year just a block away in a complicated pay-out from a thug shooting at Beniteau and Mack Ave.

When i was a child, my family lived in an upper flat in my grnadmother's house on Beniteau just a few houses north of Mack Ave. My grandmother and her mother lived downstairs and they were remmants of the French-canadians who had settled in an area once known as St. Clair Heights that was annexed into Detroit [[I don't know when).

I don't remember a lot about those years. I recall a candy store on Mack ave. where she would buy little white bags of the nonpareil candies that she loved. We went to Sunday mass at St. Bernard church and went to church festivals and dinners in the basement of the church. My grandmother canned jars of pears from back-yard trees and she said that the trees were a legacy of my french ancestors, who loved pears.

But something is lost in the mists of time. On the same block, and maybe next door, a Belgian family named Callewaert lived. I think that sometime in the 1970's a son of that family was murdered on Belle Isle, which he was visiting with his girlfriend or wife.

I can't find out anything about this memory which is linked with Beniteau Street - now maybe a curse place.

Anyone else have knowledge?