Palm Grove

Palm Grove Cemetary, Friday, February 18, 2011. Photos courtesy of Wade Williams.

The suspects broke into the graveyard to use it as a base, police spokesman George Bardue told me. We walked through a jagged hole into a sprawling mess of graves with inscriptions scrawled in black paint. We walked over piles of broken toys, plastic packages, overgrown grass and human excrement. Jallah Flomo, 19, balanced on the edge of an open grave, his hands handcuffed behind him. His clothes were full of holes and hung loosely over his thin frame. He said he had been living in Palm Grove since World War III, the last battle in Liberia's 14-year civil war. He had been a soldier in Charles Taylor's army. They were a small army of 50 or 60 people who slept on sheets of cardboard in pitted tombs. The cops found evidence in matchbooks of Italian White, also known as Shining Lady, also known as crack. They used and sold drugs, the police said, and darted outside at night to swipe food and money and people's cellphones, stealing back into the safety of the dark cemetary where they didn't have to fear being chased. People had lived in Palm Grove after the war, Wade tells me, but in 2006, the government erected a tall concrete wall, dressed in barbed wire. But the suspects broke through it and continued to live among the wreckage.