"What is it going to take?" Allen Gulch Road residents frustrated over criminal activity

“What is it going to take?” 

That’s what residents in the Allen Gulch neighborhood want to know. They have been living in fear for the last two years and feel the city has been unresponsive to the criminal activity taking place in their neighborhood.

“They called us into a meeting in July,” said resident Terri Grunendike. But since then the city hasn’t returned residents’ phone calls.

“They just ignore us,”  Grunendike said. “They promised us action months ago.”

Grunendike is fed up and tired of living in fear. 

The scenes that she describes over the last two years are terrifying. She’s had strangers who walked into her house in the middle of the day. She’s had intoxicated people pass out in her front yard. She’s had fights outside at 3 a.m.

“It’s just nonstop,” she said. “When tweakers don’t sleep, we don’t sleep.”

During the most recent incident Feb. 12 she had her grandchild on the floor to protect her from any stray bullets that might have hit their house. She has multiple people on camera with a man riding down the hill on a bicycle with a gun in the air saying “I’m going to freaking kill you.”

And while she and her neighbors went to  the most recent common council meeting she feels nothing has been done.

The city has not contracted any extra for patrols in the neighborhood. Both the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office and the city say there is a patrol officer on duty between the hours of midnight and 6 a.m. and that, although not contracted, extra patrols are taking place. 

Grunendike has only seen that patrol for the two nights following this most recent incident. She says the city did not employ a third shift as they promised. She wants action before someone gets killed.

“I’m going to give videos to every place I can,” she said.

Grunendike put in hardwired cameras so she can video tape illegal and disruptive activities taking place in her neighborhood.

“This is the terror we live in. We can’t do it anymore,” she said.

Grunendike has spoken to people in the governor’s office and to Pennington County Sheriff Dave Thom. She wants action. She feels that the city has been lying to residents. She expected personal updates from the city administrator  or mayor Kathy Skorzewski every two weeks since the July 8 meeting. She has gotten none.

“(City administrator) Brett (McMacken) and Kathy made promises,” she said.

She wants to know why the city hasn’t done anything.

“Does it really take two years to file paperwork?” she asked.

Every day she lives in fear. She sits in her house away from the windows. She has neighbors who haven’t left their house because they’re in such fear. She says that the town had tourists eating chocolate and chili downtown Feb. 12 while she and her neighbors were cordoned off behind yellow police tape. She had police dogs on her property looking for the gun used in the incident.

“This is supposed to be a nice little tourist town,” she said.

But when her neighbors won’t even go outside she wonders, “is that the kind of life we should have in Hill City?”

The Allen Gulch property is a house that essentially does not have an owner. The previous owner died in a car accident in 2019. She was preceded in death by her parents and brother. Her closest relatives are cousins scattered in four western states. 

Prior to the owner’s passing a person established residency in this home. That person is now in a diabetic coma. All the people currently in the house range in age from young to old, but none of them are the owner or tenant. 

McMacken  wants people to know that just because the person who established residency isn’t physically at the house it doesn’t give the city any rights to evict other people there.

But, he admits, “it’s fair to say the occupants are not great neighbors.”

McMacken says the city understands the frustration. He also understands that the city could have reached out right away after a recent garage fire on the property.

“More communication is great,” he said.

The city is focused on what they can be legally, primarily  health and safety issues. If those exist the city may have an opportunity to evict.

According to McMacken, paperwork was filed last week with the clerk of courts. He said an affidavit stating concerns with the property that the city can observe from the exterior including the house’s sagging roof, as well as pictures and information about the recent garage fire, were part of what was filed. 

McMacken  said  due to privacy concerns he could not answer whether the water account at the house is paid up to date, but he did verify that the water is currently on in the house. He said decisions to turn water on or off are internally communicated. 

Hill City’s water ordinance states that, “Payments not received by the finance office prior to the eleventh day of each month shall be considered delinquent and subject to disconnect. An evaluation of delinquent accounts shall be made and disconnect notices prepared and delivered. The customer shall be notified with a disconnect notice if the delinquent account is not paid in full within 10 days of the date of the notice, the water service shall be disconnected.”

Water applications require a name, date of birth, gender, phone number and occupancy status.

Paperwork given out with an application states that delinquent accounts “are subject to receive a termination of service notice” hand delivered by a sheriff.

According to the Pennington County Treasury office site the property tax bill is going to a post office box in Hughes County. 

The most recent Allen Gulch incident involved Joel Cornelison. Cornelison was a known criminal. He  was sentenced in 2020  for the crime of unauthorized ingestion of  a controlled substance. He was sentenced to four and a half years in the South Dakota State Penitentiary and paroled in April 2021. His parole ended  in October 2021. Calls to his parole officer at the Rapid City Field Office went unreturned. 

For the Feb. 12 Allen Gulch incident Cornelison was charged with three counts of aggravated assault, possession of  a firearm and burglary in the first degree. His next court date is March 2. 

According to the Pennington County Sheriff’s Office they anticipate more arrests from this incident. 

However, Cpt. Mark Hughes said, “We’re not going to arrest ourselves out of this problem.”

The sheriff’s office has flipped schedules to change things up a bit. The sheriff’s office works with three deputies with different schedules. On days deputies are not there, the sheriff’s office supplements from Rapid City’s extra patrols. The sheriff’s office typically goes above what they’re contracted to do, according to Hughes.

Things like increased traffic down a street or people known to the drug world capture the attention of the sheriff’s office, but Hughes says the office needs more than just suspiscion—it needs probable cause. 

“If there’s probable cause, we make an arrest. We do the best we can with the manpower we have,” he said.

Right now the office is reaching out to neighbors face to face in order to explain how they can work together. Things like taking down license plates are extremely helpful.

Hughes understands the frustration in the neighborhood.

“We are working with the city of Hill City to come up with remedies to deal with this,” he said.

There will be a special city meeting at city hall  Feb. 24 at 5:30 p.m. to discuss Allen Gulch.