ST. LOUIS — Goodfellow Boulevard was once home to a sprawling ammunition industry that employed thousands and supplied the national war efforts in Europe, Korea and Vietnam. Now, the north-south thoroughfare is a no man’s land of abandoned businesses, littered roadways and lawlessness that’s driving Black residents out of northwest St. Louis.
“They call it Goodfellow. There ain’t nothing good,” Shirley Robinson, 66, said from her front porch. “I can see why people be moving. I am going to be next as soon as my money pops. I like this house, but people come through our gangways with guns. I am going to buy a house where there are stores and a fence so high that nobody can get in.”
A $30.5 million tax-subsidized effort is underway to stabilize low-income housing at Hillvale Apartments, a huge complex in the area. Many neighbors like Robinson are skeptical it will last if security isn’t better addressed, particularly at the busy intersection of Goodfellow and Natural Bridge that’s an epicenter of mayhem.
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There, a headless lamppost leans like a giant sword over the entrance to the most dangerous gas station in St. Louis, according to a Post-Dispatch analysis of crime data. The business has had many formal names in its storied history. Today, it’s a Conoco, but residents still call it the “Murder Mobil.”
“I don’t go there,” said Robinson, who lives a few blocks away. “It’s been robbed so many times. There are a bunch of people hanging around. You never know when they get to shooting.”
Other than a man who buys booze, several long-term residents said they avoid the gas station for the same reason. It’s been on the city’s radar for some time, but problems persist.
Out of more than 100 gas stations still in operation citywide, the station in question at 5750 Natural Bridge Avenue had the highest number of aggravated assaults — 106 — and robberies — 66 — between 2005 and 2020. Aggravated assaults were more than double the runner-up — 46 — at the Phillips 66 on the Halls Ferry Circle. It was also one of eight gas stations with two or more homicides during that time frame.
The Post-Dispatch’s analysis relied on 15 years of uniform crime report spreadsheets, published monthly by St. Louis police on their website until 2020, when they changed computer systems. Police on Tuesday released a crime dataset covering the missing years, 2021 to 2023, but in a different format that can’t be directly compared with the old data. That data shows 5750 Natural Bridge ranked fifth for aggravated assaults over those three years, with just under half the total of the leader, the Shell station at 721 North Tucker Boulevard.
Twenty years of police calls for service to 5750 Natural Bridge also paint a bleak picture.
Between 2004 and 2016, the station averaged 186 calls per year. Then, in January 2017, the station’s owner, 31-year-old Maulik Patel, was cut down in a hail of gunfire as he drove home one night, a murder case that remains unsolved. Calls for service doubled that year to 504, kicking off a multiyear surge that lasted through 2022, except for a brief reduction during the 2020 pandemic year.
Then, on July 12, 2022, local and federal police raided the North Western Inn, another chronic source of calls for service next door known for drugs and prostitution. They arrested more than a dozen people, lining them up on the curb of the gas station. The hotel was shuttered.
The following year, calls for service at the gas station fell to a 20-year low: 55.
Now, hotel owners want to reopen. Disruptions continue at the gas station. Its ATM was recently yanked out and stolen.
As crime ebbs and flows, the Murder Mobil lives on in an area where the Rally’s burger joint is one of the latest businesses to shutter. Stakeholders say the future of stations like this one pose an enormous challenge and opportunity for those who want North City to thrive once more. Gas stations bring in tax revenue, but also come with heavy tolls.
“That place over there makes the Shell downtown look like the Ritz-Carlton,” said Jermaine Wooten, an attorney. “That’s where people meet for drug sales and all types of crime. Police say if you pull up on that lot, they assume they are going to commit a crime. That’s how bad it is.”
Wooten represented Michael Williams in a personal injury case involving the property. Williams alleged in court records that he was beaten unconscious and robbed by a group of individuals “marauding” on the parking lot July 4, 2017. Williams claimed the gas station manager poured water over his face and left him on the ground for about 30 minutes before calling for help. He claimed he was mentally and physically disabled by the incident, which, he argued, was foreseeable given the troubling pattern of crime at the location.
Ayush One LLC has owned the gas station since 2013. Several months ago, the manager described to a reporter a sense of being trapped. He complained that the city wasn’t providing enough security and that if he or his employees called for help, it worsened their case with city problem properties officials. He said he’d be open to allowing a reporter and photographer to observe the challenges for a day or night, but, when pressed on a date, changed his mind, saying the business may be sold soon.
By early March, the store hadn’t sold. The same manager angrily told the Post-Dispatch to leave the property and that he didn’t want to participate in a story about gas stations in the city. The Williams case, filed in 2019, had recently been dismissed; it’s unclear if a settlement was reached.
And another personal injury lawsuit had been filed — this one against Ayush One and a private security company, Beast Mode LLC.
William E. Jones, the plaintiff, claims in court records that a private security guard used a firearm to strike somebody inside the gas station on Sept. 8, 2021. During the struggle, the gun allegedly fired and struck Jones in the arm, making it one of many shootings that have happened at the station.
Corvettes to crime
The intersection of Goodfellow and Natural Bridge was a beacon of prosperity in the 1970s. Corvettes rolled off a nearby assembly line. The federal center hummed with jobs. Goody Goody Diner filled stomachs with fried eggs.
And Gary Hinton, just a teenager, closed the gas station at 5750 Natural Bridge at 1 a.m.
“It was a different time,” Hinton, now 66, said by telephone from Arizona.
He said his parents took over the station about a year after it opened. They initially called it Jodie’s Mobil, after his father, and later, Jodie Hinton and Son’s Enterprises. There wasn’t much money in gas, so they offered full-service and auto repair. He said they had a couple tow trucks and sold ice and cigarettes.
“Having a job was huge at that time because it kept you off the street,” said Gary. “Time on your hands and hot ass St. Louis in the summertime. It was the best thing for me to work at that gas station.”
He said they were robbed a few times, but nobody paid attention to it because no one was physically harmed.
“We were well-embedded in the community,” he said. “People called us who needed stuff. Dad was really personable.”
In the mid-1980s, around the time Gary was leaving for a career in the Air Force, the family business fell apart and turned over. Jodie Hinton pivoted to running a northside lounge. In 1986, seated at the bar, police said somebody came in and fatally shot him in the head without saying a word.
By then, the gas station was advertising as the Goodfellow Sunoco. It later sat vacant from 1989 to 1997, when new bays were built, according to city records.
It became a hot spot for crime. In the past 20 years, there was a wide variety of more than 4,650 calls for police service. Michael Anthony Tunstall alone racked up at least 22 trespassing cases filed in St. Louis Circuit Court. In one, police also claimed he had a crack pipe and threatened to kill arresting officers.
One afternoon in 2016, somebody drove off in a woman’s SUV when she went up to the window of the gas station to check on a child inside. A 2-month-old boy, left in the back seat, was later found uninjured, dumped at a Sherman Park bathroom, along with the stolen vehicle nearby.
It’s unclear when the gas station picked up the informal name Murder Mobil. According to news reports, five people have been killed there since 2002:
Lawrence Brady II, 19, the son of a former Wellston mayor, was shot in the head in 2002 as he got out of a car and later died of his wounds.
Acme Price III, 44, of University City, who served a brief stint in the Marines, was fatally stabbed in 2004. Family said he’d done time in federal prison and struggled with drug addiction.
Damien Guy, 21, of Pine Lawn, was killed in 2004. Witnesses told police that they saw somebody chasing him from the gas station before being shot in the street.
Arnold Grice, 24, who lived in northwest St. Louis near the border of Pine Lawn, was gunned down in 2011.
Caylin Hudson, 18, was killed in 2016. He was a passenger in a fleeing car that a group of men shot at in the parking lot.
Police said then that Hudson lived in the 6200 block of Lenox Avenue in Wellston. No one there could be found recently who remembered him, but Samuel Shannon, a Wellston councilman who lives nearby, said many people have been shot at the infamous gas station he avoids.
“They need to shut it down and do something,” said Shannon, 73. “It’s just a bad place for the city of St. Louis. It’s a place you don’t want to go to get gas.”
No surrender
To this day, few are aware that a recent owner of the gas station was slain. Like many fatal shootings, Maulik Patel suffered a violent death that was briefly mentioned in the news right after it happened on Jan. 11, 2017.
He was on his way home to unincorporated west St. Louis County around 10 p.m., right after work. He was driving north on Goodfellow Boulevard in a 2011 Hyundai Sonata with personalized license plates: “AYUSH.”
A witness told police that when the Sonata stopped at a traffic light leading to the Interstate 70 on-ramp, a sedan with tinted glass pulled up directly beside the Sonata and started blasting. The witness told police that the victim got out of the car and held his hands up in the air, attempting to surrender; however, the assailant or assailants continued to shoot until the victim collapsed on Goodfellow Boulevard.
The suspect vehicle sped off on Interstate 70, according to the police report.
Another witness stopped and got out of her Impala to check on the victim and call police. Soon she reported that somebody from the amassing crowd sped off in her car.
Patel was pronounced dead at the scene. One employee at the gas station told police that several unknown individuals had made verbal and physical threats toward Patel on a regular basis. A police review of surveillance video from the night of his death didn’t reveal anything notable, according to the police report.
Police wouldn’t sit for an interview to discuss the unsolved case. Evita Caldwell, a police spokeswoman, said by email that detectives received leads over the years, but none of them have been substantial enough for an arrest.
In 2017, St. Louis police Detective Daniel Sweeney acknowledged in court testimony that “we have reason to believe” that Patel was intentionally targeted.
Court records show that Patel filed a last will and testament three weeks before his death. He had a young son and wife at home but was only 31. According to a copy of the will, his business interests were Ayush One at 5750 Natural Bridge, as well as Hare Krishna LLC, which had locations in Florissant and Louisville, Kentucky.
Two witnesses signed the will, including a parent.
In a lawsuit against a car insurance company, Patel’s widow, Ripal, claimed in court records that “there was no plausible reason why Maulik Patel would be targeted by the occupants of the” fleeing vehicle.
In a 2017 television news story, three months after the shooting, Ripal called for justice for Maulik’s death. She described him as a family man without enemies.
“Who did this? Why they did this?” she said. “What’s the point? My husband was an innocent man. He never did nothing wrong in his life that somebody would just kill him in this way.”
Recently reached at her home in Chesterfield, Ripal confirmed that she is the current owner of the gas station. She said crime has dipped quite a bit since the neighboring hotel was shut down in 2022. She declined to be interviewed at length.
‘Different sets’
St. Louis police declined requests to talk about the broader challenges they face in the neighborhoods along Goodfellow Boulevard.
The closest the Post-Dispatch came was at a recent town hall held at the O’Fallon Park Rec Complex that addressed the exodus of more than 27,000 Black residents from the city between 2010 and 2020.
“We all have to collaborate to address the challenges that we face in north St. Louis,” Neal Richardson told the crowd.
As leader of the St. Louis Development Corporation, he’s expected to carry out the economic development strategy of Mayor Tishaura O. Jones, who celebrated her election victory in 2021 at a former United Auto Workers union hall near Goodfellow and Natural Bridge.
Balancing economic development and public safety continues to be a main challenge of her administration, as seen at the town hall.
An announcer struggled to pronounce the name of police Capt. Matthew Karnowski, the new leader of District 6, who also struggled to recall what SLDC stands for.
Asked by a reporter after his public remarks if he had ideas for addressing crime around problematic gas stations anywhere in the city, Karnowski said: “I am super new in this role, but leveraging technologies — ShotSpotter, real-time crime center cameras — and then working with problem properties officers, City Hall, the building division, and all relevant stakeholders to try to come up with a solution.”
A Sunshine request for problem properties records explaining the situation with the gas station at the intersection of Goodfellow and Natural Bridge took the city counselor’s office three months to process. It ultimately turned up a 27-page “chronological summary” of numerous actions, hearing dates, nuisance notices, crackdowns and scheduled meetings with city attorneys and representatives of the police, Board of Aldermen and gas station ownership dating to 2013.
Noted incidents range from the robbery and assault of an elderly woman to possession of a controlled substance to seven men seen hanging around in the parking lot that was “packed with cars at the pumps and not at the pumps.”
After a rash of police calls for service in 2017, a meeting was held with Ripal Patel and the manager. A police sergeant told them they should hire a security company that has off-duty St. Louis police officers, which would allow them to make arrests. The sergeant advised having them walk the perimeter of the lot every 30 minutes. An attorney with the city counselor’s office also recommended increased lighting, power washing the lot more often and ending sales of single cans of beer.
Soon, Patel was accused of failure to abate. More meetings were scheduled. Gas station representatives told officials they couldn’t afford to hire off-duty police. They said the gas station was taking blame for being a “safe spot” for Hillvale Apartments residents to call police.
At one point in 2018, a police colonel provided two options: either close or hire off-duty police until crime subsides. It’s unclear if they ever hired off-duty police, but a St. Louis police chaplain who has a private security company was accused of shooting at a vehicle fleeing from the gas station. Dealings with Beast Mode resulted in the ongoing personal injury lawsuit.
After another “no-show” from the property owner in 2020, another cease-and-desist order was issued for the business that expired in 2021. Another one was posted in 2021 that expired in 2022. Then, more calls for service: stolen vehicle at gunpoint; stolen bank bag of cash, cigarettes, liquor; suspected hand-to-hand transactions with numerous individuals gathering on the parking lot.
The current cease-and-desist order expires in July.
“They aren’t coming over here to do a deep dive on this,” Hassan Shariff said of city officials. “They could fix this if they wanted to.”
Shariff, 56, used to work for the Cure Violence initiative, which was aimed at deescalating potential gun violence in the city. He also used to refer people to drug court and is the current president of the Wells-Goodfellow Neighborhood Improvement Association.
He said “different sets” of people from throughout the city congregate at the gas station. “Nobody wants to take a chance to try and fix that.”
After local police and federal agents raided the neighboring hotel in 2022, Shariff, Alderwoman Pamela Boyd, a state representative and a couple others successfully testified against reopening the hotel. The owners, who testified they have made notable changes, must wait another year before applying for occupancy again, officials said.
The hotel is closed. The gas station is open.
When “Murda” was painted on the exterior wall, somebody eventually cleaned that up. But the building is still tagged with spray paint. There’s a memorial for “Mike,” apparently the guy who racked up all those trespassing cases. In 2022, somebody accidentally ran him over in a nearby street, thinking he was debris. According to the autopsy report, he had fentanyl, PCP, cocaine and old bullets in his body. He was 31.
Inside the gas station, a loaf of bread is expensive, and the beer is cheap — $1.29 for a single 32-ounce can of Milwaukee’s Best.
Shariff wants something better for the children and adults left to endure the neighborhood.
“What is the solution?” Shariff said. “Don’t give up. Stay in the fight.”