If you live in the Drew Hamilton Houses in Harlem, you learn to mind your own business. The run-down brick towers and surrounding streets are plagued with crime. Meddle in someone else's affairs and you never know what might happen. So when Valerie Tompkins opened her windows one day last summer and breathed in the foul stench of urine, she was not inclined to investigate. She knew that her upstairs neighbor, Antoine Yates, 37, kept exotic pets, but why ask for trouble? She just closed the window again. Darryl Carter, whose girlfriend lives down the hall from Yates, knew about the...
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