Cancer took her dad, her sister and many of her neighbors.

Then last year, Natasha Davis-Carr’s teenage daughter, DeTreyah was diagnosed with cervical cancer.

For her daughter, there’s some good news. The cancer was caught in the first stages, and DeTreyah sees a doctor regularly. “She’s doing fine,” her mother said.

Still, her diagnosis stirred familiar questions for Davis-Carr, whose search for answers eventually led her to contact The Journal Gazette. Almost six years ago, Davis-Carr had a hysterectomy to address cervical cancer. In 2006, her mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. The same year, another sister found out she had thyroid cancer.

All three of them are living, a fate not shared by at least eight neighbors near Davis-Carr’s childhood home on Chestnut Street, part of the area’s 46803 ZIP code. Davis-Carr’s neighbors all died of various forms of cancer. Her father, Raymond Davis, succumbed to bone, liver and lung cancer in 1996. Later the same winter, her sister Jacqueline died of colon cancer. She was 29.

“Out of all of us, we’d had the closest bond,” said Davis-Carr, the youngest of 13 siblings, two – including a brother – who are now deceased.

“I kind of took it personally. To me, she was kind of a protector,” Davis-Carr said.

More than a decade after Jacqueline’s death, Davis-Carr still gets choked up talking about her sister. She laments that she couldn’t protect her sister from the ravages of cancer and the side effects of treatment.

Shortly after Jacqueline’s death, Davis-Carr left Fort Wayne. Now 39, she lives in Indianapolis and makes the trip to the Summit City regularly to visit family.

Her questions about cancer in her family and her old neighborhood persist.

“With so many people in that one area (contracting cancer) I thought it was strange, but you never know,” Davis-Carr said.

In August, she e-mailed The Journal Gazette after a friend floated a rumor that the ground beneath Davis-Carr’s childhood home and her neighbors’ homes once belonged to a chemical factory. A check of city directories back to 1950 found no such ownership link.

Nor could health officials confirm whether the cancer rate was higher in her neighborhood or the general vicinity than might be expected by chance.

But state analysis of cancer data showed lung cancer rates were especially high in the ZIP code. Lung cancer was at least partly to blame for the death of Davis-Carr’s father.

Raymond Davis was sick, very sick when he sought treatment more than a decade ago, his daughter Carol Davis said. The cancer was so far advanced that little could be done, and he died within a few months, she said. Like Natasha, Carol, now 42, was close in age to Jacqueline. Her death compounded the grief.

“It was very painful; … it still kind of is,” Davis said.

In 2006, Davis was diagnosed with thyroid cancer – a cancer with no known cause – and sarcoidosis, a condition that can affect organ function and usually starts in the lungs or lymph nodes. On top of it all, she had to fend off pneumonia.

She had her thyroid and a lymph node removed and takes thyroid medication. She kicked a family habit.

“I smoked cigarettes until then – never really smoked them since.”

Davis said about half her family members smoke or smoked, including her deceased father, who was a longtime smoker. Still, while the link between smoking and lung cancer is strong, she doesn’t think it was to blame for her father’s death. Nor does it explain other types of cancers the family has endured, she said.

Smoking can increase the chances of getting cancer in other areas of the body not commonly thought of as being affected by the habit, including stomach, uterine cervix and kidneys, among others, according to the American Cancer Society. But Davis believes other factors were to blame for the rash of cancer that affects her family and neighbors, though she doesn’t know what.

She and her sister RaMona Howard recall a foul-smelling odor that used to pervade the neighborhood. But they attributed it to a former slaughterhouse, not a smokestack.

“Right now, you go out there, it’s like fresh air,” Howard said in an interview with her sister, Natasha, at their childhood home where their mother, Willie Bea, lives. (Willie Bea Davis declined to be interviewed for the story.) Howard said the air wasn’t so fresh when she was younger.

Today the layout of the business and residential district is much as it was several decades ago, Howard said, though many of the factory jobs have left in favor of other types of manual labor and service-oriented businesses.

A review of actions taken by the Indiana Department of Environmental Management against companies encircling the area didn’t turn up any major polluters that might be blamed for an excess of cancer cases. The review looked at violations during the past 25 years.

Though they don’t rule out the possibility of other unknown contributors, health officials think higher rates of smoking are the most likely reason for higher lung cancer rates in ZIP code 46803.

But the experts’ best guesses leave plenty of unanswered questions for the Davis family, which has dealt with a potpourri of cancer.

“My family,” Davis-Carr said, “(has) been through a lot.”

mschroeder@jg.net