So Much for the Baltimore Ceasefire...Maybe Thugs Don't Do Community Outreach?

from the Baltimore Sun

'It's really senseless:' One killed, four injured in Baltimore shootings during Ceasefire weekend
Five people were shot — one fatally — in three separate shootings over the weekend in Baltimore.

Around 7:35 p.m. Sunday, a 27-year-old man was shot multiple times in the 2400 block of Wilkens Ave. in Southwest Baltimore, police said. He was taken to the hospital and pronounced dead.

Less than two hours earlier, three people were shot in the 900 block of North Broadway, a few blocks from Johns Hopkins Hospital, according to police.

When officers arrived on the scene around 5:46 p.m., they found one man who had been shot in the leg. A 37-year-old man was wounded in the torso, but did not die as police previously reported. On Sunday, police said he is listed in grave condition. Officers soon learned of a third victim who walked into a hospital with a gunshot wound to the foot.

On Saturday at around 5 a.m., officers found a man suffering from a gunshot wound to the head at the 1800 block of Winchester St. in West Baltimore. The man was listed as in critical condition at an area hospital, police said Saturday.

The weekend shootings took place during the third Ceasefire weekend this year — a movement meant to halt the citywide violence for a 72-hour period from Friday to Sunday.

Until Sunday, there had been no fatal shootings during the three Ceasefire events this year.

Just before midnight Sunday, Ceasefire organizer Letrice Gant, dressed all in white, scrubbed the air above the marble steps on the 2400 block of Wilkens Ave. with a bundle of smoking sage. It was a ritual cleansing of the space still stained with blood from the fatal shooting hours earlier.

The fire department had sanitized the sidewalk earlier, but a dark splotch still remained. They would need to use a power washer, said Gant.

Ceasefire organizer Erricka Bridgeford waved a bundle of sage and whispered chants. She bent to the ground, touching the splatter.

“A very dark thing happened here today,” she told a group of around a dozen people who gathered in a circle, holding hands. “We leave love and light right here.”

A woman walking by in Hello Kitty shorts watched uncomfortably, curiously. She sniffed and fidgeted. Someone offered a hand, and she, too, joined the circle.

“I was going through my own thing,” said Krystal Moffett, 32, when asked what moved her to join the group. “I miss my kids. I wanna get my life together. I’ve lost people, too.”

Following the shooting near Hopkins, Shaennika Miles, 29, said she knew two of the victims and was still collecting her thoughts after witnessing such trauma.

“It’s really senseless,” she said. “I heard all the shots when I was in the middle of Broadway. I see [one of the victims] in the middle of the street. I pray that he’s OK.”

Of the victims, she said, “We’re really good friends. … They made sure I’m OK. Tell me how good of a mom I am.”

Miles said she was speaking out in the hopes that she could change the status quo.

“Most of our kids are suffering,” she said of the violence in the city.

When they heard the shots, sisters Linda Cooper and Maggie Austin ran inside in such a hurry that Austin, 92, left her cane.

“I just grabbed her by the arm,” said Cooper. “I went in my door. All I can know is I got out of that shooting.”

After police arrived, they were willing to come back to sit on their front steps.

On the other side of the yellow tape, police scanned the nearby row homes, looking for possible security cameras and evidence.

“We don’t got nothin’ to worry about,” Cooper told her sister, touching her hand. With the officers in the area, they felt safe, she said. “When they leave, we’ll leave.”