BALTIMORE — Wednesday afternoon, the scars were still visible at the home where it happened.
Blood smeared on the front screen door, just above the handle. A resuscitator bag left behind in the chaos, beside a “Class of 2022″ yard sign. Rubber gloves and gauze packages. Plastic lawn chairs toppled and broken beneath a blue tent in the driveway.
A Tuesday evening gathering in Northeast Baltimore’s Frankford neighborhood was torn asunder by gunfire, leaving two young men dead and two injured.
From his house across the street, Steve Wilson heard the shots erupt.
“Everybody goes in their house about 8 o’clock, man. It’s just peaceful,” said Wilson, 42, of the neighborhood. “That’s why — when they was shooting — I didn’t think it was gunshots. I thought it was firecrackers.”
Himself a survivor of a shooting in Baltimore about four years ago, Wilson uses a wheelchair to get around. Wilson said he was struck several times in his back while waiting for the bus to go to his job at a local Walmart.
After the shooting, Wilson said he isolated himself from friends and family. He looked for a peaceful neighborhood in the city and thought he’d found one in Frankford, the most populous in Baltimore with more than 17,000 residents, according to the 2020 Census.
But — as he puts it — “drama will find your door” in Baltimore.
News of the quadruple shooting broke Tuesday night during a lengthy and contentious City Council hearing on the police budget that ended after midnight.
Officers arrived at the home in the 5500 block of Plainfield Avenue just before 6:30 p.m. They found four young men who’d been injured in the gunfire, all between 18 and 23 years old. Two were taken to the hospital with non-life-threatening injuries. Darren Barnes, 22, was pronounced dead at the scene, and 19-year-old Craig Phillips Jr. died at the Johns Hopkins Hospital.
At Tuesday night’s city council meeting, several council members referenced the shooting in remarks to police department leaders, saying the increasing regularity of such brazen violence calls for a more urgent response.
Councilman Mark Conway, who chairs the public safety committee, said the shooting is evidence of incredibly high stakes in the push to improve policing in Baltimore.
“We have to get this right,” he said. “We don’t have a choice.”
Councilman Zeke Cohen also mentioned the Frankford shooting as he raised fundamental questions about whether the current approach to violence and policing is working.
“We are a city in pain,” he said.
Cohen called for treating “mental health as mental health and crime as crime” instead of trying to address social issues through more arrests. He pushed for increased funding of mental health services and suggested that taking police off some of those calls could alleviate staffing problems.
Tuesday night, the seemingly unrelenting conversation about just how to slow gun violence in Baltimore and across America reached Frankford. The neighborhood hasn’t seen a homicide since late January, according to Baltimore Sun data — when 19-year-old Damond Price was found shot along Lorelly Avenue, close to Herring Run Park.
Hillard Mark Smith, a Plainfield Avenue resident for some 22 years, said gun offenders and violent offenders in the city should face steeper punishments and more jail time.
”They just slap them on the wrist, and then in two weeks, they’re back out again,” said Smith, who said he was hosting a cookout when the shooting took place.
Forced inside by a rainstorm, Smith and his guests watched from inside as police cars and fire trucks raced into the neighborhood. Later, they saw the yellow tape go up down the street.
Smith said he feels that efforts to set youth on the right path should begin by providing programs to keep them occupied meaningfully. For Smith, who grew up in Buffalo, New York, that involved a program in which he helped clean local playgrounds, starting when he was 12 years old.
It’s part of the idea behind Beats Not Bullets, a city program run by another neighborhood resident, 45-year-old Kevin Beasley, who goes by the nickname Ogun, a reference to a warrior spirit in African lore. Beats Not Bullets is a music mentorship program teaching youth songwriting, sound engineering and production, he said. Beasley also helped found nonviolence group Baltimore Ceasefire.
“It’s crazy that it’s gotten to the point where we’ll have a youth program on a Saturday — four hours, five hours — and a parent will really say: ‘You know what, at the end of the day, you kept him safe for five hours,’” Beasley said.
Barbara Faltz Jackson, longtime president of Frankford Improvement Association Inc., suggest the answer to stemming the tide of violence may be a closer-knit community.
The 78-year-old said she remembers a time when she could easily recruit block captains throughout Frankford, to whom residents could turn with questions and concerns. But now, she has difficulty finding a group of volunteers anywhere near that large. The coronavirus pandemic made community organizing just that much harder, she said.
Meanwhile, some community residents are focused on keeping the neighborhood beautiful.
John Cotman, who said he’s lived in Frankford for about a year, said he often picks up litter he finds in the small patch of greenery along Gardenville Avenue, which includes a tributary for Moore’s Run. It’s an “urban oasis” full of all sorts of wildlife, he said, after lifting a Jose Cuervo tequila bottle from brush and tossing it into a white garbage bag.
Before Tuesday’s shooting, he’d witnessed one other incident involving gunfire in the neighborhood, he said. Just before last Christmas, at least one passenger in a passing car fired bullets straight in the air. Cotman and his family, preparing for a holiday meal, hit the floor. Thankfully, no one was struck, he said.
It felt like an aberration at the time, he said. But the recent violence has him wondering if he should be scrolling Redfin for new homes, despite his love for the city and for Frankford.
“Baltimore’s dangerous,” he said, “but Baltimore’s beautiful.”
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(Baltimore Sun reporter Lea Skene contributed to this article.)
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