While it was hardly shocking to learn that Memorial Day weekend provided no respite from gun violence in Baltimore, there was something especially brazen about the Saturday night shooting of two 17-year-olds, one of whom later died, at the Inner Harbor at 7:35 p.m. near the amphitheater — a peak time and place for visitors and police. As Baltimore Police Commissioner Michael Harrison later observed, there were at least 20 officers in the general vicinity. The perpetrator clearly wasn’t concerned about getting caught.
If that wasn’t depressing enough, two other men were killed in a triple shooting later that night, and a woman was shot and killed early Sunday. And then, before the weekend even started, there was the matter of 83-year-old Marjorie Tyson who was reading a book in her own home in Northwest Baltimore when she felt a sharp pain as if bitten by a snake or spider. A stray bullet had come through her window and into her arm, leaving her bleeding badly. She required hospital care but was soon allowed to go home — to wonder how one can feel safe in a city where such things happen. “I’m not at ease,” she told The Sun’s Lea Skene.
She is also well aware of the city’s homicide woes having lost a grandson to gun violence.
