BALTIMORE — Dr. Thomas M. Scalea has had spent much of his long career as a trauma doctor witnessing the emotional toll on families from the city’s unrelenting violence.
“The walk down to a set of parents to tell them their kid’s not coming home again ... I can almost tell you the number of steps because I have had to do it way too many times,” said Scalea, physician in chief at the University of Maryland R. Adams Cowley Shock Trauma Center.
“Them hoping I’m not going to say what I know I’m going to say, it’s actually impossible to convey what that’s like.”
The toll across Baltimore — more than 300 homicides and hundreds more injured in shootings — is “nuts,” Scalea said. With Shock Trauma in the backdrop and an orange ribbon pin on his scrubs, he joined other University of Maryland, Baltimore officials Tuesday in announcing a new Center for Violence Prevention that will look for solutions to that violence.
Scalea will head the center that draws upon the expertise from of the Baltimore campus’ institutions, including the schools of medicine, law and social work.
Those schools already engage in research and community programs, and the center aims to pool findings and determine new ways to apply the information in concert with people and other groups in the community.
“Our work in West Baltimore — one of the communities in the country with the most challenges — puts us in a unique position to take an interdisciplinary approach with experts already working in the community,” UMB President Bruce E. Jarrell said.
Funding comes from a $2 million grant from the Sherman Family Foundation.
But Scalea, who will head the center, said it will still take time to quell the city’s violence.
“The center, which is a wonderful thing, this is not the solution. There is no ‘the solution.’ This problem has been part of our city for years and years and years. The solution will take years,” he said.
Liza Holley, whose son Daurrell Hudson was fatally stabbed in June 2021, said the work cannot come soon enough.
She was working in the hospital’s radiation and oncology department when she received a call about her son. Once at the hospital, she was told that he had died.
“After his death, I did not know how to move forward,” Holley said. “Parents are not supposed to bury their child, especially in a preventable death.”
For a month after his death, she said she visited her son’s grave. “You can never prepare yourself for something like that,” Holley said.
She continued to struggle with the loss but managed to find strength in her coworkers.
After learning about the work at the center, she said she wanted to get involved and see its success.
“This is well overdue,” she said.
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