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 He was devastated.
"He was always taking care of his mother," his sister, Ashley Terry
said of Guinn, "He would empty her pan for her."
Two years after his mother died, Guinn ran away, following his
father's path into a world of gangs, drugs and violence on the
streets of Baltimore. When Guinn was 13, someone showed Terry a
crudely produced film, “Stop Snitchin Part 2,” in which a young boy
posed with gang members, holding a gun and smoking a
marijuana-filled cigar. The boy was her brother.
It wasn’t until he was a teenager, and a series of arrests landed
him in juvenile facilities in Maryland and Pennsylvania, that he
reconnected with his siblings. Once out, he visited his sister on
holidays and sent report cards and letters urging his younger
brother to "keep his head up and stay out of trouble."
Terry, seven years older, knew that her brother considered her a
mother figure. But, she said, "I didn't know how to make boys into
men."
A year ago, at 12:35 a.m. on July 30, Guinn was shot and killed on
the street outside a Chinese restaurant that has been the scene of a
number of recent murders in Baltimore. He was 21.
CONCENTRATED CARNAGE
Guinn was the first of five Baltimore residents under 30 who died
from gunshots over three days of concentrated carnage last summer.
All of them were black.
In the wake of Freddie Gray's death while in custody on April 19,
allegations of police brutality in Baltimore have received extensive
and deserved attention, but the city’s entrenched problems extend
far beyond policing issues.
Young people die unnecessarily every week in Baltimore - from
complications of chronic illness, from accidents, from drugs and,
overwhelmingly, from gunshots. In 2014, all but a handful of the 116
under 30 who died violently were black and male. Few families are
spared.
“Over the last 30 years there were somewhere between 190 and 350
people murdered each year,” in Baltimore said Philip Leaf, a
professor at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “So
it’s your uncle if it’s not you.”
Still, five young people killed in three days is a lot even for
Baltimore. Reuters examined the deaths and their aftermath, using
data collected by the Baltimore Police Department, the Maryland
Office of the Chief Medical Examiner and the Baltimore Sun, as well
as interviews and other public records.
A year later, gaping holes remain in the lives of the families of
those who died. But the deaths are otherwise remarkable only for
their small contribution to Baltimore’s reputation as one of
America’s deadliest cities for young people.
Homicides have increased so far this year by a third, and as another
summer’s worth of deaths unfolds, the families of last year's
victims still hope for closure. But they have been repeatedly
disappointed. The Baltimore City Police Department reports a
clearance rate of about 45 percent in last year's homicides. A
suspect has been charged in only one of the five killings examined
by Reuters.
Here are the stories of the four other young people who died in
those few days.
DOMINIC TALES, 7/31/2014, 1:01 A.M.
For 19 years, Miriam Tales, 44, successfully kept her son Dominic
safe in a city where death was never far away.
“Every summer one of his friends was killed," Tales said of
Dominic's high school years. But her son held steady jobs, stayed
away from gangs and spent lots of time with his family. She didn’t
expect him to be next.
Then, early on the morning of July 31 last year, Tales walked around
a corner and interrupted a robbery. Prosecutors allege that Marquel
Gaffney, 22, shot both Dominic and a man he was attempting to rob.
The other victim survived. Gaffney, in jail awaiting trial on murder
charges, has pleaded not guilty.
 "If you knew [Dominic], you would know he was not someone who
deserved this," said Tales.
DEVIN COOK, 7/31/2014, 11:44 P.M.
Devin Cook was just a month away from leaving for college in
Missouri on a lacrosse scholarship, when he agreed to drive a friend
home from practice after dark. Someone with a gun approached the car
and asked to borrow a cell phone, and when Cook handed it over the
shooting began.
Cook was shot three times in the chest. His friend was shot twice,
but still managed to drive the car to a hospital, where Cook died.
The crime remains unsolved.
"He always helped people out - that's what got him killed," said his
grandfather Ronald Cook, 61, who raised him. During the weeks
leading up to his death, Devin, 20, had been taking classes at
Catonsville Community College, playing lacrosse and working at the
Baltimore Zoo.
"The last thing he said to me, he fussed at me for mowing the lawn
because he wanted to mow it," Cook said.
[to top of second column] |
KEVIN BUTLER, JR., 8/1/2014, 1:50 A.M.
As a young man, Kevin Butler, Jr., used heavy drugs and spent time
in jail. But fatherhood, his relatives say, had inspired him to try
to be a better person. By July of last year, they say, he had gotten
clean and moved to Baltimore to live with a cousin and look for
work. Early on the morning of August 1, Butler, 29, told his
cousin he was going out for cigarettes. On the street, he met a
friend, and soon after someone began shooting at them. The friend,
the family said, told them he ran and hid. Butler was mortally
wounded.
His killing remains unsolved, and Butler's mother, Tershelle Brown,
feels as if the police - and the city - have lost interest.
"These young kids are killing young kids every day but now when a
policeman kills somebody everybody wants to protest," she said,
referring to the protests that erupted following Gray's death.
"What about how somebody killed my son? Did anybody go and riot
about that?"
Brown said her son had begun singing in a men’s church choir prior
to his death. His favorite Gospel song, according to his sister
LaToya, was ‘No Weapon Formed Against Me.’
MCKENZIE ELLIOTT, 8/1/2014, 3:51 P.M.
Three-year-old McKenzie Elliott was playing on her front porch in
the afternoon when someone rode past on a bicycle and started
shooting. A neighbor threw herself on top of Elliott to protect her,
but she had already been hit.
Her murder, too, remains unsolved, though the police commissioner at
the time, Anthony Batts, announced publicly in the days after
Elliott’s death that he expected to make an arrest within a week.
Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake fired Batts earlier this
month.
"I blame the neighborhood because somebody knows who did it," said
Elliott's godmother Tanya Watt. "There's a street code where you
don't tell, but there's no rule when it comes to a three-year-old."
 She said her family is still struggling after Elliott's death. The
girl’s eight-year-old cousin, Khadin, sees a therapist. He likes to
watch videos he made of his cousin, which he keeps stored on a
portable player. He insisted on helping carry Elliott's tiny coffin
at her funeral.
In May, the city renamed the street where she died McKenzie Elliott
Way. Her relatives are unimpressed. They just want her killer found.
A LEGACY OF SEGREGATION
A year after their loved ones died, all five families are still
struggling. Brown and Tales both think Baltimore's social fabric is
too severely frayed to repair.
Academics who have studied the area and its entrenched problems
agree that change won't come easily. Lawrence Brown, a professor at
Morgan State University, a historically black college in Baltimore,
sees many of Baltimore's ills today as rooted in the city's legacy
of strict segregation that began in the early 1900s.
"When you combine the psychological impact of racism,
anti-blackness, economic conditions, red-lining, disinvestment,” he
said, it’s no wonder “we have a disproportionate rate of violence."
Ashley Terry, Kajuan Guinn's older sister, remains hopeful, however,
that the current generation of young parents and their kids might be
able to overcome their broken pasts.
"I think we could be the ones to change things," Terry said. "I
didn't really have any parents, but I did a better job."
Still, she wishes she could move somewhere else. While her husband
drives a truck for a distribution company, Terry focuses on caring
for her extended family and saving money. She used to work a night
shift as a home health aide but she stopped recently, after her
elderly client died.
"I would rather be in another state," she said. "But just getting
out of this neighborhood would be fine."
(Reporting By Emily Flitter; Additional reporting by Selam
Gebrekidan; Editing by Sue Horton)
[© 2015 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.]
Copyright 2015 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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