BALTIMORE — Neighbors out cleaning up their yards in the 1600 block of Plum Street in Curtis Bay pay little attention to the open air drug markets surrounding them.
“They don’t bother me, do they?” Rita Weatherley told us, “Unless they start shooting, but I guess they know who they’re shooting. Nobody that I know of.”
But unbeknownst to residents, investigators have been working for the last six months to clean up this area as well—-of a drug trafficking organization, returning indictments against eleven of its members.
A group offered a chance through the Group Violence Reduction Strategy to change their ways or else.
“If you turn down the support or if you call my bluff or in Baltimore, as we say, if you tell the mayor to ‘kick rocks,’ this will be what happens to you,” said Mayor Brandon Scott.
A series of fentanyl overdoses tied to Plum Street and a nearby convenience store on Pennington Avenue drew the attention of police, who with their state and federal partners, used controlled buys to take fentanyl, heroin and cocaine off the street.
Behind guns, drugs and fentanyl overdoses in Curtis Bay
As part of the investigation, agents also seized nine handguns and three Glock switches, which can turn those into automatic weapons.
“For just 20 dollars, these switches turn handguns into weapons of war capable of firing up to 12 hundred rounds per minute,” said Maryland Attorney General Anthony Brown.
Another small victory in the war on drugs and violent crime in a city where some residents have become numb to the threat right outside their front doors.
“I will go anywhere I want,” said a defiant Weatherley, “If it’s my time, God will take me. If not, then I’ll survive. It seems it’s been working alright so far, thank God,” she laughed.
