BALTIMORE — 16, no it’s not the number of gunshots reported near Hanlon Park in Northwest Baltimore on Monday.
It’s the age of a teenager shot in the torso who died a short time later at Sinai Hospital.
“It sounded like I was down at Fort McHenry,” said Dawn Vethea, “You’ve got to give these kids something to do. You know the city is dirty. You want to pay those squeegee kids to clean it up. Clean the city up. This city is filthy.”
Monday’s shooting followed Sunday’s gunfire at the Inner Harbor, which left a 14 and a 16-year-old injured.
Police did make an arrest in an east side shooting last week after an altercation between teenage girls led to an angry father allegedly firing indiscriminately on a house on Belnord Avenue, striking a 15-year-old girl in the arm.
Talk of doubling down on the enforcement of a teen curfew is being met with doubt here near Hanlon Park.
“How do you enforce it? What good is a law or an ordinance that you can’t enforce?” asked James Briscoe who lives across the street from the shooting scene, “And then the larger question is, ‘Where are the parents?’ They were arresting kids downtown and couldn’t find the parents. So the children are amuck. How can you have young people without direction?”
