Nineteen people killed in Baltimore City since last Monday, seven of those murders happened just this past weekend.
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It’s been the deadliest week all year, and the death isn’t discriminating. People of all walks of life are adding to the 243 homicides in 2018.
Seventeen-year-old Tray White was goofy, his aunt Latoya White said he was starting to get on the right path. He was shot and killed Friday across the street from a church.
“I hate it and the Mayor needs to do something about this,” White said. This is ridiculous, there should not be 200 and something killings in Baltimore, there needs to be something done.”
On Facebook, the friends of 24-year-old Abdoulie Jallow can’t believe they’ll never laugh with him again after he was killed on South Calvert Street.
The day before White was killed 25-year-old Timothy Moriconi was shot to death while walking home in Riverside, a community right next to Federal Hill. Just three of the 243 names laid out on the side of Riverside Park for hundreds of people to pick up and walk with.
The Riverside Neighborhood Association and The Federal Hill South Neighborhood Association along with city leaders came together for a peace walk on Monday.
“The South Baltimore Peninsula is very concerned,” said John Pare the President of Riverside Neighborhood Association. “This murder is an absolute tragedy, people are mournful, and we just did the prayer out in front of the residence where the gentleman was killed.”
Mayor Catherine Pugh flanked by police and local leaders talked to the public about the rash of violence.
Standing by her violence reduction initiative while committing to new LED light bulbs for every light in the city and more police on the streets.
“We’ve had an uptick in violence in September there was an uptick in April, but every single month we were trending downwards,” Pugh said. “We’ve got to stick to what we’re doing but I still say we need more help and we will continue to ask for more help and police officers and getting them on the streets as quickly as we can.”
In an effort to respond and prevent more crimes, Baltimore City Police Commissioner Gary Tuggle announced he has suspended all leave for police personnel to get more uniformed officers on the streets.
Officers will not be able to take off for the next couple days unless it's an emergency, and they will be focusing on areas that have a historical value in violence, and where there might be retribution.
Union Baptist Church Reverend Al Hathaway was born across the street from where White was killed.
He is heavily involved in his community and was saddened to hear that the uncle of one of the children in the Head Start Program he runs was killed just outside of it.
“We have to now deal with what you call trauma-informed care,” Rev. Hathaway said. “We have to provide care to people who see these incidences too frequently in our community. You keep seeing it what does that do to a child, anybody in the community but specifically children seeing this constantly. The challenge is they become numb to it. They feel as if this is normal. We got to work to make certain that this activity is not normalized.”
Across the city mourning and exhaustion with the what’s become the “norm” in the city.
“It can happen any moment, it can happen now,” said Sade Jones. “We can’t really control it, the police sitting right there it can still happen. It’s something to be afraid of.”
BELOW IS AN INTERACTIVE MAP OF THE CITY'S RECENT SHOOTINGS
