“I call it ‘Clip City.’ What they got now — they’re death dealers. And it’s not hard to get ’em .”
decade or longer, including Baltimore and Chicago, shootings proved to be deadlier over the years, not just last year.
Former D.C. Chief Lanier, who has worked with police chiefs across the U.S., sharing ideas and data on the surge in homicides, noted a shift in the mindset of shooters. Criminals are emptying their clips, she said, leaving crime scenes littered with 50 to 60 shell casings, and opening fire in the daytime.
“Something’s changed in the mentality of the people shooting,” she said. “Very reckless. Everyone’s got a gun, and everyone is willing to do these shootouts.”
Trauma care falls behind
The first bullet ripped into his thigh, and he crumpled. Devante Turner-Fordbey dropped to the asphalt on a spring day in West Baltimore two years ago, turned and saw his assailant in a hoodie pointing what looked like a 9 mm. The gun was jammed, and Turner-Fordbey began pulling himself up the street on his elbows and forearms as quick as he could. Then he heard the next shot blast.
Now the bullets felt like hammer blows. The more the shooter closed in, the more he felt the force of the bullets, which were moving at more than 900 feet per second. Turner-Fordbey turned onto his back and put his hands up.
“You’re good, you’re good!” TurnerFordbey yelled. “You got me!”
But the shots kept coming. A bullet pierced his chest. Nine sank into his right thigh. One just missed his heart, striking his chest where the words “Nana” for his grandmother are tattooed along with some clouds and doves.
Figuring he was going to die, he began to taunt the man standing over him with a gun. “You’re a bitch. You’re a bitch.”
Then a slug sliced into his head, and he blacked out just as he saw the man run away. He figures his survival instinct must have taken over, and he came to as he was trying to crawl away again.
“He heard me shuffling on the ground, and I’m trying to get myself off the ground,” Turner-Fordbey said. “He came right back and slapped in another clip in the gun. Boom. Boom. Boom. Boom. … I blacked out.”
In and out of consciousness he went, while his mother, who lived nearby and came running when word reached her, dug out the slug from his skull and pressed her hand against his neck to stop the bleeding.
“I’m sorry, Ma. I’m sorry, Ma. I feel
myself leaving, I feel it,” he told her.
As a paramedic called his name in the racing ambulance, he thought it was God. “Devante! Devante! Devante!”
With advancements in trauma medicine over decades, emergency room patients now have a far better chance of surviving. Patients who have been stabbed are more likely to live. Better care, coupled with safety advancements, has driven deaths from motor vehicle accidents to historic lows.
Gunshot victims, however, are less likely to live.
In Baltimore, at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, the nation’s first hospital devoted to trauma injuries, doctors sought to assess improvements in care. They studied patients over a dozen years and found that chances for surviving “improved significantly.”
A notable exception: gunshot victims. In 1999, 9.8 percent of those patients died. By 2008, that rate had risen to 17 percent.
The study’s authors, including Thomas Scalea, the physician-in-chief at the center, blamed the increasing availability of lethal automatic and semiautomatic weapons on the street. Scalea says that trend continues today. The trauma surgeon said in an interview that he’s seeing more “higher-velocity injuries” from high-caliber guns and more bullet wounds per patient.
Johns Hopkins researchers also studied trauma outcomes and found that the fatality rate for patients with gunshot wounds nearly doubled from 9.5 percent between 2000 and 2003 to 18.3 percent for the period through March 2005.
The study concluded that the overall fatality rate jumped because patients were arriving in grave shape. More patients were dead on arrival, and more succumbed to their injuries within minutes of arriving at the hospital.
The median time before they were pronounced dead: six minutes.
The researchers at one of the nation’s most respected medical institutions concluded that there was little they could do. “The only way to save these patients is to reach out to them in the community before they are victims of violence,” the study concluded.
That was when one in four shooting victims died; now it’s one in three.
On the streets in a number of cities, gunmen have increasingly aimed for the head. The number of fatal head shots in Milwaukee doubled in 2015 over the year before, and gunshot victims with three to seven bullet wounds jumped 150 percent.
It has been a clear, long-term trend in Baltimore, with the number of fatal head shots rising fivefold over the past two decades.
Some criminals are cunning enough to know that more of their targets could be wearing body armor, said Baltimore police Maj. Donald Bauer. This year, police seized body armor in multiple drug house raids — something veteran officers said they haven’t seen before.
And in a cruel twist, some shooters are taking into account that Baltimore has top-notch trauma care, said former police commissioner Anthony Batts. That’s why they aim for the head — to “take the trauma center out of the equation,” said Batts, now a consultant with the AWW Group training police commanders.
Gunmen are pumping more bullets into victims. People shot multiple times made up less than 60 percent of homicide victims in 2005, the earliest year for which data is available. That rose to 70 percent by last year.
The Maryland office of the chief medical examiner recently studied homicide autopsy reports of gunshot victims dating to 2005. About one-third of the victims died from a single gunshot, and that remained constant over the past decade. But the number of victims shot five to nine times doubled, as did those shot 10 or more times. In one case last year, a victim had been shot 38 times. community activists and residents.
Davis, the police commissioner, noted that about half of shootings in Baltimore are carried out in the daytime and most are outside.
Baltimore Homicide Detective Vernon Parker said perpetrators no longer use darkness “as a mask.” They are “more bold,” he said, shooting near churches, schools and other public places.
“People more cold-hearted these days than when I was growing up,” said Turner-Fordbey, the man who survived 27 shots. “Everybody wants to be a killer. It’s more killings going on now because everybody feel like they got to prove themselves.
“Back in the day, I was told, it was like a kind of rule: The old dudes wouldn’t allow outsiders to come in the ’hood, and everybody respected the women and children. Now, it’s like no respect for nothing. People don’t care.”
In West Baltimore this summer, shooters opened fire at a church after a funeral and at a candlelight vigil, both being held for other shooting victims. Six people were wounded in those attacks. Eight people were shot last weekend in East Baltimore steps from a makeshift memorial where three weeks earlier a man died and two women were injured in a triple shooting.
In Chicago, a South Side gang war sparked a series of shootings. Last year’s retaliatory execution of 9-year-old Tyshawn Lee, which became emblematic of the ruthlessness plaguing that city, led his father this year to shoot the girlfriend of a suspect in his son’s killing, according to police.
The challenge for police is knowing when someone might pull the trigger. Police departments nationwide have turned to predictive policing to try to understand who might be the next killer, or next on a hit list.
Chicago police have created the Strategic Subject List, the product of an algorithm that calculates someone’s propensity to become a party to violence. A person’s score is based on previous police contacts and criminal activity, known affiliations with gang members, social connections or networks, and past injuries from gunshots or assaults.
Once a person lands on the list, Chicago police make in-person visits to warn of the “consequences that will result should violent activity continue.” Police hope to reach out to 1,500 people this year.
They make up a fraction of the city’s population but take part in an outsized share of the violence — in the first three months of this year, about three-quarters of the shooting victims and homicide suspects were already on the list.
In Baltimore, a similar undertaking has identified 600 “trigger pullers,” who police believe are the most likely to shoot or be shot. People land on the list for a combination of factors, including a history of violent crime or handgun violations, parole or probation, involvement in previous gun violence.
Officers monitor them with a “laser focus,” said Baltimore police Col. Stanley Brandford.
In many cities, it’s a select club. Suspects and targets often know each other. They may have been friends, lived on the same the street or even be related. Many are in the drug trade together. That familiarity allows for face-to-face disagreements that can end with a trigger pull.
“The distance has closed in a lot of these cases, and now they’re up on each other,” said Brandford, who has led the Baltimore police homicide unit two times in his career. “These guys stay in these neighborhoods. They really don’t travel very far. And the opportunity to get close and do some damage is prevalent in some of these neighborhoods.”
Police say a common tactic shooters use to gain proximity is to work with an accomplice who knows the target. The accomplice lures the target to an area,