“People more cold-hearted these days than when I was growing up. Everybody wants to be a killer. It’s more killings going on now because everybody feel like they got to prove themselves.”
“I never get a single gunshot wound — never,” said Sue Carol Verrillo, nurse manager of the surgical inpatient care unit at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Hospitals across the nation, including in Denver and Newark, N.J., have reported the same trends — the severity of wounds and the sheer number of them increasing year by year.
Angela Sauaia, professor of public health, medicine, and surgery at the University of Colorado’s Anschutz Medical Campus, was among a team of researchers that completed a study in June of patients at a Denver trauma hospital, comparing chances of survival from various injuries.
Again, they found that gunshot victims stood out for falling behind. Their fatality rate jumped 6 percent — every two years.
“There are more injuries to treat, so no wonder the case fatality is increasing,” Sauaia said. “That was not the norm 10 years ago.”
Doctors couldn’t keep up. “We do know there are more bullets, and the injuries of each bullet are more serious,” she said. “The holes are bigger.”
Turner-Fordbey, now 24, was one of the lucky ones. Shot 27 times two years ago, he says he was the victim of “karma” after years of Percocet-popping, drug dealing, fights and shootouts.
He saw his shooter and believes he was targeted by a rival drug crew over turf. Turner-Fordbey toyed with the idea of retaliating — gathering his “boys,” finding the suspect, and shooting him and everyone with him, leaving no witnesses.
But he says he gave up “the game” to focus on being a father to his four children. He’s relearned how to walk with extensive physical therapy and keeps the bullet his mother dislodged from his head in a box near his bed.
Still, he isn’t about to give up his credibility on the streets.
“I can’t be labeled a snitch. I can’t be labeled a rat, especially in this city,” he said, explaining why he didn’t cooperate with police. “Snitches die.”
“Code of the streets, period,” he added. “Snitches get stitches. I honor the street code — the G code. I honored it my whole life. I can’t tolerate snitching. I can’t. My body, my mindset won’t let me tell.”
No one has been arrested in his shooting.
‘Rocking you to sleep’
The “code” has many connotations on Baltimore streets. To some it’s a “gangster” or street code that strictly prohibits snitching to police. To others it’s a set of guidelines for when violence is prohibited — no shooting near children or the elderly, for instance — and when violence is warranted, or even required. The Black Guerrilla Family, Baltimore’s most powerful gang, distributes typewritten and handwritten rule books to members on the streets and in jail cells. The militaristic rules dictate that infractions can lead to punishment, sometimes death, and include protocols for carrying out violence, such as no shooting near “religious institutions.”
Covington, the hit man who says he was an enforcer for the BGF gang, describes the “golden rules” as nuanced in some ways, clear-cut in others.
You’re never supposed to snitch, even on your enemy, he said. And you’re not supposed to target your enemy’s “lawabiding citizens” — family members who aren’t in the drug game. But if those relatives are “in the life,” he said, they can be targeted.
Nowadays, however, rules that might have helped to keep a lid on random, collateral violence are regularly broken, according to law enforcement as well as
‘Trigger pullers’