Baltimore sees 319th killing of 2017, eclipsing last year’s homicide total

BALTIMORE — Aleasha Bowie was recuperating at her East Baltimore home from a surgical procedure Thursday morning when she heard the shots.

She screamed for her brother, who was just about to leave for work, then rushed to the front of the house to peer out the window, she said. On the corner outside, she saw a young man — someone she’d watched grow up in the neighborhood — slumped on the street.

The 21-year-old man, whom police did not identify, was the 319th homicide victim in the city in 2017; there were 318 killings that occurred in Baltimore in all of 2016.

That means this year is now Baltimore’s seconddeadliest on record on a percapita basis, with a month left to go. The record was set in 2015, when there were 344 homicides.

Bowie, 40, immediately thought of the man’s mother, she said. Then she thought of her own children, who often play in the playground just feet from where the gunfire had erupted.

“I got four good kids. I’m trying to have them make it out of here,” Bowie said shortly after noon, about an hour after police responded to the 1800 block of Aiken Street in East Baltimore’s Oliver neighborhood.

More than a half-dozen evidence markers sat on the sidewalk, a coat crumpled on the ground, as homicide detectives and crime scene technicians worked.

“We at a bad spot in this city,” Bowie said from steps just inside the yellow police tape surrounding the crime scene. “We at a bad spot.”

Moments before, another woman had come running up to the tape screaming. Police moved to intercept her, and she dropped to her knees on the sidewalk. A friend pulled her up, and she wailed as they walked down the street holding onto each other.

The shooting followed the discovery Wednesday night of a man’s body in a burning vacant house in the 3000 block of Rayner Avenue in West Baltimore’s Franklintown Road neighborhood. That death was ruled a homicide after an autopsy Thursday determined the man had been shot, police said.

Mayor Catherine E. Pugh has called the violence “out of control” and vowed to increase the police force to 3,000 sworn officers as quickly as possible — hundreds more than there are now — but recruiting cadets and putting them through the police academy takes time.

Police Commissioner Kevin Davis repeated on Thursday his now-frequent calls for harsher penalties for repeat gun offenders, citing the arrest of a man on attempted first-degree murder and other charges on Thursday in relation to an incident Wednesday night, in which an officer was shot in the hand after stopping the man on a street in Cherry Hill.