As long as thugs roam streets, just call Baltimore `Fear City'

NATE GULLIVER was a hero."

Manley Cosper's words have been ringing in my ears since last Wednesday, when my brother Michael and I headed over to the scene of the crime.

Nate's been called a number of things this past week. For some in the media, he was a "recovering addict" and a "good Samaritan." For the folks who gathered at a candlelight vigil held at the corner of 27th and Sisson streets Monday night, he was a victim.

But I knew him best as a first cousin, "Little Nate" we called him, when we were growing up.

He was "Little Nate" because he was named for my uncle, Nathaniel Gulliver, who raised him as a son in Coatesville, Pa. "Little Nate" was the biological son of my other uncle, Leon Gulliver, who had 14 other children living with him in Baltimore.

Summers and holidays would find my Uncle Nate bringing "Little Nate" down from Coatesville to have our typical boyhood romps at my Uncle Leon's or my Aunt Margaret's house. "Little Nate" was kind of chubby then, and, to some of my other cousins, a bit of a mama's boy.

"I hear `Little Nate' is over 6 feet tall now and a hell of a basketball player," my cousin Louis Floyd, not hiding the astonishment in his voice, would tell me years later. Nate was a teenager then and had grown more up than out. He was, indeed, a beast on the basketball court, but a gentleman off of it.

That was before he ran into the problem with the drugs, before he lost his job as a probation officer and ended up here, in Fear City, trying to recover.

Nate had been sober nearly a year, Cospers - who owns the halfway house - told us. He entered what the news media have called a halfway house on Feb. 4, 2004. On the night of Monday, Jan. 10, 2005 - three days past his 49th birthday - Nate answered the door when two men knocked.

They wanted to see one of Nate's housemates about a drug debt. At least one of them pulled a gun. Before long, they had all the men who lived in the house sitting in a room that contained a couch, two chairs and three beds. One of the men lived upstairs in a single room. Nate and another guy shared a room.

When the gunman threatened the guy who owed him money, it was Nate who volunteered to quash the drama by going to get some cash from his bank account to pay it. Nate left with the gunman's cohort and returned.

He didn't have to. Nate, well over 6 feet and 200 pounds, could have handled the other guy easily. But that would have left the other men in the house at the mercy of the gunman. Besides, Nate figured he could probably talk the gunman down from his homicidal rage. He'd no doubt talked to guys like him before, in his days as a probation officer.

It didn't go that way. The gunman wasn't satisfied with the money. He stuck the gun in the side of the man who owed the money and fired two shots. He turned and shot three others. Nate and another man were fatally wounded. A third - Nate's roommate - escaped by diving through a window.

Cospers described Nate as a "wonderful man" who attended church every Sunday and who would take any kind of job that would earn him money on his road back to recovering from drugs. He even hustled bottled water on the 28th Street bridge before the cops shooed him away for not having a peddler's license.

"I feel a lot better after talking to you," my brother Michael told Cospers. A little later, as he drove me back home, he added, "Nate should have stayed in Pennsylvania."

"Yeah," I agreed, "he shoulda stood in Pennsylvania." He should have gone anywhere for his recovery, except here, to Fear City.

Let's drop the pretense, shall we? And let's abandon all those cute nicknames and quaint slogans - "The City That Reads," "Believe" - our city's chief executives come up with to describe Baltimore as something other than what it is: a place where we have some of the most vicious, homicidal thugs walking our streets.

It is a town where the official reaction to the killing of my cousin and two others is a promise to thoroughly investigate all halfway houses to be sure they're properly licensed. I would like to remind our august leaders that a nonexistent license didn't kill my cousin.

A murdering thug did.

During this witch hunt for dreaded runaway, deadly, unlicensed halfway houses, it would be nice if Baltimore's elected officials - all of whom belong to the party whose unofficial mantra is "there are more black men in prison than in college" - committed themselves to removing murdering thugs from our streets for as long as the law allows.

Until then, let's stop calling Baltimore "The City That Reads" and quit telling folks that they have something to "Believe" in. Let's admit that when people move here - to recover from drugs or for anything else - we can't protect them. Let's tell them where they really live.

In Fear City.