All I know is what they tell me - what Gregory Welsh's parents, his brother, his spiritual counselor and the police tell me. It's always like this, the columnist coming in after the funeral, after everyone has finished crying. You arrive late, after another young man's death in the city of Baltimore, and they spread photographs on the kitchen table. In this case, they offer you samples of Gregory Welsh's wayfarer poetry, too. And you sit and listen, then walk away in the drizzle shaking your head, trying to feel something besides grim resignation.
When does it stop? We're not about to legalize drugs, so we'll continue to live with the killer-dealers as they perform brutal acts of commerce in our midst, selling poison and shooting customers who do not pay for it.
Gregory Welsh was addicted to crack cocaine for many of his 32 years. In the late afternoon of Oct. 31, he had a confrontation with two drug dealers in front of his parents' house in Northeast Baltimore. The police tell me that Welsh got into a dispute with the dealers - "Over $10," he told his mother - and the dispute turned into a fight, which ended with the men promising Welsh that they'd be back.
A short time later, they returned - and they shot Welsh to death on the porch. The police have issued a warrant for the arrests of the two men.
His spiritual adviser, John Burghauser, tells me he was saddened but not shocked by Gregory Welsh's death.
Welsh's addiction was so strong he never managed to break free and get into full recovery, Burghauser says. Even a trip last year to a residential treatment center in Ireland, under the auspices of Stauros Ministries, a Christian organization devoted to addictions counseling, could not do the trick.
Welsh's father, Bob Welsh, on the other hand, thought the spiritual retreat to The Haven, in County Tipperary, had been significant, that his son had returned to Baltimore a changed man.
"He wasn't sulking anymore," Bob Welsh says. "He wasn't sneaking in and out of the house."
"He found God during that trip," says his mother, Susan Welsh. "He had a very structured day at The Haven. They had prayer time, of course, but they had to work to maintain the place, and Greg worked in the garden. He was digging in the garden, and he found an old cross in the dirt. He took that as a sign from God. He went through a transformation I had hoped for and had never seen." But to hear Burghauser tell it, Gregory Welsh returned to the streets to buy drugs almost immediately upon his return from Ireland.
