The teddy bears, all 80 of them, are piled in a living room at a home in Northeast Baltimore. Most are hand-me-downs - "pre-loved," Faith Bocian calls them - each representing one of the persons who has lost a life to violence in the city this year.
Wednesday night, the bears will be displayed as part of a vigil called "Teddy Bears Crying" at the Baltimore branch of the NAACP at 8 W. 26th St. Each will be wearing a laminated name tag of a victim: "Andre Thorpe, 17, Jan. 2, 2009, 800 block of N. Kenwood Ave., shot; Andrew Goodwyn, 22, 11:10 p.m., March 13, 2009, Normandy Ave. Shot."
And so on.
Bocian is 19, and she just completed her freshman year at Maryland Institute College of Art. This is her project, a public display for her class, Art Matters. She lives in Gardenville, and she got the idea after seeing bears tied to poles as makeshift memorials to the dead.
She thought every victim needed a bear.
"It's crazy," she told me, taking a quick break from moving out of her dorm on West Lafayette Avenue at the end of the school year. "Some of the people were involved with gangs. Some were just drunk. I can't imagine being in that situation at all."
The president of Baltimore's NAACP chapter, Marvin L. "Doc" Cheatham Sr., quickly latched onto her idea. He's been trying to raise public awareness of violence all year, and he was disappointed that a rally he held earlier this year drew few people.
Bocian told me she chose used bears to signify something loved and lost, and chose different sizes and colors so that no one victim stands out amid the unfortunate crowd. "I wanted to show how big the problem is," she told me.
While Bocian is trying to raise awareness of violence, her mother deals with it nearly every day. Katherine Bocian, 51, is a city paramedic working out of a station on Harford Road. On Tuesday, she stood next to her ambulance holding three of her daughter's bears.
"It's something that touches all our hearts, to see somebody's life taken away from them," Katherine told me. She knows the teddy bear gesture is a small one, but she feels that if everyone got angry or involved, something might change.
I rode with Katherine on Medic 6, and as we sped toward a hospital with a woman who had injured her leg, Katherine told me that days and nights are getting busier, and there are fewer quiet corners of the city. Harford Road used to be the elderly and heart attacks; now, she said, violence "is in everybody's area."
As her siren blared and she worked her way through a crowded intersection, Katherine recalled a man who had been shot but was still able to talk. "Then he stopped talking," she said. "I had a man who was stabbed tell me about his children. Then he died. I'm so glad I held that man's hand."
On Friday afternoon, a young man was shot and killed on Montebello Terrace in Northeast Baltimore, near where Katherine lives. She was off that day, but she still needed information. The name of the victim hadn't been released, and her daughter needed it for her project.
"A lot of young people are getting killed," she said. "A lot of innocent people. No matter what they were doing, they didn't deserve to have their lives taken away. It's sad seeing their lives snuffed out."
The victim from Montebello was Anthony Duane Griffin. He had been shot in the upper body and back. He was 23.
Katherine sighed. "Another bear."
