His mother made him walk home from the police station in the rain: "She told me I got into this, I have to get myself out."
He soon realized he would have to leave Baltimore to escape.
He graduated from City College, went to Morgan but dropped out to join the Air Force. He returned and got an accounting degree from the University of Baltimore, started a family and opened his own business. He chose the suburbs over the inner city, but about a decade ago he took his 10- and 12-year-old sons to a family gathering in the old neighborhood.
There, he saw some men he used to hang with, now in their 40s but still strung out on the corners, still trapped in the old game, one that had long passed them by with violence and heroin. One son looked up incredulously and said, "Dad, do you know these bad people?"
Stunned, the man looked down and answered: "They're not bad people. They're people who made bad choices."
As he thinks back at the violence that engulfed Pen Lucy, he's sorry about the fight over the girl - she rejected both suitors, but that didn't seem to matter to boys fighting for honor - and wonders if any of the members of the gangs even know why they started fighting.
He suspects that the pattern in Pen Lucy was and is repeated all over the city. A simple dispute escalates, turns to drugs and guns, then jail and death. But he's encouraged because he sees others like him - men who escaped the game and, "like me, made something of themselves."
If it's a silent majority, it needs to be heard.
