No one was shot on Fairmount Avenue.
It wasn't for a lack of trying.
The gunmen who ravaged East and Southeast Baltimore Sunday night and early Monday, hitting at least 18 people and killing two at five locations, didn't spare this street. Bullets here didn't draw blood, but they found the sides of houses, car doors and hoods and rooftops.
And a beleaguered Police Department ran out of plastic evidence cards used to mark the shell casings.
At the scene of an earlier shooting, where a dozen people were injured at a backyard cookout, the technicians had used 31 cards. There were four other streets that required their use, and by the time the cops got to Fairmount on Monday afternoon, they had run out of basic tools.
So someone took a pile of informational pamphlets providing crime victims with telephone numbers, folded them into small pieces and propped them next to more than a dozen bullet casings that littered this residential street just south of Johns Hopkins Hospital.
After the cops finally left, dozens of the small white pieces fluttered in the breeze and littered a grassy median strip.
Just feet away, the street was marked with small yellow chalk circles drawn where the casings had been - two clumps 25 feet apart.
Cars parked on the side were dented and punctured; the side window of one minivan was held together with duct tape, and a bullet had punctured the fender. The driver for a rental car company patiently waited for a husband and wife to arrive and be driven to the office. "I want to talk but I can't because my car just got shot up," the man said.
Similar scenes played out all over the Eastside on Monday, where a distinct and haunting quiet descended on a historically violent swath of city real estate.
The last bits of evidence from a night of chaos were melting in the afternoon heat.
On Ashland Avenue, where at least one gunman had opened fire at the cookout, five cops walked the street, deserted but for some kids playing on a front porch. On Comet Street, a tiny court where cops followed a blood trail from around the corner on Aisquith and found two people shot in a car, residents retreated behind closed doors but said they had been jolted awake by a volley of gunshots shortly before 2 a.m. "They were shooting all over the place," said one man who came to the door but wouldn't open it.
