Heber Brown III, a young pastor from the York Road corridor, could not get to his mother's house on Radnor Road on Thursday night because, at 8:45, Radnor Road became a crime scene. Three men had been shot there, and by 9:15 police officers and detectives with flashlights were all over the place. So Mr. Brown, in a T-shirt and jeans, stood with me on York Road, behind the long streams of yellow police tape slung between street lamps.
Mr. Brown, one of the rising leaders in Baltimore's faith community, came from his home a few blocks away with business cards giving his phone number at Pleasant Hope Baptist Church. He was hoping to hand them out to anyone from the neighborhood, particularly young men and boys, who might like to take his counsel.
"Nobody calls," Mr. Brown says, flashing his cards. "But you have to keep trying."
You have to keep trying to get through to them. You have to keep praying and hoping that some day young men will stop killing each other over drugs and money.
Mr. Brown is a street-level preacher with one hand in cyberspace; he sends out Tweets - "Triple Shooting in North Baltimore 2nite around the corner from my house. They just covered 1 guy with a sheet." - and maintains a provocative blog called Faith In Action. He blogs about social issues, politics and faith. He does this while keeping his ministry close to the street. He's keenly aware of his responsibility as a faith leader. The North Baltimore streets with which he's most familiar - Old York Road, Beaumont Avenue, Ivanhoe Avenue - are starting to become places of drug trafficking, tension and violence again.
On Tunbridge Road in June, someone fatally stabbed a teenage boy in retaliation for an earlier attack. There have been six homicides in the corridor this year. There's more talk these days of rivalries among gangs associated with certain streets off York Road. These are streets where homeowners rise and go to work each day, and yet just a block away things commonly associated with East Baltimore and West Baltimore make an appearance.
"I hear people say that," Mr. Brown says, meaning gang-related violence as a phenomenon limited to the most impoverished sections of the city. "But it can develop in any neighborhood."
Any neighborhood where drug dealing happens - or follows someone home. Thursday night, it followed someone to the street where Heber Brown's mother lives.
