Baltimore Weeps. "Angel," 18, Dead On the Ground. A 20-Year-Old Man Dies In the Hospital. Shots Wound 28 Others, 23 of Them Teens. 3 Women, 2 Men.

July 4, 5:12 a.m.

By Gary Gately

Minutes after midnight Sunday, along the buckled asphalt road by the squat brick buildings of the Brooklyn Homes public housing complex, the music that had played all day long Saturday played on. DJs spun discs. Rappers rapped. Hundreds of people danced in the street and laughed and sang and hugged at the annual Brooklyn Day celebration in South Baltimore.

Some teenagers stole a kiss in alleyways, and even toddlers and babies whose young mothers brought them in strollers or strapped on their backs got to stay up this late and eat cotton candy and take pony rides, the moms holding the babies up on the pony and walking alongside.

Some of those who have lived here for 10, 20 years or more said they know the old neighborhood has certainly seen better days. but as Saturday night slipped into Sunday morning, it seemed to be doing OK. Why, a few had recalled thinking just around midnight that the cops didn’t even have to come out this year, and nobody’s causing even a whiff of trouble.

So maybe it’s easier to understand that when quiet talk began about somebody possibly having a gun, and then the DJ said, twice, they’re just rumors, no cause for alarm, many just kept right on dancing, or feasting on the remaining grilled chicken or ribs or burgers, and you can, after all, consume significant quantities of alcohol over the span of 10 or 12 hours and now blow a blunt legally.

Or maybe they just didn’t want to believe it.

For even as the gunfire after sunset got so frequent around here that it hardly made even a little kid flinch anymore – no place any parent really wants any child to grow up – somehow on Brooklyn Day, it seemed almost like they called a truce nobody dared violate.

Then in a barrage of bullets that?started around 12:30 a.m. Sunday, everything changed, forever.

The music died, the dancing stopped, and everybody — many teenagers, old men and women and fathers and young mothers who abandoned their strollers and scooped up their babies and toddlers — ran for their lives.

In the aftermath of this dreadful Sunday morning at the Brooklyn Homes, when the mother of 18-year-old Aaliyah Gonzales, who lay dead on the ground, posts on Facebook, you can almost hear her sob.

The mother, Krystal Gonzales, wrote:

MY BABY!!! Worst day of my life! I cannot do life without her I NEED HER!! Why would they do this to a perfect angel. I love you so much baby. I didn't get there fast enough. God this is a mistake!!! Please!!

Her angel, she was a natural. She had this gift for telling stories that matter, in a way that they moved us and we remembered them, stories of dreams when dreams are young, and the creative writing teachers even back at Brooklyn Park Middle School knew it. Aaliyah had just graduated from high school with a college scholarship, but this mother’s angel will never get to tell her stories because her story ended here on this Sunday morning when it really had only just begun.

Another casualty from the Brooklyn Homes, 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi, survived the wounds, but then died soon after at the hospital.

The shots fired by at least two shooters — no suspects, no leads, the police tell us, still, now, more than 48 hours after this heinous crime — also wounded 28 others, 23 of them teens, and three women, two men, ages 20 to 31.

Even if over the decades you’ve reported on more than a hundred homicides and four mass shootings, it’s hard to put words around this toll, and, of course, the numbers alone, the ones whose bodies the bullets found, cannot begin to capture the depths of grief among so many of those who carry on, leaving holes in their lives and their souls that we know time will never fully heal.

We the press have this compulsion about being able to write absolutes with as much authority as we can muster that this, this one’s the worst, in this way: The Baltimore Sun: “The Sunday violence is likely the largest shooting in Baltimore history….” then becomes in a follow “a victim tally that rivals any act of gun violence in the city in at least several decades.” The Washington Post: “The shooting — the city’s largest in recent memory…. “

Largest, you could say, accurately, if we measure solely by the number wounded, but then if six kids get shot to death in an alley in a city where more than 300 people got murdered for each of the last eight years, it seems we’re maybe trying too hard for play, or drama, and we quickly qualify it, when what happened here in Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, our Baltimore, our hometown, it is enough.

We all feel it now.

We all weep for Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, and for Baltimore, our hometown, my hometown I love, but sometimes love hurts, and tonight, this old port city, it makes me weep.

Not for long, though, so I shed tears for a few minutes, and then I dab them dry with a wrinkled 7-11 napkin. For we have work to do, and we have to do our best to report the news and to ask questions that have no easy answers, or ones, at least, apparently not so easy to answer for those who need to answer them.

And one of them focuses on this detail lots of people noticed, but few seemed to fret about until the gunfire rang out, that is:

Where were the Baltimore City police this year, this Brooklyn Day, and until 35 minutes into the next day?

The Baltimore City police had always come through on Brooklyn Day with a highly visible presence, residents tell me, and that sends a clear message to angry people with grievances and guns.

The acting police commissioner, Richard Worley, told us on Sunday that the event was “unpermitted,” and explains that this means police were not told about it in advance.

So they just didn’t show up.

“If we made mistakes,” Worley said, “we will fix them and move forward so it never happens again, but again, we did not know that this event was occurring.”

Uh, all due respect, Chief, this isn’t easy for any of us, but we are all professionals here, so please spare us blaming some bureaucratic slip-up that led to your officers not showing to detour traffic around the parade route or something, not when we have two dead, 28 wounded, and not a cop in sight when all hell broke loose.

On Monday afternoon, Worley became perhaps even less convincing when he told reporters BPD internal talks on whether to send officers came “too late.”

“Unfortunately, we didn’t get there in time to prevent what happened,” Worley said.

He did allow that the gunfire — and the two dead, the 28 wounded — might never have happened if cops had been present.

And we’re told that while hundreds of people in Brooklyn Homes knew for weeks or months the date of the 2023 Brooklyn Day, the police pleaded ignorance, that they just did not know about the date of the annual celebration.

Until the day of the event.

Still, they?chose not to show up.

Mistakes.

Too late.

Indeed.

These answers raise so many questions, but no more answers will come before later today, Tuesday, the Fourth of July.

Phylicia Porter, the city councilwoman representing the people of Brooklyn Homes, did not mince words on Sunday.

“The fact that there were no police officers here is an immense systemic failure,” she told reporters. “Brooklyn has always and forever been a neglected community. This is not the time for us to forget them now. This is the time for us to come together and stand in solidarity with them.”

Nocturnal by nature, this keeps me up at night, and I’m a bit of a voyeur, like many reporters, and so around 1 a.m. Monday, I am at Brooklyn Homes again, and I see just a smattering of cops and others.

But I think for everyone who would prefer a root canal to seeing a reporter about now, there’s gotta be one more, always one more, who’s going to make this trip back here really pay off.

When I find myself standing in the shadows at 3:15 Monday morning before an old Black man leaning hard on his cane, the smile, still, somehow never leaving his face, I know even running on caffeine, adrenaline and nicotine that it’s time to stop talking and listen.

Because he tells me this:

“You know, I was born here and I grew up here, and it was fine place to grow up then, and I was a good kid really. But there’s always temptations, and I started cutting school and smoking some weed and then by high school, doing heroin, and before I know it, I’m an addict. I’m hurting, and I’m hurting everybody in my life.”

He nods and pauses and still smiles, but now his face is tinged with a little shame.

“But I got in a program, NA, and I did the steps and then got honest work, fell in love, married, had a little boy, and then me and some some others, young and old, we started this festival here, and we called it Brooklyn Day. And I gotta tell you, even as the neighborhood started going the way of so many others, it seems now almost like a miracle or something that beyond a scuffle here and there, nothing bad ever happened on Brooklyn Day or when, as it often did, it went past midnight, and that made me mighty proud, you know?

“I don’t even know what to say right now. But this ain’t what we hoped for and this ain’t what we got for 26 years, so it’s like everything we built, it just vanished when those shots rang out.”

His voice trails off, and then he?says:

“Thanks for coming by and keeping me company. Goodnight, or should I say, good morning? And good luck. We all need faith, son, and we all need luck too.”

Gately Column: Real Newspapermen Cry Too. Or At Least This One Does.

As I mentioned, in nearly four decades, I have reported on more than a hundred homicides and four mass shootings.

I used to think it would get easier.

It never does.

Instead, it gets harder.

I am sitting in a living room at 2 on Monday morning and talking to an elementary school teacher and her husband, an laid-off former warehouse worker, and with their?kids, two boys of 10, and a 14-year-old girl. They had slept, but then woke again, and the mom and dad tell me they need to leave Brooklyn, our Brooklyn, and?Baltimore, the only hometown they could ever love like this town, forever.

And never look back.

They say it doesn’t matter where they go — Philly, Wilmington, Richmond, Boise, LA, anywhere but here, because, they say, we can’t relive this and, especially, our kids can’t.?

Twenty-five feet from their front door — again, a reminder — an 18-year-old angel of a daughter, as her mother called her, lay dead on the ground. A 20-year-old man from up the street wounded in the fusillade of gunfire died at the hospital. Bullets struck 28 others, 23 of them teens, and three women, two men, ages 20 to 31.

Too much. Too many. Not again, the couple tells me.

Ever.

And I stumble back out into the street and duck behind a car so the cops and the smattering of locals can’t see me, and I sit on curb and I cry torrents of tears and look to the heavens and speak to God in terms not resembling prayer as most know it.

I think he’s crying for Brooklyn tonight too.

For Baltimore.

For us all.

But I cry for just a few minutes and then I dry my tears with a crumbled 7-11 napkin, open my reporter’s notepad and get back to work because if I give in to emotions on a big story, I become the journalistic equivalent of a surgeon whose hands shake.

So now I'll try to somehow take you there to a public housing project in South Baltimore called Brooklyn Homes, and if I can?help you see the world from those streets and stoops and living rooms, and through the eyes of children and a mother and a dad, and all who shed tears for the dead and the wounded, then maybe I’ve done my job.?

We are all Brooklynites today.

We are all Baltimoreans today.

And when pony rides and childhood squeals of delight and laughter and music and dance, and people from babies to grandparents crowd the Brooklyn Homes complex past midnight, and some old-timers come back home again for Brooklyn Day and hug kids and relive a bit of childhood, when this joy suddenly turns into a frenzied flight for life, some praying desperate prayers that the bullets do not find them or their kin, nobody fully escaped those bullets.?

They pierced the heart and soul of these people, the good people of Brooklyn, and they are us and we are them, but for grace and circumstance.?

If you believe, maybe say a prayer, or spare a thought this night for Brooklyn, for Baltimore, for us all, for our hometown, for an end to the madness, for light to somehow triumph over darkness, hope over despair, faith over doubt, love over hate, life over death.

May we never, ever become so numbed by the relentless barrage of bloodletting — “and every day, the paper boy brings more” — to the point that we accept this as the norm because when I looked into the bloodshot eyes of some of those little kids, I thought of my sons, Joseph and Paulie, when they were little. I pictured them at a big celebration, a festival, a fair, a carnival maybe, and then, bullets flying, and I could see them, in my mind’s eye, crying like I’ve never seen them cry and hear them wailing like I’ve never heard them wail.

I know I would never forget seeing that anguish in their faces and hearing those desperate cries, but more importantly, they would never forget, for those terrible moments would be seared into their consciousnesses all their days.

And I know that for those little kids in Brooklyn, still up so late this one night of the year, and about a half-hour after Brooklyn Day officially ended, and for all those teenagers not wounded, those bullets stole away a part of the innocence of childhood forever, the wonder and magic of a summer’s night when the sweet aroma of barbecue chicken and ribs and burgers and hotdogs filled the air and generations of families hugged and laughed, danced and sang, and teenagers kissed.

Then the music stopped.

And everybody ran for their lives.

We cannot, we must not just sigh and then forget it, because odds are, tomorrow or the next day will bring another murder to our hometown, and within just three or four days, many others will be wounded, but rarely make the papers or the websites or the TV news.

Often the names of homicide victims don’t even make the cut anymore, and that used to be unthinkable. If the cops have a name of the victim, you publish, post or air the name of the human being who lost his or her life to violence.

Back then anyway.

No, nobody here fully escaped early on the morning after the end of Brooklyn Day, as all the locals knew and loved it, the annual ritual and the rite of passage for the younger ones.?

None of us did.

Enough.?

Enough vapid cliches spoken from the same old tired script of thoughts and prayers and senseless violence (as opposed to the sensible kind) to feed the sound bites for the news and 'round the clock on cable if there’s enough blood and anguish, misery and grief and wailing to get national play, or here, to serve as a prominent quote that will be dutifully published in the dailies and on the web.

Enough makeshift memorials and balloons and teddy bears and tears.?

Enough hashtags.?

Enough.

No, it doesn’t get easier, and it shouldn’t get easier, ever.?

It gets harder.

I really need an anal copy editor now, but I don’t have that luxury, so I’m gonna have a good cry and pray and cuss out God a little bit too.

I think he can handle it.

But then I’ll try to find it inside of me once more to muster the faith to believe in the Psalm that says tears are prayers too.?

This is my hometown.?

Our hometown.

I will love it forever.

And tonight, it breaks my heart into little pieces.?

I guess real newspapermen do cry, after all.

At least this one does.

Goodnight, Brooklyn.

Goodnight, Baltimore.

Damn, you,?my hometown, you make me hurt so bad.

But still, I love you.

And to you, the God of my faith, sorry about cussing you out and all.

You know, to forgive is divine, right?

I could use a kicker quote too.

So how about this one?

“Blessed are you who weep now, for you will laugh.”