Dispatch From Brooklyn, Our Brooklyn, In Baltimore, My Hometown. You Make Me Weep After Carnage Inflicted at a Community Celebration of Hundreds with Nary a Cop In Sight. (July 3, 2023)
Monday, July 3, 7:16 a.m. (with multiple updates)
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 the DJ twice mentioned guns and called for calm, 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 eight to 10 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 Gonzalez, 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.
“If we made mistakes, we will fix them and move forward so it never happens again, but again, we did not know that this event was occurring.” — Acting Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley
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.
“The fact that there were no police officers here is an immense systemic failure. Brooklyn has always and forever been a neglected community. This is not the time for us to forget them now.” — Baltimore City Councilwoman Phylicia Porter
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 a 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.”
Thanks for reading The Baltimore Observer, an independent, reader-supported daily news publication. If you spot any errors, want to share news tips, pitch story ideas or submit a first-person piece, please get in touch. I’d love to hear from you. Thanks again for reading. Gary Gately, Editor, The Baltimore Observer, garymichaelgately@gmail.com, 410-382-4364.