Homicide Report on a break

The Homicide Report is on vacation, and will resume Sept. 1. There will be only minimal posts during this period.

Comments

[Tony]

let's hope the homicides themselves take a vacation.

[Phillip ghee]

Blood stained twenties

I got crack. I got smack. I gotta pocket full of twenties.
I got dis corner and, my boyz, they got my back.

So let’s be realistic, don’t need me no mystic.
Got my glock for ballastics.
Don’t plan on becoming nobody’s statistic.

So don’t try to stop it. Yo! My pockets phat and,
your 9 to 5 can’t top it. Don’t need a bible either
cause a stack of twenties, my profit.

Excuse me. Yo! yo, wait a minute cuz. Don’t come up in here with your store.
You play your side of town, for real, cause dis here corner’s spoken for.
What’s you looking at; Maybe you crusin for a beat down, or you think you’re bad e-nuff to score?

Oh! now you gonna play me like you’re so fine.
Gonna pimp walk right up to me and then flash me your nine.

cap cap cap

Oh! baby boy you’re quick, you done really gone and hit it
Caught me three times, your bullets went straight and, bit it.

Can’t stand now, going down, damn there goes my reputation, I didn’t even get off a round.

pop pop pop

What an awful sound then a loud ’ thud’ as my head hits the ground.

I feel the hot blood flow from my gut and down into my pockets;
messing up my stack of twenties. Please won’t somebody stop it.

I see blue lights flashing and in the distance I hear an ambulance howl.
Now my twenties are really getting messed, I can’t even hold my bowels.

Now here comes this cop. He takes my glock. Ask es me to snitch.
Yeah! I know who done it but that’s my bizness, bitch

Yours is to make sure I get these twenties back on me.
Once they stitch me up and release me from Emergency.

In my right pocket, I knows I got damn near four hundred
And in my left…my left,…damn! my stomach
Can’t think right now, head’s getting lite and I thinks I gonna vomit.

Please Lord help me, I can change, get a job, I’m not that lazy.
And please Lord tell me, why is everything starting to get so hazy?
Can’t this ambulance move any faster, Jesus! I don’t want to be pushing up daisies.

Things are darker now, I can only hear voices.
while all about me, a lot of busyness, I start to think about my losses.
Hell! I was supposed to have cleared six hundred tonight.
So’s I could get right with all my sources.

What you say, hang some blood, whose blood is that, I don’t want no HIV.
I thought they only needed to take out the bullets, give me prescription, like they do on TV.

Damn! I m not really sure if all these doctors are really wid it.
EVERYTHING seems to be fading away. I’m getting cold, colder.
I think I getting ready, getting ready, getting ready to quit it.

And quit he did, so continues the toll. Another deceased young black male. Paid in Full, all his Thug and Dope life fees.
Nothing on his person but, 8 bags of smack, 5 rocks and a stack of blood stained twenties.

His End.

Phillip Ghee 8/19/07

About This Poem

I like to think of this poem as an anti-rap, trying, with a single effort, to reverse the damage that decades of negative urban programming in gangster rap and gangsta culture has reaped. It sounds ambition but, I think it can be done, good far outweighs evil even if it just The Power of One.

The poem was inspired by the articles on Ms. Millie Brown and Doctor Edward Cornwell III, both of Johns Hopkins Hospital. Day in and Day out, they witness firsthand and attend to the care and witness the demise of scores of young black men, caught up in (the mostly drug traffic induced) epidemic of gun and knife violence sweeping the city. The (genocidal) Toll 200 murders in Baltimore in the period of time from January 1st, 2007 to August 22, 2007. The overwhelming numbers of victims and perpetrators have been black young men.

See: articles below

For individuals who may have come across a hard-copy of this article and wish it sent to you via e-mail, write to phillipghee@yahoo.com.

For out of state recipients (their press and media) whose cities suffer from the same fate as Baltimore’s; please you are more than welcome to amend this article with your statistics and add a presentation on your hero’s speaking out. However as a courtesy to the originator of the article, I am requesting that you maintain the stats on Baltimore and possibly update it to reflect the toll of the day. This can be done by either writing to me, via e-mail Ghelove@aol.com or by an Internet search for:

By Anna Ditkoff at At Baltimore CityPaper
I prefer this listing because it also gives a brief synopsis of the crime along with a tally of murder for the week and the comprehensive toll to date.
Caution: The poem belongs to me and you have my permission and encouragement to reprint it, obeying the aforementioned guidelines but you may have to contact the various news sources to reprint the two accompanying articles.
Contact Information -- baltimoresun.com
Contact Information. baltimoresun.com 2 Hamill Road Suite 200 Baltimore, Maryland 21210 ... The Baltimore Sun Company 501 N. Calvert Street P.0. Box 1377 ...
www.baltimoresun.com/about/bal-about-sun-contact,0,2796354.htmlstory - 44k -
letters@baltsun.com

afcp_net
Contact Information:: Baltimore Times: 2513 N. Charles Street: Baltimore, MD 21218: Phone: 410-366-3900: Fax: 410-243-1627: Website: www. ...
www.afcp.org/design/general/memberdetail.asp?pubid=2041 - 13k - Cached - Similar pages

btimes@btimes.com

To the National recipients and the national press and media, you have the resources, access and the talent, I charge you with being ambitious and gathering a toll from all areas to be included with this poem .
I think the circumstances surrounding the current murder epidemic are no different in Baltimore than any other urban city. As we move out West and in the Southern Atlantic Cities, many more Hispanics youth may also be caught up in the toll but, it’s the same thing. We have to realize that our survival is contingent on theirs. We are all interconnected no matter how removed we think ourselves to be from the situation. Acknowledge your connection.

Phillip Ghee 8/22/07

She fights bloodshed one T-shirt at a time

Operating room worker Millie Brown holds up the T-shirts she is selling to raise awareness of the young victims of violence in the city. She's printing them at her own expense.

There were no relatives in the hospital when the young man died, so Millie Brown and her co-workers in the operating room reached for a wallet in his pants to find some identification. The pants were wet, and so were the wallet and the thick stack of cash inside - blood money from the streets of Baltimore.

Another young, African-American male lay on an operating table at Johns Hopkins Hospital, dead from five, maybe six bullets to the upper body. Many young men come, bleeding or unconscious, by ambulance to one of the greatest hospitals in the world, direct from the streets of East Baltimore - sometimes from only a few blocks away, where the paramedics and homicide detectives find them.

Doctors and nurses try to save them. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail.
Millie Brown works as an operating room associate in cardiac surgery. She gets a page to the trauma room when she's needed there. It's her job to move patients to and from the OR - and sometimes to the hospital morgue. She's there when the bodies are cleaned and tagged and bagged. She's there when the next of kin arrive.

But that one night, no kin could be found, and Millie remembered the stack of $20 bills in the young victim's wallet, soaked through with blood.

"It must have been this thick," she said, referring to the cash-stuffed wallet and holding her thumb and index finger nearly 4 inches apart.

I had to stop and think about that for a minute - blood-soaked cash, the death of young men, our frustrating city - and in the next breath, I heard Millie Brown say, "It's all so senseless."

Friday afternoon, before Millie started her 2-to-11 shift in the Blalock Building, we sat and talked about all this - and speculated about that shooting victim having so much cash on him - because the killing of young men in Baltimore has moved her to launch a one-woman campaign to stop the violence.

Seen too much already, she says.

Hopkins has given her great opportunities to advance her career - to move in time from food services to environmental services and into the OR, where she has observed amazing efforts to save lives after high-caliber efforts to end them.

She's not a surgeon, not a nurse. But she wants to do something.

That's why she's selling a T-shirt that her teenage son designed. It says: "Save Our Children, Stop The Killing." She has them printed with her own money and some that she's raised. She sells them for $15 and wants to donate the proceeds to an effort to pull at-risk boys back from the brink.

She hasn't quite figured that part out yet. She's just getting started.

"I want to see this T-shirt in neighborhoods everywhere," Millie Brown says with the passion of a woman who has just discovered true purpose. "I want to see people wearing them as they walk down the streets."

Millie, who is divorced, lives in Dundalk with her son, William, 15. Her heart aches for the other women who come to the OR to view the bodies of their teenage boys, victims of gang battles and street beefs, of guns and of knives, of the whole insane culture of macho violence that keeps one part of Baltimore bleeding and dying as the other one thrives and grows.

Millie Brown knows five women whose sons have been shot, one of whom is still clinging to life at the University of Maryland Medical Center across town. Two women she knows, who work in Hopkins housekeeping, have lost children to violence.

Of course, we've seen stop-the-killing efforts before. Been there, got the T-shirt.

But this one comes from a woman who has the twin perspective of mother and health care worker. Millie Brown is right there, at the hospital on the hill, in the middle of the night, under the surgical lights, when young men come in off the street, wounded and gasping for breath. She's been there when they died and when their mothers arrived to embrace the still-warm bodies. She's hugged the moms as they wept.

"Talking about all this, seeing it on the news, in the newspaper, that's one thing," Millie says. "But when you stand right there and you see it, and you actually touch it or have to move a body from one room to the morgue ... when you have to take a mom to see her baby who's been shot with a gun or stabbed with a knife, and he's gone ... when you see a grieving mother crying for her child ... then I want to do something about that.

"I really want to try and make a difference," Millie says. "My goal is to save one mom from coming in here and seeing her son dead from a gunshot."

So she's selling the T-shirts. She wants to get the mothers of victims involved in the effort to stop the killing; she'd like to produce a video of their stories or get them to speak to young men about making better choices in life.

She said it was OK to publish her number in the newspaper today (410-961-1003) in case anyone else in Baltimore wants to join her in saving the boys and saving the city.
dan.rodricks@baltsun.com
LO

Baltimore TimesL NEWS

Dr. Cornwell heals gun shot wounds and guns down bad images
by Ken Morgan
Baltimore Times
Originally posted 8/13/2007

Dr. Edward E. Cornwell III serves as associate professor of surgery at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. He holds the position as chief of the Adult Trauma Center at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. These are lofty titles with prestige and income to go with them. Yet, he is an angry black man. In the ER, he sees so many young black men coming through. He says, “Some we can save others come dead on arrival. For every 12 gunshot wounds, one is dead on arrival. Ten gunshots are to the head or to the chest or both.”

Cornwell has lots of experience with gunshot wounds. He cites where he has worked in trauma centers over the last 19 years. “I have been at Howard University Hospital, Los Angeles and now Baltimore.”

“Our culture glamorizes violence. Music videos depict violence as being cool and hip. Kids look at these images and want to copy what they see,” says Cromwell.

The trauma surgeon recalls his invitation to record producers in New York to talk about violence on the CDs. He considered it an insult to be shown films that the record moguls showed him.

“The garbage that I saw was phenomenal. 50 cent is more creditable than Ja Rule because he has been shot nine times,” Cornwell rails. He talks about the 17 record executives that included one black and one Asian. “They said to me, this is what the market wants. I said to them the market wanted cigarettes,” drawing a parallel with the adverse affects of both,” from his way of thinking.

The veteran surgeon first started a youth impact program in L.A. “We would bring our graphic trauma slides to first time offenders not yet perpetrators but going in the wrong direction,” he says.

Starting with this same thesis in 2004, Dr. Cornwell was a primary member of Johns Hopkins researchers who followed 97 boys and girls ages 7 to 17. These youths took part in activities at two Police Athletic League centers. The Research team conducted an initial survey to assess youths' “attitudes towards interpersonal conflict and their likelihood to act violently.” They then showed youth graphic photos of gun shot wounded patients being treated.

These photos were contrasted against rap glamorizing violent rap photos from videos. The follow-up survey captured a significant lessening in the same young people's quantified beliefs that supported violent behavior. The study suggested that these youth would be less inclined to choose violence to resolve conflicts.

Dr. Cornwell played a prominent role two years ago in giving home-town boy makes good, NBA star Carmelo Anthony a platform to recant his don't snitch message. The project, Cornwell's “Hype v. Reality”, was the then Gov. Robert Ehrlich's stop the violence initiative. Anthony held a press conference on a vacant field near his old homestead in the shadows of Johns Hopkins Hospital where he set the record straight. Cornwell was there to give his message.

The dynamic surgeon continues to hammer home that exposing at-risk youth, especially between the ages of 10 and 14 to the realities of being shot, to real photos and videos of gunshot victims can alter these youth's beliefs and hopefully behavior.

Looking at the larger picture, the passionate doctor reveals how he thinks glamorizing shooting can be staunched. Cornwell alluded to the strategy of the late Cong. Adam Clayton Powell who called for everyone to boycott businesses that discriminated against blacks. He says, “It's a financial answer. It is economic. When Imus was emboldened by the same garbage to talk about bitches and “ho's” it took him eight days to get fired. It wasn't until his sponsors pulled out.”

“My goal is to drum up the debate,” says the surgeon who throws down the gauntlet to record producers and artists who glamorize shootings.

The Hopkins surgeon feels today's context for this issue involves what still is segregated society, where white supremacy still exits, where blacks think other blacks are inferior , where Uncle Toms still sell black folk out and where absentee fathers come into play. He even raises the issue of a genocidal society. You also get the feeling that politicians who just talk rhetoric are not among his favorite people. His advise to politicians to help deal with the image and culture issue is, “I would say to a politician pick the three most egregious and shine the light on these producers.”

In passionate tones, Cornwell says, “We have allowed a culture to be defined by those who don't have the right.” His finger points to record producers who glamorize the violence and make a killing in more ways than one. You get the feeling that he also does not think too kindly of some of the artists. “The answer is to shine the spotlight on them,” he says. He insists that we need a culture change.

Often thought of as a role model himself, one of the good doctor's role models includes Sue Tibbels who is executive director of the New Song Learning Center and co-founder of New Song Urban Ministries located in Sandtown-Winchester. When asked why she thinks Cornwell feels that way about her she says, “He deals with hope, death and despair. He sees me being on the positive end, preventing children ending up in the emergency room.” Cornwell sits on the board of the New Song Learning Center.

Other heroes for Cornwell are “the kids who are beating the odds and those young people who persist in school despite being ridiculed because of it.”He thinks that peak efforts to help change this negative culture should peak between the ages of 10 and 14. He thinks that there has to be a movement of like- minded people to deal with culture change.

The enterprising doctor has created a nonprofit organization to create a public service announcement highlighting the “Hype v. Reality” video that shows Cornwell in action, and a critically wounded young black bedridden man telling some youngsters that the gang life filled with shootings is no life to lead. Anyone who deals with at-risk youth needs to obtain it.

Whether you agree or not with Dr. Cornwell's philosophy and ideas, you have to love and respect his passion connected to his action.

.

[james]

can you tell me if there was a shooting near playa vista early AM on 8/21?

thanks!

[Common Sense]

James, this is the Homicide Report, not the "Shooting Report" or the "James Report". There is only one full-time reporter covering this blog. You should probably look for that info yourself by using the internet, your local police department, and a little common sense. Jill isn't a public information officer.

[b respectful]

Wow he's just curious about a murder. After all this is a homicide report aint it? Keep the smart comments 2yourself an besides....he didnt ask u anyway!!!

[Kat]

Common,
How do we know if this Homicide Report isn't James' only source of information...meaning disabled, or alone, or any number of other issues. Don't be so quickly to lash out. That's why this report is full of names...people judge too quickly and all our sence of empathy and sympathy is gone. He made a request...in line with this report. Take a deep breath next time you read something you don't like and remember what you are reading and then take a moment to realize why each and every name is on this list...because someone some where made a up his/her mind that it was necessary to take him out.

[stebve Johnson]

Where is the map of the homicides? I'd like to show it to someone who is considering buying a house in a neighborhood.