Dontae Maurice Melton Jr. died in the custody of Baltimore Police officers June 25 after he was restrained on the night of the 24th during a mental health crisis at the intersection of Franklin Street and Franklintown Road, where he asked a police officer for help.

The 31-year-old father of two suffered from mood disorders and a seizure disorder, his mother, Eleshiea Goode, told Baltimore Beat.

“His decision to start using drugs was his way of self-medicating as he tried to fight the battlefield in his mind that never seem to allow him to rest,” Goode wrote in a text message to the Beat. “He’s been to rehab around seven times in the past 10 years on his own ( he went when he was ‘ready’) because he never gave up on trying to beat the demons in his head.”

After a rehab stint in Crownsville, Melton remained sober for some time and began working at a medical waste plant in Curtis Bay. “He kept that job for almost a year and even bought himself a used truck and was extremely proud of himself as this was the first time he made significant progress managing his condition,” Goode said. 

Melton and Goode were the subjects of a 2005 Baltimore Sun story about access to tutoring that opens with an almost bucolic sense of their family life in Edmondson Village. “It’s a cool spring evening in Edmondson Village, and children are playing outside Dontae Melton’s house in the still-strong daylight,” the story begins.
“The 11-year-old boy, however, is in his family’s darkened living room, working by lamplight on a writing assignment under the supervision of a private tutor paid for by Baltimore’s public schools.”

Goode was in graduate school at the time studying to be a school counselor. “I have spent my life helping young people achieve success as a School Counselor in Baltimore City Public Schools rising to a specialist position leading school counselors in the district,” she says.

According to his mother, Melton graduated from Forest Park High School in 2011 and worked as a busboy at The Prime Rib. He later had trouble with the police as he struggled with his mental health, including an attempted murder charge, stemming, according to Goode, from an incident when he was jumped by three people and fired a gun into the air. The charge was later reduced to reckless endangerment. 

Melton was the father of a 13-year-old son and an 11-year-old daughter and remained active in their lives despite his struggles. Sometime around Mother’s Day this year, according to Goode, Melton lost his job at the medical waste plant, “but didn’t want to tell me until after Mother’s Day because he didn’t want to ruin my day. For probably the first time in a very long time, he got me and my mom gifts for Mother’s Day which is something he wasn’t able to do over the years due to his addiction.”

After relapsing, Melton checked himself into a seven-day detox program in early June so he could attend a family function sober. 

On June 12, Melton, his mother, his sister Kaila, and his children went to Main Event, where the family often celebrated special occasions with bowling and air hockey, for his daughter’s fifth grade graduation. “Dontae loved his kids and they loved him. He was also very close to sister and they were super competitive! Dontae did the best he could to show up for those he loved. He has a special relationship with my mom, and he helped to care for her when she was ill. He was certainly her favorite,” Goode says.

A few days later, he began to act erratically and finally left the house, saying he didn’t need anyone. His mother filed a protective order, which she was told would let police know he was suffering from mental health issues. As a licensed clinician, and Melton’s mother, Goode says she was in a position to know the signs of someone in need of assistance and filed an emergency petition the day before Melton died. “I told the court, ‘this time is different, my son is not himself and needs help,’” she recalls. The petition, she says, was denied. 

On June 24, Melton sought assistance from a Baltimore police officer. According to the initial report of the Independent Investigations Division of the Office of the Attorney General of Maryland, “at approximately 9:40 p.m., an adult man, approached a Baltimore Police Department (BPD) officer who was stopped at a traffic light in a marked police cruiser at the intersection of West Franklin Street and North Franklintown Road.”

“I’ve got a gentleman pulling on my doors asking for help,” an officer said on dispatch audio. “But he doesn’t look like he needs help.” 

Later, an officer said he “thinks somebody’s chasing him, but nobody’s chasing him.”

“While the officer was speaking to the man, the man walked into the middle of the roadway several times. The officer attempted to restrain the man for the man’s own safety, and when other BPD officers arrived on scene, officers placed the man in handcuffs and leg restraints,” the preliminary IID report continues. 

The report does not say whether the officers used violence to perform this restraint. At one point an officer radioed that “he’s very irate right now. They have leg shackles on him and handcuffs already.”

Melton was noted as unconscious at 10:15 p.m. but was not transported to the hospital until 10:30 p.m., 50 minutes after Melton first approached an officer seeking help. It is unclear from dispatch audio and the initial investigation what happened during the intervening period, but problems with the Computer Aided Dispatch system that emergency personnel use to communicate with each other seemed to have prevented a medic from arriving.

The IID, which now investigates such incidents, promises to release body camera footage and the names of the involved officers. Neither the officers nor Melton have been officially named. An employee of the Crown gas station at the intersection said police officers came and took the footage from the security cameras. The Attorney General’s Office did not respond to questions involving their investigation by press time but confirmed they are looking into who took the video footage. 

Melton is one of three people to die in encounters with police in less than two weeks. Both Bilal Abdullah, a beloved arabber, and Pytorcarcha Brooks, a 70-year-old woman, were shot and killed by police officers. 

City Council President Zeke Cohen has called for a hearing to examine the city’s crisis response system in response to the deaths. The city has one single crisis response team, and it’s unclear if the officers involved in Melton, Abdullah, or Brooks’ case were trained in crisis intervention. BPD has not responded to questions about whether the crisis response team was called or whether any of the officers in Melton’s case had received crisis response training. 

Melton’s case, where he died while in restraint, bears a resemblance to the case of Tyrone West, who died while being violently restrained by police in 2013. West’s death was ruled “undetermined” for years until an audit of the state medical examiner’s office revealed this May that his death was among three dozen cases involving restraint-related deaths that were incorrectly categorized as undetermined instead of homicides due to pro-police, anti-Black bias within the office.

West’s sister, Tawanda Jones, says that the police promised transparency. But even before the autopsy was performed, on their first visit with the family, police were already laying the groundwork for explanations other than murder. “They said… ‘We want to make sure that there weren’t other contributing factors of Mr. West’s death, that he wasn’t suffering from the heat, you know, because it was really hot yesterday,’” Jones recalls.

Jones had just taken her brother for a physical and didn’t believe the medical examiner’s explanation that ultimately attributed her brother’s death to a heart condition and the heat. Jones has held “West Wednesday” protests for her brother every week since July 18, 2013, when he was killed, and refused a million dollar settlement so she could continue to speak freely about the case. Six hundred and sixteen weeks later, she was finally vindicated by the audit, which began in 2021 after former Maryland Chief Medical Examiner David Fowler testified for the defense during the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and said that the death of George Floyd should have been classified as having an “undetermined” cause.

“As horrible as my brother’s murder was, the cover up was far worse,” Jones says of the lack of transparency and attempts to blame her brother for his own murder.

Goode, Melton’s mother, feels a similar lack of transparency when dealing with officials from the police department and the OAG. “They kept saying they didn’t know if the person deceased was my son, yet they were at my door,” she says. “They said they didn’t know what time he got to the hospital, but said he died ‘a couple hours after arrival.’ They transferred my son to the Medical Examiner’s office as a John Doe yet he told the police officer his name when he asked  for help.”

“This is a nightmare,” Goode says, lamenting “a system that is not set up for people like my son to succeed.”

“I have signed graduation transcripts for literally hundreds of Baltimore City school kids and continued to help them navigate life with many of the same challenges as my son,” she says. “It was hard knowing that I could help everyone else’s child, but not my own.”

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On the evening of the Juneteenth holiday, a crowd gathered near the Upton Metro station off Pennsylvania Avenue, not to celebrate the end of slavery in America but to mourn the shooting of beloved arabber Bilal Abdullah, known as BJ.

Tawanda Jones was standing where she has so many times since Baltimore Police officers killed her brother in 2013 — beside another grieving family. Joy Alston, the mother of Abdullah, was sitting in a chair, surrounded by her surviving children and other friends, family, and members of the community. 

Alston was the only person sitting, but she was holding her head up, facing the crowd around her and the reality of what had happened, all while nursing an injured shoulder. When her son’s body was lying on the pavement, police physically wrestled her back as she was trying to reach him, causing the injury.

“I still was fighting to get over and see him on the ground,” Alston said. “When I finally got over, I saw him on the ground, and I knew he was dead. I knew he was dead then.”

“When you got men pushing you on and throwing you, doing all that at the same time, it’s hard,” Alston said. When her daughter demanded the officers leave Alston alone, they threatened to arrest her. 

This is one of the reasons why, according to numerous people at the vigil, the crowd was so distressed on the night of the shooting. Not only did police officers shoot a beloved arabber, but as he lay there dying, they were not rendering aid and would not let his mother reach him, injuring her in the process. 

“Everybody down here knows me and my kids,” Alston said.

Alston says that authorities kept the family waiting and in the dark at the hospital for over two hours. 

“I said, ‘Where’s my son? I want to see him,’” Alston recalled. At first, doctors told her that Abdullah was in stable condition. The next thing they told her was that her son had died.

Exactly what happened is not clear yet, and body camera or other footage has not been released. After her daughter noticed a casing on the ground that police didn’t collect as evidence, Alston is concerned about how thorough the investigation will be.

The Maryland Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division, which investigates police shootings, released a preliminary report describing the event: 

“The preliminary investigation revealed that at approximately 7:15 p.m., Baltimore City Police Department (BPD) officers in an unmarked cruiser were in the area of Pennsylvania Avenue and Laurens Street when they encountered an adult man standing at the corner, carrying a crossbody bag on his back. The officers attempted to speak with the man from their vehicle, and then one officer exited the unmarked cruiser and approached the man on foot. The man began walking away and the officer followed. As the officer followed, the man shifted the bag from back to front and fled on foot.”

Illinois v. Wardlow ruled in 2000 that fleeing in a high crime area can provide an officer reasonable suspicion to make a stop — a ruling that was an important factor in the case of  Freddie Gray’s 2015 death in police custody after he was chased for running in a “high crime area.”  

But in the 2023 case of Tyrie Washington, who was standing with a friend in Baltimore City and ran away when approached by police and argued that after Freddie Gray, it was reasonable for a Black man to fear the police, even when innocent, the Maryland Supreme Court ruled that “unprovoked flight may occur for innocent reasons, including those associated with fear of police officers.”

“Courts and police officers make this mistake somewhat regularly,” said David Jaros, a professor of law at University of Baltimore. “They are mechanically assuming that simply as long as a suspect runs and they are in a high crime area that means necessarily they have the authority to pursue and seize them.”

“That’s not actually what the case says and it’s certainly not the kind of totality of the circumstances test that includes everything we’ve learned in the last 25 years about why an African American man might run from police,” he said.

According to the Washington ruling, there was no reason for what allegedly happened next to occur at all. 

“A second officer exited the cruiser to assist. A third officer, posted at the intersection in a separate marked cruiser, also exited her vehicle,” the IID preliminary report says. “As the first officer grabbed the man, a firearm was discharged. This prompted the officers to retreat and/or take cover. The man then pointed a firearm at the officers and three officers exchanged gunfire with the man, striking him. A firearm was recovered from the man and secured by an officer.”

No evidence of Abdullah wielding a gun has been provided at this point. 

According to the IID, the shooting officers were “BPD Detective Devin Yancy, an 8-year veteran of the department; Detective Omar Rodriguez, a 6-year veteran of the department, both assigned to the Group Violence Unit; and Officer Ashley Negron, a 7-year veteran of the department, assigned to the Patrol Division.”

“Plainclothes” squads, which would include the Group Violence Unit and the District Action Teams, have had a deeply troubled history in the city, including the Gun Trace Task Force’s federal indictments in 2017. 

Police scanner audio does not reveal how an officer was shot in the foot, but it is clear that, though a medic was called, that officer was transported to Shock Trauma in a police vehicle before Abdullah was transported by medic. 

Though Commissioner Richard Worley seemed to blame the crowd in the aftermath, saying they “actually interfered with our ability to give the victim aid,” it is striking to members of Scan the Police, an abolitionist collective focused on monitoring police scanners, how seldom Abdullah is mentioned in the dispatch calls from either the Western or the Central Districts. “He’s only referenced once or twice in the hour or so of recording,” said a member of the collective, whose members do not want to be identified because of fear of reprisals. 

“Cop down. Suspect was hit,” is one of the few mentions of Abdullah, shortly before the wounded officer arrives at Shock Trauma for care. 

Much of police communication is encrypted, allegedly to ensure police safety, but with the convenient side effect of limiting scrutiny and transparency, and so it is impossible to know what else was said. 

Communications with BPD’s aviation unit Foxtrot paint a different picture than Worley’s statement. 

“Just to fill you all in. You got maybe a crowd of maybe 20-25 people. You got a lot of officers holding them back right now. We made an announcement for them to get back. [It] looks like they are starting to clear up right now,” Foxtrot said roughly seven minutes into the transmission about the incident. “We got plenty of officers. Way more than the people there.” Dozens of police cars were on the scene. 

The Abdullah family has dealt with BPD misleading the public about their family before. In December 2022, Bilal Abdullah’s brother Zayne was awarded a $375,000 settlement for an altercation that occurred two years earlier. Initially, when body camera footage was released of people struggling with Police Sergeant Welton Simpson, police, politicians, and gullible news outlets jumped in to condemn the lawless behavior. “Just before midnight last night, one of our sergeants was conducting a business check on Pennsylvania Ave. when a person in the business became argumentative with the sergeant and spat in his face. Subsequently, as the video that was recently posted online shows, several other people began kicking the sergeant as he was trying to arrest the suspect,” then-Commissioner Michael Harrison said in a statement. Harrison said he was “outraged, as any resident of Baltimore should be,” and noted that “based on our preliminary review of the incident, the sergeant did nothing to provoke the assault, and the sergeant should be commended for using the appropriate amount of force to apprehend his assailant.”

Independent video revealed that Simpson bumped into Zayne Abdullah and said “get the fuck out of my face.” As they exchanged words, Simpson pushed Abdullah. Simpson was choking Abdullah and another man, who was also awarded a $375,000 settlement, tried to get Simpson off of Abdullah, who was saying he couldn’t breathe. Both men were held in pre-trial detention without bail until their lawyers released the new evidence. The incident occurred in the same neighborhood where Zayne’s brother, Bilal Abdullah was shot. 

Several of Bilal’s siblings spoke at the vigil about how deeply Bilal cared about the people around him.

“He ‘gon put his heart on the line for anything,” said one brother, who didn’t want to give his name. “Everybody love him but his brother loves him the most.” 

“He loved the kids. He loved the hood, everybody loved him,” said a sister. “Fruit man, everybody loved him.” 

The family and supporters will be calling for justice in a protest that will meet at Penn North at 6 p.m. Friday June 20 and march to the Upton Metro Station. 

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Well-known Baltimore arabber Bilal Abdullah was shot by members of the Baltimore Police Department near Penn North around 7:30 yesterday evening and pronounced dead at Shock Trauma at 11:14 p.m. 

BPD has not released Abdullah’s name, the names of any of the shooting officers, or the officer reported to have been shot in the foot. Three members of the arabber community and one of Abdullah’s family members have confirmed his identity to Baltimore Beat.

Abdullah, who was known as “BJ” for Bilal Junior, was born into arabbing, or the tradition of selling produce along city streets in a colorful horse-drawn wagon, enticing customers with distinctive cries for watermelons, cantaloupe, or other fruit. 

“[He] came up in the stables. His dad had a lot of horses and he was one of the most hardcore arabbers for a number of years,” says M. Holden Warren, former president of Baltimore’s Arabber Preservation Society and co-founder of Stable Baltimore, a nonprofit dedicated to horse culture and healing in Baltimore. “Every day, he was out with a horse covering the whole city. He went [the] distance.” 

“He had customers everywhere. He was one of the old-school guys. He had real routes. People relied on him.” 

Levar Mullen, a life-long arabber and violence interrupter who also co-founded Stable Baltimore, has known Abdullah all his life. He recalls that when Abdullah was too young to go arabbing himself, “every time we would go through there with a wagon, man, he would follow us for blocks. When I tell you about the term ‘horse crazy,’ it was BJ,” Mullen says. 

“I walk about 24 miles a day,” Abdullah told Mic in a 2018 story. “I gotta keep new shoes. The soles be gone on them.” He said that he would often take kids on his route. 

Abdullah was the subject of a lengthy Eater profile in 2014, where he was dubbed “the last of the arabbers.” 

“If I didn’t have this wagon, the police would be chasing me,” Abdullah told Eater more than a decade ago. According to BPD, that is what happened on Tuesday night. 

“On June 17, 2025, at approximately 7:17 p.m., Officers were patrolling near the intersection of Pennsylvania Avenue and Laurens Street when they observed an adult male believed to be armed,” BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge wrote in a statement. They did not provide information on why the officers believed him to be armed. 

Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters at a news briefing that the person began to run. According to police, the individual they were chasing fired a weapon, hitting a veteran officer in the foot as three officers opened fire on him. 

The Office of the Attorney General will be investigating the shooting, as it has since October 2023, when a new law gave that office, instead of the State’s Attorney’s Office, the power to investigate police shootings. 

“The AG’s Office will release the identity of male and officers,” BPD’s Eldridge wrote in response to questions about the identity of those involved, noting that it usually takes “within 2-4 business days.” Eldridge also said that BPD would be releasing body camera footage in accordance with its policies. 

Abdullah, who had worked out of the Fremont Street stable, a short distance from where he was shot, was well known in the community. A stand-off developed between residents and police, as dozens of officers were deployed to the area, while people expressed anger and grief. 

In his briefing, Worley seemed to place blame on the community for Abdullah’s death. “The crowd actually interfered with our ability to give the victim aid,” Worley said. “Officers from all around the city had to come to kind of quash the disturbance so that we could get the victim to the hospital.”

In the Eater story, Abdullah detailed some of his struggles with the criminal justice system, which began when he started selling crack after his father, Bilal Abdullah Sr. died.

 “That’s all you grow up around,” he told the reporter. “You see people wearing the finer things and diamond rings. If that’s what you want, eventually that’s what you end up doing. Then it leads you to a place you don’t want to be.”

“I don’t know what transpired yesterday that led up to that tragic event, but what I can say is that he is not a violent person,” Mullen says. “He didn’t live his life based on violence.” 

Mullen remembers Abdullah as “one of a kind.”

“He was a great arabber, a great family member, [and] a great comrade in the horse world.” 

This story will be updated.

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“My world ended on July 18, 2013,” says Tawanda Jones, of the night that police officers killed her brother near Morgan State University in Northeast Baltimore. Her brother, Tyrone West, had eaten dinner with Jones that night and borrowed her car. Within a couple hours, Jones recalls, she was overwhelmed by a feeling that something was wrong with him. “I got all this pain, overwhelming pain, that leads up to the time when my brother was getting murdered, like my neck, my back, it felt like somebody broke my neck. I’m in there screaming,” she says.

Her family tried to calm her down as she made frantic phone calls trying to find West. Eventually, her then-fiance walked in the room and told her, “You were right, Tawanda. Someone killed your brother.”

Though police beat West that night, the Maryland Office of the Chief Medical Examiner ruled the cause of death was not homicide, but “undetermined” and resulting from a heart condition, which Jones maintains her brother did not suffer from. 

In the 616 weeks since, during which she has protested the killing of her brother, she has tried to get people in power to listen to her family’s story and rule his death a homicide, as he was, as she puts it “beat worse than Rodney King.” 

Finally, on May 15, Governor Wes Moore and Attorney General Anthony Brown announced that an independent audit of OCME found three dozen deaths in police custody that should have been ruled homicides during the nearly 20-year tenure of Dr. David Fowler — including that of Jones’ brother, West. (See our previous reporting on the audit here)

“I literally cried out like a baby today,” Jones told Baltimore Beat. “To see my brother’s name included, and just to know that for a whole entire decade, I’ve been fighting and literally taking my soul out of my body, being my brother’s keeper, and trying to convey the message that my brother was, you know, brutally murdered.”

On July 18, 2013, Baltimore Police officers claimed that West and a passenger were acting suspicious in the vehicle he was driving. Officers Jorge Bernardez-Ruiz and Nicholas Chapman claimed that when they noticed a bulge in his sock, West charged Chapman, trying to poke him in the eye. Witnesses said the officers pulled West from the car by his hair and with more than a dozen other officers present “started beating him and Maced him, he got up and called for help and the cops knocked him over and beat him to death, then tried to bring him back.”

Jones says that neither she nor anyone else in her family was notified. “Why didn’t nobody call me? Like he had my car. They could have called me,” Jones says. When detectives and a police colonel showed up at the house the next day, “they’re doing, like, an investigation on my whole damn family,” Jones says. “And I’m like, why are you asking? Like, we should be asking you guys questions: What happened to my brother?”

Jones says that the police promised transparency and said the autopsy would be performed that afternoon. But even before the autopsy was performed, on that first visit with the family, police were already laying the groundwork for explanations other than murder. “And they said… ‘We want to make sure that there weren’t other contributing factors of Mr. West’s death, that he wasn’t suffering from the heat, you know, because it was really hot yesterday,’” Jones recalls. “And then [the Colonel] said, ‘We want to make sure Mr. West didn’t have a bad heart or anything like that.’”

Jones told them she had just taken her brother for a physical and that his heart was fine, but, despite the promises that there would be an autopsy that day, OCME did not release West’s body to the family for five days. “Even the funeral home called us and said, ‘Look, we never heard of such a thing,’” West recalls. 

OCME did not release a post-mortem examination report to the family until December 11, 2013. But when they did, it echoed the theory floated by police that first day, declaring “this 44 year old man, Tyrone West, died of Cardiac Arrhythmia due to Cardiac Conduction System Abnormality complicated by Dehydration during Police Restraint.”

Rather than ruling the death a homicide, OCME ruled the cause of death as undetermined. “And then that’s when [then-State’s Attorney] Gregg Bernstein came in and he said … he was basing his information off the findings from the medical examiner’s office,” Jones recalls. “So if the medical record would have said so, my brother’s case would have been treated like a homicide.”

Jones did not accept the ruling and, after a tissue analysis contradicted the autopsy, she had her brother’s body exhumed for an independent autopsy, performed by a board-certified pathologist who ruled in 2016 that West died from asphyxiation while being restrained by police. In 2017, Jones refused a $1 million settlement, because it would have prevented her from continuing to fight for the truth about her brother’s death to come out. 

Finally, after nearly 12 years, the independent audit, released last week ruled that OCME’s determination was faulty and the death should have been ruled a homicide. 

The audit began in 2021 after Fowler testified for the defense during the murder trial of former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin and said that the death of George Floyd should have been classified as having an “undetermined” cause. Video of Floyd’s arrest showed Chauvin pressing his knee against Floyd’s neck for more than nine minutes, and Chauvin was ultimately convicted of murder.

More than 450 medical experts signed a letter to then-Attorney General Brian Frosh calling for an independent review of OCME’s practices during Fowler’s tenure leading the office from 2003 until 2019.

The audit team selected 87 cases to review out of more than 1,300 in-custody deaths investigated by OCME during that period and hired 12 independent forensic pathologists to examine the cases. Three reviewers were assigned to independently review each case and make their own determinations of the manner of death. In 36 cases, all three reviewers agreed the death should have been ruled a homicide. In another five cases, two out of the three reviewers found the manner of death should have been homicide.

“This audit is incredibly troubling, but sadly confirms what we have seen for years — that the OCME holds deep-seated biases that favor the police and mirror the racial disparities that pervade the entire criminal legal system,” Maryland Deputy Public Defender Keith Lotridge said in a statement to the Beat regarding the audit findings. “The families of the victims have suffered for years while enduring the blaming and smearing of their loved ones.” 

“As horrible as my brother’s murder was, the cover up was far worse,” Jones says. “So when you have people from the medical examiner’s office lying — they do the final examination of your loved one, and they come back being biased, like that  — that’s ridiculous.”

Still, by focusing on a limited number of cases, primarily those in which the death bore some resemblance to that of Floyd’s, the audit may have only scratched the surface of problems with Fowler’s OCME, as reporting by The Appeal has shown, with their own investigation into in-custody deaths that were labeled by the office as “natural” or “suicide.” Jones has previously called on the state to examine all 1,313 in-custody deaths in the OCME database. 

The report’s findings do not automatically mean there will be criminal charges or that police will face discipline. Instead, the Maryland Attorney General’s Office plans to review with each jurisidiction’s state’s attorney’s office all of the cases that reviewers say should have been identified as homicides. 

That is further complicated in West’s case, where Baltimore State’s Attorney Ivan Bates and Maryland AG Brown have been arguing since 2023 not whether West’s case should be examined, but who should do it. After a new law giving the Attorney General’s office the power to investigate police-involved deaths, Bates called on Brown to take on the case, claiming that his own office had a conflict of interest that prevented him from pursuing it. 

“If you’d like, we can also assist in creating or vetting a deconfliction policy to address the potential conflict that you believe might prevent you from investigating the death of Mr. West, and any future potential conflicts that routinely may arise in an office of your size,” Brown responded in a letter to Bates. The conflict involves an assistant state’s attorney who is married to Bernardez-Ruiz, one of the police officers who killed West. 

“Right now, I want the AG’s office to bring their special prosecutors out and secure criminal charges” against the officers, Jones says. 

“While the Office of the Attorney General did brief prosecutorial offices as to aspects on the forthcoming report, neither the report itself nor the full details of its findings, methodologies, or conclusions were shared with Maryland’s State’s Attorneys in advance of its public release,” Richard Gibson, the president of the Maryland State’s Attorneys Association said in a statement. “As such, at this time, we are not in a position to support or oppose the analysis or conclusions contained within the document until we conduct our own independent due diligence.”

“The Office of the Attorney General intends to fulfill its obligations under the Governor’s Executive Order, which includes reviewing the 41 cases, in consultation with the respective State’s Attorney, and determining whether any additional action is appropriate,” Kelsey Hartman, an OAG spokesperson said. 

The Baltimore City SAO has not responded to repeated requests for comment. 

“This report will be meaningless if multiple steps are not taken,” says deputy public defender Lotridge.  “First, the families of the victims need to be provided with avenues of relief. The officers involved in these homicides also need to be investigated and held accountable, with a full review of all of their work.”

In 2016, Bernardez-Ruiz and Chapman, two of the officers involved in West’s death, were found guilty in a civil case brought by Abdul Salaam, a youth counselor who Bernardez-Ruiz and Chapman stopped and severely beat in an alley while his child was in the car and his neighbors watched. Salaam was awarded $70,000 by a jury. 

Nine officers involved in West’s death, including one from Morgan State University’s private force, were initially suspended while an internal investigation was conducted. No charges were brought against any of the officers, and Bernardez-Ruiz was promoted to the rank of sergeant in 2020. 

“The Baltimore Police Department is aware of the recent audit findings. We are committed to full transparency and we will fully cooperate with the State in its ongoing investigation and findings,” BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge wrote in a statement. 

“I always knew that these weren’t isolated incidents,” says Jones, who has long sought to bring light to other cases of police brutality in Baltimore, including Anthony Anderson, Freddie Gray, and others. 

In 2005, years before Gray’s death in a police vehicle “rough ride” sparked the Baltimore Uprising, a plumber named Dondi Johnson was arrested for public urination and thrown into the back of a police van. He died two weeks later from injuries he sustained during a “rough ride.” OCME ruled the death an accident. The audit deemed it should have been a homicide. Nicole Leake, the driver of the van, appeared in an “I am BPD” promotional video in 2015.

The report does not address controversial cases, where the issue is something other than OCME’s determination of the cause of death, such as that of Donnell Rochester, who was shot and killed by Officer Connor Murray on February 19, 2022. In that case, the SAO, under Marilyn Mosby, investigated the killing and decided not to bring charges. But instead of releasing their findings, that administration left them for her successor Bates, who followed Mosby’s recommendation and did not charge the officers. However, in a separate report, the Attorney General’s office ruled that there was probable cause to bring charges. But, because the case occurred prior to the 2023 law allowing the OAG to investigate police deaths, Brown’s office argued there is nothing it can do. Danielle Brown, Rochester’s mother, has been urging Governor Moore to “order the Maryland Attorney General to prosecute those involved in the killing of Donnell.”

Governor Moore’s executive order regarding the crisis at OCME empowers the OAG to investigate deaths such as West’s, even if they occurred before the responsibility of such investigations was transferred to their office. So, the audit report opens the possibility of prosecutions for the officers involved in the deaths of dozens of people in the city and throughout the state. 

“I’ve been standing 10 toes down and I’m gonna keep pushing it ‘til I bring it home, and home for me is securing criminal charges for what they did…They said they based their findings on what the medical examiner’s office lied about,” says Jones. “Let’s base it on the truth, and let’s get some criminal charges.”

Madeleine O’Neill contributed reporting.

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April in Baltimore ended with a historically low number of homicides. Five people were murdered that month, the fewest in any recorded month in the city’s history, ending a decade where the city regularly surpassed 300 homicides a year. “This is progress, but we aren’t stopping to celebrate,” Mayor Brandon Scott said. “Five homicides in April is still five too many — and we will continue to use all tools at our disposal to prevent violence and save lives.”

But at the end of that month, the city had fewer tools at its disposal than it previously had thanks to major cuts by the Trump administration. On April 22, the Department of Justice cancelled more than 360 ongoing grants totalling more than $800 million issued by the Office of Justice Programs for community violence intervention work around the country, including programs credited with contributing to Baltimore’s dramatic reduction in homicides. 

The Justice Department eliminated the grant funding in cookie-cutter emails sent to the organizations, terminating the funds immediately. 

“The Department has changed its priorities with respect to discretionary grant funding to focus on, among other things, more directly supporting certain law enforcement operations, combatting violent crime, protecting American children, and supporting American victims of trafficking and sexual assault, and better coordinating law enforcement efforts at all levels of government,” one termination letter, obtained by Baltimore Beat, read. “This award demonstrates that it no longer effectuates Department priorities.”

The Justice Department did not respond to request for comment, but the cuts came days before the Executive Order “Strengthening and Unleashing America’s Law Enforcement,” which promises to “establish best practices at the State and local level for cities to unleash high-impact local police forces; protect and defend law enforcement officers wrongly accused and abused by State or local officials; and surge resources to officers in need.” 

Paired with the cuts, the “unleashing” seems in part to mean “defunding” everything but the police. Additionally, the executive order promises to review all consent decrees, such as the one the Baltimore Police Department has been operating under since 2016, “and modify, rescind, or move to conclude such measures that unduly impede the performance of law enforcement functions.”

“For all their lip service about public safety, the Trump administration doesn’t give a damn about it,” Scott said in a statement. “They said they support law enforcement but they’re defunding programs to support public safety officers and pardoned [January 6] rioters.”

The organizations whose grants were terminated have 30 days to appeal.

“At the precise moment that we are realizing these public safety reductions, when we’re seeing all of these partners in the city of Baltimore… truly doing work to coordinate together, at that very moment, we’re seeing a withdrawing of that investment and that threatens to undermine the gain that we’ve worked so hard collectively to achieve,” said Stefanie Mavronis, the director of the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE). 

Roca, a violence interruption program that was founded in Massachusetts and has worked in Baltimore since 2018, is one of those organizations. In 2022, Roca’s Baltimore program was awarded $1,998,807 as part of the Office of Justice Programs’ Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative. 

“At 5:00 pm on [April] 22, we got a letter that three of our grants are gone,” said Kurtis Palermo, vice president of Roca Maryland. “It was just gone.” 

Roca’s model is based on what they call “relentless outreach,” which begins when they “find young people at the center of violence and show up at their door—and we keep showing up every day until they open up,” as the organization’s website puts it. In one case in Baltimore, it took 112 visits to bring one young man into the program. Like the city’s Safe Streets program and other violence interruption programs, this approach involves working with “credible messengers,” whose own histories around violence allow them to speak honestly and authoritatively to those most at risk for violence. Unlike Safe Streets, or the national Cure Violence model, Roca’s interventions are more intensive and long-term, involving skills training and a look at the larger systemic causes of violence. 

But like other violence intervention programs, Roca is responsive to individual acts of violence, operating on the idea that the victim of a shooting is likely to become a shooter. With the Community Based Violence Intervention and Prevention Initiative, Roca expanded the use of their data-driven After Shooting Protocol, where “all non-fatal shootings will be reviewed daily and each identified young person will receive a door knock within 24-48 hours to connect them to services.”

With only about half of the roughly $2 million grant spent, Roca quite suddenly lost about a million bucks. And this comes on top of losing $1.3 million in congressional earmarks that had already been approved by Congress for Roca Baltimore’s Transitional Employment Program but was later scrapped as legislators kicked the budgetary can down the road, forcing the organization to make difficult decisions even before the grant cuts. 

“We eliminated three open positions in December, then in March, we did a modest layoff in Baltimore,” said Dwight Robson, executive vice president of operations at Roca. “We’ve gone from 10 youth workers to seven.”

Even with increased case-loads for the remaining outreach workers, this has very real consequences on the streets of Baltimore. “Last year, in FY 24 we served 441 individuals, I believe,” Robson said. “We’re now planning to serve about 380 on an annual basis…So we have had to reduce it by 60.” 

Roca is struggling to prioritize the most high-risk people to work with, Robson says. 

“There is no such thing as low or moderate risk, with regards to Roca, Baltimore,” he said. “But, that’s 60 fewer individuals that we will engage with.”

“It definitely does have an impact if we’re seeing these community violence intervention organizations have to scale back the number of staff, taking people off the street [who] can prevent the next incident of violence from happening,” says Mavronis of MONSE. 

Roca is not the only organization that the mayor’s office credits with contributing to the reduction of violence that has lost its funding. Living Classrooms Foundation lost $1 million in grant money for its Operation Respond, whose goal is “to provide comprehensive services through our mobile Crisis Response Resource Center,” which is modified RV staffed with a team comprised of resource navigators, a licensed clinical social worker, and career and workforce development case managers. The hope is to “empower those at the highest risk of community gun violence, helping them heal from unresolved trauma and transform their lives for the better,” in the Belair-Edison and McElderry Park neighborhoods, which are also Safe Streets “catchment areas,” where the city has focused resources to curb violence.

LifeBridge Health’s Center for Hope also lost around a million dollars remaining in a grant for a program supporting therapy for gun victims. LifeBridge runs several of the city’s Safe Streets locations, but Safe Street’s operational and staff funding was not affected, according to Mavronis. 

“Safe Streets and the funding that supports it is pretty well secured,” Mavronis said. “Our state legislature, back in maybe 2018, put it into the budget, so every single year there is $3.6 million in the state budget along with more than a million, if I’m not mistaken, from city general funds that support Safe Streets.” 

Though Safe Streets is funded through the city and state, it does not work closely with the police department because the nature of its work requires trust from those likely to be victims or perpetrators of violence. Safe Streets’ violence interrupters would, they feel, lose credibility — and access to vital information — if the streets thought they were collaborating with police. 

Roca, on the other hand, works closely with police and began a program in 2024 that uses the same emotional regulation training that they deploy in the community to “rewire” the mental processes of police officers. “Our training has gotten a lot better over the last few years, and this happens to be one of the best ones that we have,” Baltimore Police Commissioner Richard Worley told WBAL in September 2024. BPD has not responded to request for comment on the loss of funding for these organizations. 

The Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) also lost funding. PERF, which has had close relationships with several Baltimore Police commissioners and released an after-action report on BPD’s handling of the 2015 Uprising, focuses many programs on police reform 

As much as the loss of the DOJ grants may affect individual organizations, the uncertainty of the future is worse. 

“What I’m hearing from everyone is just bracing ourselves for the fact that this is just the first of what’s probably going to be more and many cuts,” Mavronis said. “So I think part of what we’re dealing with right now is the uncertainty…and knowing in the back of our minds that there’s certainly more to come.” 

Mavronis says MONSE is working with its partners to try to limit the damage to their work, seeking funding from the city, state, or philanthropic partners but that such conversations are ongoing, due in part to the “chaotic nature in which some of these decision notifications are coming down.”

“We are adjusting to this situation while preparing for what could be several other shoes to drop,” Roca’s Robson said.

Despite the uncertainty, which Palermo compares to the onset of COVID-19 in 2020, MONSE and its partners are working to maintain the violence interruption work that they credit with the dramatic decrease in homicides in the city. 

“We’re not going to stop doing what we’re doing,” Palermo said. “We may not look the same through all of this, but we’re still going to serve young people.”

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The Maryland cop who first linked Kilmar Abrego Garcia to alleged gang activity in 2019 was placed on a “do not call” list published by Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Aisha Braveboy in 2021 — meaning he was deemed unfit to testify in state court due to criminal charges filed against him for sharing confidential information about a police investigation. 

This means that the Trump administration has detained Abrego Garcia in the CECOT prison in El Salvador, against the rulings of the Supreme Court and a Maryland District Court, based solely on the word of a cop deemed untrustworthy by the county’s state’s attorney’s office. 

The New Republic first reported that PGPD Corporal Ivan Mendez, who filled out Abrego Garcia’s “gang field interview sheet,” pleaded guilty to criminal misconduct in office charges based on giving information about a police investigation to a sex worker in December 2018, according to Maryland Case Search — just months before Abrego Garcia’s arrest in a Home Depot parking lot.

Attorney General Pam Bondi released on Wednesday a redacted form of the “Gang Field Interview Sheet” filled out by Mendez when PGPD arrested Abrego Garcia in 2019, with right-wing media outlets crowing that they “reveal” his MS-13 gang “rank” and “street name.” 

Abrego Garcia has been illegally abducted by the Trump administration and imprisoned in El Salvador on the basis of the allegation of gang membership, which, the administration claims, annuls the 2019 “withholding order” that made it illegal to deport him to El Salvador. 

Baltimore Beat reporting shows Mendez was one of 57 officers on a “do not call” list published by Prince George’s County State’s Attorney Braveboy in 2021. 

At the time the list was released, Braveboy said that untrustworthy officers risk “the integrity of cases brought to the justice system.” And yet, the United States Department of Justice is basing the extraordinary rendition of a Maryland resident solely on the credibility of just such an officer.

According to Maryland Case Search, Mendez’s crime occurred on December 31, 2018, when, according to the Prince George’s County Police Department, he provided “confidential information to a commercial sex worker who he was paying in exchange for sexual acts. The information he provided focused on an on-going police investigation.”

On March 28, 2019, Abrego Garcia went to the Home Depot in Hyattsville, looking for work as a day laborer. While waiting around for a job, Abrego Garcia and three other men were stopped by police, according to court documents. “At the police station, the four young men were placed into different rooms and questioned. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was asked if he was a gang member; when he told police he was not, they said that they did not believe him and repeatedly demanded that he provide information about other gang members. The police told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that he would be released if he cooperated, but he repeatedly explained that he did not have any information to give because he did not know anything,” a 2019 court filing reads. 

Mendez filled out the “Gang Field Interview Sheet” that deemed Abrego Garcia a member of MS-13, based on the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie “indicative of the Hispanic gang culture” and a confidential informant who told them that Abrego Garcia was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” even though the Western clique is located in Long Island — a place Abrego Garcia had never been. “Officers know MS-13 gang members are only allowed to hang around other members or prospects for the gang,” Mendez wrote. 

Then, only three days later, on April 1, “PGPD was first made aware of the allegations against Mendez,” the department’s statement reads. “He was suspended on April 3, 2019.”

“The officer’s police powers were then suspended and he remains suspended. We then brought our investigation to the State’s Attorney Office for consideration of charges,” said then-Interim Police Chief Hector Velez. “All allegations of criminal misconduct by our officers are taken seriously and thoroughly investigated.”

Mendez was investigated thoroughly enough that he pleaded guilty to misconduct in office in state court in 2022, being sentenced to probation before judgment. 

So, because of his illegal use of information, Mendez was only an active-duty officer for five days after alleging that Abrego Garcia was a gang member. Meanwhile, Abrego Garcia remained locked up for months in the Howard County Detention Center, where he married his pregnant wife Jennifer Vasquez Sura in a ceremony that was “far from how we ever imagined it.” 

In October 2019, after months of incarceration based solely on the word of Mendez, who had already been charged with misconduct in office, a judge granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal” status, which made it illegal for him to be deported to El Salvador because of “past persecution based on protected ground, and the presumption of a well-founded fear of future persecution,” which means that the government could not deport him to El Salvador because to do so would cause irreparable harm based upon past threats. 

Then, more than five years later, after Mendez pleaded guilty to misconduct in office, the entire executive branch holds Mendez’s Gang Field Interview Sheet, filled out in the period between Mendez committing a crime and his imminent exposure, above the ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court, which, in a 9-0 decision, ordered the Trump administration to facilitate the return of Abrego Garcia. 

After the power trip press conference held by President Trump and El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele, in which they made a verbal game of Abrego Garcia’s rendition and detention, Maryland Senator (D) Chris Van Hollen travelled to El Salvador on Wednesday where he met with Vice President Félix Ulloa, but was denied a visit or even a phone call with Abrego Garcia, to at the very least confirm that he was healthy and, in the worst case scenario, still alive. 

Abrego Garcia’s wife Vasquez Sura has not heard from him since March 15, the day before he was sent to CECOT, when he called her from an ICE detention center in Louisiana.  

“That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different. He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote in a court filing. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.” 

She only knows he’s at CECOT because she was able to pick him out of one of the published photographs of stripped and shaved inmates who had been deported to the prison without due process. Neither she nor his lawyers have had any news or contact with him since then. 

“President Trump and our Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Vice President of the United States are lying when they say Abrego Garcia has been charged with a crime or is a member of MS-13,” Van Hollen said in a statement. “This is a lie to cover up what they did…they illegally abducted Mr. Abrego Garcia from Maryland.”

Van Hollen is the first lawmaker to take real action attempting to effectuate Abrego Garcia’s return. Senator Angela Alsobrooks, who was the County Executive for Prince George’s County when Mendez first arrested Abrego Garcia, has not responded to the Beat’s questions about the role of the disgraced PGPD corporal in Abrego Garcia’s illegal, out-of-country detention. 

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On Monday, when President Donald Trump met with with Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele at The White House, the two authoritarian leaders sent a clear signal that Trump administration is solidifying plans to use the Terrorism Confinement Center (CECOT) in El Salvador as an offshore gulag, one where the U.S. judicial branch has no jurisdiction over who is detained, including legal residents and citizens. A Maryland District Court and the U.S. Supreme Court have ordered the administration to “facilitate” and “effectuate” the return of Maryland’s Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was illegally deported to the Salvadoran prison, in what the administration calls an “oversight” and an “administrative error.” In their joint press conference, Trump and Bukele scoffed at the rule of law in their refusal to afford due process to Abrego Garcia, signaling yet another crisis point in the legal saga that has unfolded in Maryland and El Salvador over the last month. 

On March 12, Abrego Garcia was pulled over after picking up his special needs son at the end of his shift as a union metalworkers apprentice and detained. “At approximately 9:00 PM the night he was arrested, Kilmar called me from Baltimore,” his wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura recalled in a court filing. “Kilmar did not understand what was happening or why. He was reassured he would see a judge.”

But, like hundreds of others recently detained by ICE and deported without due process, he did not see a judge. On the morning of March 15, Abrego Garcia called his wife one more time. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different. He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.” 

On April 4, Paula Xinis, a federal judge in Maryland, ruled that the Trump administration must return Abrego Garcia to the United States by the end of the day Monday, April 7, noting that allegations of gang affiliation need to come in “the form of an indictment, complaint, criminal processing … I haven’t yet heard any of that from the government.” 

The ruling notes that, though Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador, “this court retains subject area jurisdiction” to order his return in order to “preserve the status quo and preserve Abrego Garcia’s access to due process in accordance with the Constitution and governing immigration statutes.”

The Trump administration’s response was chilling. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia is presently being held in El Salvador, by the El Salvadoran Government. The United States does not have control over Abrego Garcia. Or the sovereign nation of El Salvador. Nevertheless, the court’s injunction commands that Defendants accomplish, somehow, Abrego Garcia’s return to the United States in give or take one business day,” the government wrote in its formal court response to the ruling. “Such a request—one made to a foreign ally, on a hyper-sensitive subject, involving a designated terrorist—is freighted with foreign policy considerations.”

Chief Justice John Roberts had previously issued an “administrative stay,” halting Xinis’s order demanding that the U.S. government “facilitate and effectuate the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7.”  But last Thursday, April 10, the Supreme Court removed this stay, and unanimously ordered the government to detail its efforts to return Abrego Garcia, but also giving the administration a wedge when declaring that the district court must also show “due regard for the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs.”

The government argued that “facilitate” should be interpreted as removing “any domestic obstacles,” but not to “make demands of the Salvadoran government” or “dispatch personnel onto the soil of an independent, sovereign nation” because “a federal court cannot compel the Executive Branch to engage in any mandated act of diplomacy or incursion upon the sovereignty of another nation.”

This argument creates an impossible position for Abrego Garcia, who was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1995. The Barrio 18 gang first extorted the family for selling pupusas out of the house and then began to try to recruit Abrego Garcia, threatening him if he didn’t join the gang, even after the family moved multiple times. This history led to the “withholding order” that kept him from being deported to El Salvador, where, judges ruled, he would face irreparable harm from the gangs. Bukele used the same gangs and related violence as a pretense to suspend constitutional rights so that the country could make mass arrests without due process. So now Abrego Garcia is being held in prison with the very gangs he fled. 

Trump and Bukele, both master manipulators of media, played up their logical bind for the cameras. When a reporter asked Bukele if he would return Abrego Garcia, who the Trump administration accuses without any evidence of belonging to the MS-13 gang, Bukele called the question “preposterous.” 

“Of course I’m not going to do it,” he said. “I hope you’re not suggesting that I smuggle a terrorist into the United States…How can I return him to the United States. I smuggle him into the United States? Of course I’m not going to do it….I don’t have the power to return him to the United States.” 

Trump grinned at this bit of sophistry. His administration has been claiming that it does not have the power to follow a court order and bring a Maryland resident home, while Bukele says that he somehow does not have the power to return Abrego Garcia to the U.S. either and that to do so would, somehow, be the equivalent of “smuggling.” Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff and long-time advocate of draconian border policies, claimed in the same press conference that Xinis in Maryland had asked the administration to “kidnap” Abrego Garcia from CECOT. 

The bad faith arguments are almost laughable. But the consequences are dire. Justice Sonia Sotomayor noted the inherent danger in this situation in a concurring opinion. “The government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U.S. citizens, without any consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.” 

Trump himself made the same point, in an exchange that Bukele posted on social media. “The homegrowns are next,” Trump says in the video. “You’ve got to build about five more places, alright? It’s not big enough.” In keeping with the sadistic mood of the press conference, the room erupts with laughter. 

Trump has made the suggestion before. “I have suggested that you know why should it stop just at people that cross the border illegally? We have some horrible criminals, American-grown and born,” he said last week when asked about the deportations to El Salvador. “If we could get El Salvador or somebody to take them I’d be very happy with it, but I have to see what the law says.”

Of course, both the Supreme Court and a Maryland District court have ruled that the deportation of Abrego Garcia is illegal and the administration has refused to comply with “what the law says.” As if flaunting their refusal to acknowledge court orders they don’t like, Miller now claims that Abrego Garcia’s deportation was not an “error” at all. “No one was mistakenly sent anywhere. The only mistake that was made is a lawyer put an incorrect line in a legal filing,” he said. “Because he is a member of a foreign terrorist organization, withholding orders do not apply.” 

There has been no evidence presented since 2019, when Abrego Garcia was granted the holding order, that he had any gang affiliation. At the time, the alleged affiliation was dependent on the evidence that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and sweatshirt, which agents claim would indicate he was a member of an MS-13 set that operated in Long Island, New York — a place Abrego Garcia had never been. But the legal bind created by Salvadoran, rather than domestic, incarceration bypasses the need for due process. 

“If they can just sweep someone off the street, put them on an airplane, and send them to a torturer’s prison in an authoritarian state like El Salvador without due process and then not bring him back claiming they have no control over El Salvador,” Maryland Congressional Representative Jamie Raskin said in an interview on Legal AF. “Then they could do it to anybody.”

Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen wrote to the Salvadoran Ambassador to the United States, Milena Mayorga, to request a meeting with Bukele. “Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia never should have been abducted and illegally deported, and the courts have made clear: the Administration must bring him home, now. However, since the Trump Administration appears to be ignoring these court mandates, we need to take additional action. That’s why I’ve requested to meet with President Bukele during his trip to the United States, and – if Kilmar is not home by midweek – I plan to travel to El Salvador this week to check on his condition and discuss his release,” Van Hollen said in a statement.

There was a prayer vigil held outside of The White House during Trump and Bukele’s meeting to pray for Abrego Garcia’s return and a protest at the federal building in Baltimore, where ICE has been holding detainees in substandard conditions. 

Chanting “Bring back Kilmar!” and “No ICE, no KKK, no fascist USA,” about 100 protestors marched through downtown Baltimore, demanding Abrego Garcia’s return. The demonstration, organized by grassroots groups including Free State Coalition, Baltimore Rapid Response Network, and local Indivisible chapters, drew a cross-section of concerned residents, union members, and immigrant rights activists. They carried signs that read: “No Justice, No Peace,” “Defend Due Process,” and “Kilmar Cannot Be Disappeared.”

“Kilmar is a family man — a hardworking person and union member who was trying to achieve the so-called American dream,” said Joseph Raysor, Jr., a member of Teamsters Local Union 355. “I just had to let my voice be heard today so that he knows, and his family knows, there are people in his corner fighting for his return.”

Speakers at the demonstration emphasized that the protest was just the beginning. Organizers announced plans for sustained weekly demonstrations — what they are calling “Occupy ICE”— held every Monday at the federal building. Larger mobilizations are also planned for the coming weeks, including May 1, International Workers’ Day.

“This is a moment that should shudder us to the core,” said Sergio España, an organizer with the Baltimore Rapid Response Network. “If the Supreme Court allows this to stand — if we allow this to happen — then there is no rule of law left in this country. It doesn’t matter if you’re brown. It doesn’t matter if you’re Black. It doesn’t matter if you’re an immigrant.”

Senators Angela Alsobrooks and Van Hollen had previously toured the Baltimore site and sent a letter to the Department of Homeland Security and ICE arguing that “it is clear that the directives from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and ICE Headquarters in service of President Trump’s mass deportation agenda are resulting in unacceptable harms inflicted on those being detained.” 

The conditions are so bad in part because of the number of people being detained there, and yet ICE continues to arrest people with no criminal history, as in the case of Elsy Noemi Berrios, who was pulled from a car in Westminster, Maryland, after an ICE agent with no warrant broke its window. 

“This President’s goal is to overwhelm us with chaos and cruelty in hopes that we fail to notice that he lacks the ability to fulfill his most basic promise – to bring down the cost of living,” Alsobrooks said in a statement. “To have a President who not only disregards but so clearly abhors the rule of law will forever change this country. For the worse.”

The press conference between the two presidents seemed to show Trump wanting to make America more like El Salvador. Bukele, who calls himself the “world’s coolest dictator,” serves not only as a client of Trump’s, but also as a model of authoritarian rule. In 2022, Bukele declared a “state of exception” — a legal category championed by Nazi legal theorist Carl Schmitt, allowing a sovereign to suspend the rule of law in a time of crisis — to deal with gang violence. Though the constitution of El Salvador limits such a state to 60 days, the state of exception is still in place and El Salvador now has the highest incarceration rate in the world. And yet, when Bukele ran for re-election — also against the constitution, which does not allow for consecutive terms — he won with 80% of the vote. 

In the oval office, Bukele told a story about an alleged Venezuelan gang member who told the authorities in El Salvador that he had been arrested six times in the United States, once for shooting a cop in the leg, and had been released every time. “There’s something broken,” Bukele concluded, of the American justice system. 

It was an astounding moment, little commented on, for the Salvadoran president to call the U.S. criminal justice system broken for incarcerating too few people — and the U.S. president agreeing with him. The U.S. is fifth, globally, in terms of incarceration per capita, but, according to the U.S. Prison Policy Initiative, if U.S. states were treated as countries, Louisiana and Mississippi would follow close behind El Salvador as the second and third most incarcerating places on earth. 

When it was pointed out that Trump said, just a week ago, that he would abide by a Supreme Court ruling, he said, “I don’t even have to answer this question from you. Why don’t you just say ‘Isn’t it wonderful that you’re keeping criminals out of the country.’ Why can’t you just say that?”

But this isn’t just an example of authoritarianism or a constitutional crisis. It is the life of a Maryland man and his family. He has been in the Salvadoran prison for nearly a month now and no one in his family has heard from him. His wife is only sure that’s where he was taken because she was able to pick him out in one of the photographs of inmates in CECOT.

“It was a group of men bent over on the ground, with their heads down and their arms on their heads,” Vasquez Sura wrote in a legal filing. “None of their faces were visible. There was one man who had two scars on his head like Kilmar does, and tattoos that looked similar to Kilmar’s. I zoomed into get a closer look at the tattoos. My heart sank. It was Kilmar.”

Jaisal Noor contributed reporting.

The post A Maryland man’s life is at stake. Trump and Salvadoran president Bukele could not care less. appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

On the morning of April 12, 2015, at about 8:48 a.m., a 25-year-old Black man named Freddie Carlos Gray Jr. allegedly made eye contact with a police officer at the corner of North and Mount, where he was walking with his friends Brandon Ross and Davonte Roary looking for breakfast from a carryout. Gray and Roary both started running, and three bicycle cops — Lieutenant Brian Rice, who first spotted Gray, Garrett Miller, and Edward Nero — pursued him in a chase later deemed constitutional because of that eye contact and the fact that West Baltimore is deemed a “high crime area.” 

The cops caught Gray at Baker and Mount and pushed him down by his face while twisting his legs behind him. Ross, who had not run, caught up with Gray and the bike cops and began to record the event. Kevin Moore, who lived in Gilmor Homes, heard Gray’s screams and ran out to film as the officers carried Gray, crying out in pain, and put him headfirst into the back of the police van. 

The van drove a block and stopped again. Gray was removed and, once again, slid in headfirst, handcuffed. No one hooked his seatbelt. The van would stop four more times, but Gray would never see the outside world again.

Gray’s spine was severed and he was not conscious when they removed him from the van and put him in the hospital, where he remained for a week before dying on April 19 of the injuries inflicted in police custody. He was not the first person in recent years to be killed by the Baltimore police, who killed Anthony Anderson in 2012 and Tyrone West in 2013. West’s sister, Tawanda Jones, had been organizing around her brother’s death for years, and that movement converged with the national Black Lives Matter movement, which had exploded in Baltimore in November and December 2014 after prosecutors failed to charge Darren Wilson, the cop who killed Michael Brown in Ferguson. 

This situation made Gray’s death different. Protests began, almost immediately and organically, even before Gray died, straight out of Gilmor Homes, and they continued to grow, drawing thousands into the streets for nearly the next two weeks, the totality of which has been called the Baltimore Uprising.

In the 10 years since Baltimore police officers killed Gray, roughly 3,100 people — mainly Black men — have been murdered in Baltimore; more than twice that many have suffered fatal overdoses; one mayor, one state’s attorney, and one police commissioner have been convicted on federal charges; more than 15 police officers have been implicated in the Gun Trace Task Force RICO case, where officers conspired to illegally detain and rob Baltimore residents; more than $70 million has been paid out in settlements relating to police misconduct; the Baltimore Police Department’s budget has increased by nearly $150 million; BPD has shot at least 59 people; Adnan Syed, whose case at the time of Gray’s death was a national obsession, saw the charges against him dropped and then reinstated; more than 130 units in six buildings at Gilmor Homes, where Gray was arrested, have been vacated, while Perkins Homes and Poe Homes, other public housing projects, have been either demolished or boarded up; none of the officers who killed Gray were convicted and no one has ever been held accountable for his death; and Gray never got a chance to grow or mature past 25, and his family and friends have missed not only the 10 birthdays he never got to experience, but every day in between. 

The protests, in retrospect, mark the halfway point in a decade of mass protest that could be said to have begun with Occupy Wall Street in 2011 and ended with the mass George Floyd/Breonna Taylor protests of 2020, but could also have begun with the Tea Party in 2009 and ended with the right-wing assault on the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, in which we saw that perhaps the right has out-organized us, to disastrous consequence. 

In order to try to fathom not only what happened in 2015, but also to get a sense of where we are now, I began to seek out people who were involved, in one way or another, with the Uprising. But there are thousands of other versions of this story. Because it was truly a mass movement. This is a corner of it.  

Duane “Shorty” Davis, organizer: I did Occupy Baltimore because I wanted Black people to be represented in that struggle, in that fight. So I learned how to work with Hispanic, Black, Indian because we all oppressed. So when you find the common denominator and you work with that. Freddie Gray was something that just, like, kicked it off, because we did the Trayvon Martin, we did the Mike Brown, we did the protest for all the other cities, and then when they hit home, it was just like a firecracker just blew up.

Davon Neverdon, “PFK Boom,” organizer, 300 Gangstas: Organized confusion … Gilmor Homes were the only people that was organized at that time, when that boy hit the ground. Gilmor Homes knew what they wanted to do. They just needed the people to help them do it. Marching, organizing, beating down doors, hitting the streets for Gilmor Homes, and they set the tempo. I asked her, before I did anything, Freddie Gray’s mother, asked her, what did she want done? She said she wanted justice for her son, and I said we could try to do that.

Jenny Egan, co-founder, Baltimore Action Legal Team (BALT): I remember leaving work, and I knew he was in the hospital, and just driving over there with another public defender friend, because we wanted to lay a flower and, like, wish him the best. And it’s when I just stumbled upon one of those first protests. Yeah, that’s what I want people to remember, is that it was organic, and that it was all like word of mouth and people talking to each other. It was Freddie’s neighbors who stood up, and that the Uprising didn’t start on the 21st, it started on the 17th, when he was still in the hospital, that the neighborhood and the people who knew Freddie and knew his mom and knew that they weren’t perfect people and knew that they weren’t going to make the most PR-ready campaign, who stood up and said, “No, we’re not going to take this anymore,” and that their neighbors and their friends and the people of Baltimore stood with Sandtown and with those neighbors, and that that power is still, yeah, it’s still being built, and it’s still real, and it’s still the thing that’s going to push us [toward] the better world.

Angela, Baltimore Bloc: This was probably this Saturday while Freddie Gray was still in the hospital before he died. And we went out there. We just left Coppin [State University, where Bloc was meeting], and we went out to Gilmor. And I just remember this incredible number of people out on the street and I remember being really blown away by the organicness of it, that the neighborhood had organized itself into this really huge action that went on all day. 

Payam, Baltimore Bloc: People didn’t think Freddie was gonna die, you know. So it wasn’t like, you know, it wasn’t so heated. It was hot, but there was still optimism that he’d recover. “We just want all these officers accountable” type shit. 

D. Watkins, writer: Even though I didn’t have a personal relationship with Freddie Gray, I didn’t know Freddie Gray, I knew people that knew Freddie Gray, so everything just felt more intense, and I just found myself following what was happening with him, and is he going to make it out of the hospital or not, and is he going to survive or not? … There was a narrative that was going on in America, and then it just knocked on our front door, and I just remember that it just felt different.

Angela: I was really stunned when we got out there. It was like every person who lived in the neighborhood was out there. And it was, the mood was so optimistic on that day, and I think he died the next day, actually. But the mood was so resolute and optimistic.

D. Watkins: Like, what do we do in this situation? What do we do? And the only thing that seemed like it made sense was gather. So if I wasn’t gathering with people that was directly connected to what happened, then I was gathering with my own family and my own friends. It was a way of dealing with the grief before he even died.

Freddie Gray died in the hospital on Sunday, April 19. Tawanda Jones, who lost her brother Tyrone West to police violence on July 18, 2013, and had been protesting the police every Wednesday since then, was devastated to hear about another man killed by police in her city. 

Tawanda Jones, organizer and sister of Tyrone West: It was hurtful, because that was the reason why I was standing out there [protesting every week], because I didn’t want it to happen. And I kept saying at previous West Wednesdays that we didn’t want to be another Ferguson, because before that, it was Michael Brown. And I’m like, if Baltimore City don’t hold these killer cops accountable, then we’re heading that way. So when the reality hit and it happened, I had a range of emotions, of sadness, of disbelief. It was just so much at one time.

Police detained the first two of many protesters on April 21 during the Uprising at the Western District police station, both of whom were filming. Over the course of the coming week, they would arrest and detain hundreds more and continue with a pattern and practice of targeting photographers. 

Angela: We went out there every single day for a week after that. We just kept going back every day. I was leaving work and going immediately, like, still in my work clothes, just driving straight from work to Gilmor Homes and getting out of the car and walking into whatever was going on protesting at the Western District. 

Juan Grant, neighbor and friend of Freddie Gray, was filmed speaking into a megaphone. “Do not allow them to put you in a cell. Take you away from your family. They already took Fred from us. That’s why we’re out here. So do not allow them to take you away from your family at no time. We’re gonna stand out here. We’re gonna scream and shout. They gonna hear us loud. We love you, Fred. We love Fred. The whole family, the whole community. Once again I’m proud of y’all and I love you. Every single color out in this motherfucker. This not about racism. It’s the police that’s racist. Not us. We are united and we showing them that. So once again I love y’all and I’m gone.” 

Payam: But [officials went to] everybody in Gilmor like, “Look, y’all are the leaders. Y’all gotta calm everybody down,” like, type shit where they weren’t hearing that. They listened, but they were like, “No, we’re not doing that shit.”

Robert “Meech” Tucker was filmed on the barricade in front of the Western District giving a speech. “Black Power, Black Power! Listen yo, listen. All that gang shit, all that reds and that blue shit, that shit out the window right now. Feel me. We going at them.” He gestured at the police officers gathered behind him. “They our target, yo, we not each other’s target no more.”

“These young men are incredibly angry,” said Miguel Marquez, live on CNN as Shaun Young approached and put his hand around the mic.

“You can’t keep doing this shit to people,” Young said into the mic. “Motherfuckers ain’t gonna take it.” Marquez tried to take the microphone back. “Fuck him, fuck you, fuck that,” Young yelled. “Fuck that, straight up. Fuck CNN. We here. Straight up. Straight up.”

Shaun Young, photographer: Looking back, in that moment, I see this guy who was just frustrated. … We as a people weren’t going to stand for just blatantly being killed by the police. 

Shorty: We started a march down Gilmor Homes, and it was only with a few people. … By the time we got to Camden Yards, we pulled everybody from every community. They joined in. The kids joined in. It was like a magnet, and people were drawn to it.

A young man named Allen Bullock was filmed smashing the window of a police car and dancing on top of it. Boston Red Sox fans at bars surrounding Camden Yards yelled racial slurs at protesters. A general melee broke out that ended with a number of broken windows and a tense standoff with police. Detective Daniel Hersl, who at the time was the subject of numerous brutality complaints, was filmed among the riot police. 

In a photograph by J.M. Giordano, Shaun Young stands between a line of riot cops and a line of protesters, his arms outstretched, his eyes wide. 

Shaun Young: When we were at the convention center, the idea behind it initially was not to [say], “Hey guys, let’s go down here and fight some police.” … So in that moment, I understood that again, it would have been more impactful to me, for me to use whatever influence that I had to say, “Hey guys, like, this right now is not the way to go,” because it just wasn’t.

Later that night, police took revenge at Gilmor Homes as hundreds of cops in riot gear faced down 20 or 30 protesters and a few members of the press. In another video, from after midnight, a swarm of officers attacked City Paper photojournalist J.M. Giordano, pummeling him with clubs as they dragged him away, and the filmer — me — screamed: “He’s a photographer. He’s a photographer. He’s press.”

Giordano got the shot they didn’t want him to get as they dragged him off: One officer holding down a young Black man who screamed as another raised a billy club above his head to beat him. 

They arrested Sait Serkan Gurbuz, a photographer with Reuters.

April 27 was the day of Freddie Gray’s funeral, but it was also, allegedly, the day high school students had planned a “purge” — a day where they would follow no laws. There has never been good evidence of the purge. 

Payam: ​​There was supposed to be no protest that day. Even his friends were like …[his] family said chill out today, and that’s why I didn’t take the purge stuff seriously. I heard it at work, and I’m like, that’s some fake shit, like, nobody’s heard about this, we don’t know where it came from.

Schools were dismissed early and public transit was closed. When students from Frederick Douglass and other schools approached Mondawmin Mall, they were confronted by a line of riot cops. 

MTA has repeatedly refused to release its video of what happened that day and has never revealed who called for the shutdown of public transit. 

Desiree Thaniel, artist, City College alumna, Morgan State Student: We had a political group at my high school and they organized a protest at our school … to pay our respect, to show our teachers that this is serious because you know how in school, a lot of teachers and professors like to just kind of pretend everything is all good. They don’t necessarily want to talk about it. And so there was their chance to really force people to have a conversation. And we organized a walkout because of that. So they made sure to tell everyone at a certain time that, you know, to wear all black, and during class, we’re all just gonna walk out. And so we had this giant protest in the halls with yelling chants and forcing people to see us all come out, like, the more students that saw us, more students just joined us, and it turned into this whole giant parade.

Students from around the city had been hassled by police for years and supported the protests. In a photograph by Patrick Semansky, five officers in riot gear watch as a sixth throws a rock at schoolchildren, who began to lob rocks and bricks at police in a rolling battle that made its way down the street. 

Jenny Egan: Police start riots, right, by showing up and beating people and then having them have to respond. I think that I thought the violence might be worse than it was, the police violence, in those moments, and yet I’m still shocked that we have videos and photos of police throwing rocks at children. We have their faces, we have their badge numbers, and none of those people were ever disciplined. It was a fascinating thing to see them be told, “Hey, if anyone critiques your job, you do get to beat them up and throw rocks and cause violence.”

The running battle between heavily armed and armored cops and kids in school uniforms led down to Pennsylvania Avenue, which was complete chaos. The CVS was set on fire. 

Desiree Thaniel: I’m all down for peaceful protesting and everything, but I don’t necessarily think that they’re going to see us or hear us if we’re always just calm, quiet, cute about it. When that riot happened was the first time, maybe not the first point… that I really recognize, like, I’m not the only one that’s mad about it. You know, it made me feel really seen and made me feel really supported, even though it wasn’t about me.

Payam: The Uprising was Frederick Douglass High School students, you know, people around Penn North …  they weren’t organizers, they weren’t activists. That was an organic uprising, and then everybody just demonized that. Really, the media demonized it successfully, when up until that point, you’d had 10 days of straight, for the most part, peaceful protests. But after that, they just changed the whole narrative around.

PFK Boom: That’s the day that I was prepared to die.Smoke was everywhere. I didn’t think I was gonna make it through the day. I didn’t. I didn’t think one of my men was going to make it past the third day because it was so reactionary and everybody wanted a finger to point.

Video: PFK Boom is talking with Miguel Marquez from CNN. “What you’re getting an example of is what’s really inside of everybody for about 20 years,” Boom says. Greg Butler, wearing a gas mask and a red and gray shirt, punctures a fire hose amidst the chaos of the riot. 

Greg Butler was a former basketball player at Poly who had a scholarship to play ball in Florida, but because of a quirk in the way Baltimore City calculated GPAs, his average was just below the threshold, because of honors classes he had taken. If he had been able to accept the scholarship, he would not have been in Baltimore that day.

Greg Butler, educator: When I was 21, I was frustrated with the world. I described my city as the world, because that was my experience, and I was uncomfortable with challenging myself in a real way. The 20-, 21-year-old mind that I was in, I wouldn’t have been looking to burn down a CVS. We’d have burned down courthouses. We would have went big, right? I had that direction. I just didn’t have the power to tell everybody, “Come on, let’s go this way.” So it scares me to know what I would have done in that moment, because I had no fear. Fear was introduced to me later about how these people would move the finish line, how the law is what they say it is, how there’s no recourse for abusing the law for those who have the power to wield it. I couldn’t appreciate that at 21 years old. I did enough to be the person I wanted to be, but if I could take it back, if I could take it back, I wouldn’t do anything different. If I was in that moment with another chance, I probably would have done a lot more violent.

Payam: One of the things I failed to do was like, support these kids. More like, put them at the forefront more for what they had to say, what they wanted to do. But it lasted so short, it was squashed so quickly, by the end of the night, and it didn’t come back, and there was just so much pushback. You know, people were vilified. I don’t know how to say it, but yeah, we didn’t honor them.

In federal court, Donald Stepp, a co-conspirator with the corrupt Gun Trace Task Force, testified about April 27. 

“It was during the riots of Freddie Gray that [BPD Sgt. Wayne Jenkins] called me again and told me to — woke me up and says, ‘I need you to open the garage door.’ So I went downstairs, opened the garage door. Same routine: pulls in, police-issued car, undercover car, popped his trunk. This time he come out with two trash bags, large trash bags … I go, ‘What’s this?’ And he says, ‘I just got people coming out of these pharmacies. I’ve got — I’ve got an entire pharmacy. I don’t even know what it is.’”

Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake declared a curfew and the National Guard, as well as law enforcement from all over the region, rolled in the next morning. There was a cleanup at Penn North that day and tear gas and body armor at night. 

Megan Kenny, Baltimore resident: There’s that cleanup day when there’s a picture that Devin Allen took that I’m standing and my back is to the line of police … because I figured that they would be less likely to run me over from the back, if they were trying to get to somebody. And so that’s when I was like, “Oh my God, this is that thing that people are saying that we should be doing, is being that physical barrier, because they’re less likely, not that they wouldn’t, but they’re less likely to steamroll me from the back.”

Shaun Young: I was proud of the fact of the number of people that came out and supported, you know, Black, white, everybody … it brought the city together, even though it had its negative moments. But I’ve never seen that many people come together and literally walking up just for weeks, protesting. … I built so many relationships from that, that, again, looking back, I understand the emotion behind it, and again, I’m proud that everybody rallied together the way that they did.

On May 1, then-State’s Attorney Marilyn Mosby indicted six of the police officers involved in Gray’s death. The charges did much to end the Uprising and contain it in the legal system. 

Tawanda Jones: I remember being at work when Marilyn Mosby made the announcement that charges would be upon the officers that murdered Freddie Gray, and the speech she gave was phenomenal, I must say, and it literally was like a moment in time that I’ll never forget, and I was so appreciative of it and praying that we got accountability. But then it’s like, they dragged it off, and then it’s like justice delayed is justice denied.

Meech Tucker, who claimed gangs would unite against cops, was photographed dancing with a rabbi at the intersection of Penn North in a shirt reading “I Bleed Baltimore.”

None of the officers were convicted. 

Baltimore police shot 44 bullets at Keith Davis Jr. on June 7, 2015, and Marilyn Mosby tried Davis a historic four times for the alleged murder of Kevin Jones, which he was ultimately exonerated of. Juan Grant, Gray’s friend and an early organizer of the Uprising, was murdered in April 2019. Baltimore police shot and killed Donnell Rochester in 2022 as he fled police. He lived in Gilmor Homes and was 12 years old when the police chased and killed Gray. 

Shorty: So what are we doing different? We stopped protesting. We stopped protesting because it didn’t affect us directly. We don’t have no more Black leadership that’s working for change. We got Black leadership working for money. Big difference.

D. Watkins: So we had a moment. I mean, we had a moment. And a lot of people, a lot of people have been awakened by that moment. A lot of people have benefited financially from that moment. A lot of people had their perspectives rocked and changed from that moment.

Megan Kenny: For me, that time was a profound, life-altering event. So when I think back to that time, I think of both the pain but also the immense opportunity that the city had as a structure,  because people were speaking out in droves and civil disruptions and actions, and it was pretty acute, the need for something to change. And so I think of both the pain and of, you know, this is “something’s happening here,” like something momentous can happen from this horrific event of police killing a young man who really did nothing except run for his life. 

Jenny Egan: I feel like out of the Uprising came a number of not just organizations, but  infrastructure that has gotten so much stronger over the last decade. Jail support just didn’t exist, right? We made it up in those weeks, and then there’s Court Watch and all of that sort of sharing of information, and people really engaging and understanding abolition. I think that “abolition” was a shocking, far-left radical word at those protests. And now I think most of those organizations, who used to be afraid of that, even mainstream nonprofit organizations, have come to reckon with the depth and breadth of a police state and how much bigger our imaginations have to be. I don’t think any of that would have been possible without the Uprising. … And so, some of the outing of the most abject corruption in BPD, even when it’s not related to violence and death, I think is directly attributable to the Uprising, and it wouldn’t have happened without the Uprising. I don’t think [former Police Commissioner Darryl] De Sousa would have been indicted. I don’t think cops would have gotten fired for stealing or for planting drugs. I think GTTF would not have broken if the Uprising had not predated it. I don’t think Wayne Jenkins would have ever gotten indicted if the Uprising hadn’t happened.

Tawanda Jones: I’m so scared because the same feeling that I felt when we had the Uprising, I’m like, please, I don’t want to see this. I don’t want this to happen. I’m starting to have the same feeling right now, and I’m sorry, because I have tears forming in my eyes, because this is a serious thing to me. I feel like, and I’m praying it don’t happen, but I feel like, soon, in the next two and a half years, we might be in the streets fighting for a civil rights law, just basic civil rights. They’re taking us back there, and it’s sad and disgusting.

Greg Butler: At 21, I was an activist. At 31, I am organizing, and I don’t shy away from that. In 2015 I knew, 10 years ago, that I was fighting men and I was not fighting the universe. There were men who waged war against us in 2015. We were not fighting God. We were not fighting the universe. We had every piece that we needed to push against that, and we did. And despite things not changing in a desired result, things have changed. I’m watching little Black kids be allowed to be little Black kids. That’s a blessing. It did not come through legislation, let’s be clear. It came through people pushing in whatever space they had.

PFK Boom: You’ll see a kid that’s going home to two parents best friends with a kid that’s going to a foster home, but they both understand, “We all we got, we all we need.” That’s why that slogan and that saying also has been able to come out of the Uprising and still actually be focused, understood and meaning the Black suffrage-poor-all-white-ain’t-white, all-Black-ain’t-Black struggle that in Baltimore is just very unique.

Desiree Thaniel: Not only have I already not trusted the police, but it’s like, now I just straight up don’t like them anymore, and it’s also making it hard to, like, trust people around me. So that’s the thing that makes me sad, and it just makes me want to make sure that we are teaching the children how to be safe and how to know that their rights are worth fighting for, because after my mom’s generation is my generation, and after my generation is my children’s generation.

D. Watkins: I think it’s gone. I think there’s still a whole lot of good people out in the world doing the work. I think there’s a lot of people trying to advocate and trying to push for this change. But I truly feel like in this particular time, you know, the country has regressed in a lot of ways. I mean, look at the election, right? Look at what’s happening right now, and if Freddie Gray happened today — I truly believe that it won’t be the same kind of response when it happens.

Jenny Egan: When I think about it, 10 years on, I think in 2015 I really had a hope that [by 2022] when a police officer murdered Donnell Rochester in cold blood, and an investigation said this is prosecutable … that people would care, that people would know his name, and that something would be different. And my feeling right now is that the police killed more people last year in the United States, despite crime being dramatically lower than it was in 2015. Despite all of the changes in the United States, cops are still killing people.

Shorty: Freddie got killed, and they got money. And then after they got the money, and the money ran out, we still suffering the same Freddie Gray shit. We still getting killed by the police. We still got jump-out boys. We still got police. They can do what the fuck they want, and ain’t nobody doing nothing about it. We got a Black state’s attorney. We got a Black attorney general, and you still ain’t about to do Tawanda Jones right? So how the fuck we done did anything different? Yeah. So we’re reminded of Freddie Gray, but we still got a Anthony Anderson, we still got a Maurice Donald Johnson, we still got a Tyrone West.

This article is a joint publication between Truthout and Baltimore Beat.

The post A Mass Movement: A History of the Baltimore Uprising, From the Ground Up appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

UPDATE: On Friday afternoon, federal judge Paula Xinis ruled that the Trump administration must return Kilmar Abrego Garcia to the United States by the end of the day Monday, April 7, noting that allegations of gang affiliation need to come in “the form of an indictment, complaint, criminal processing … I haven’t yet heard any of that from the government.” 

This sets up a possible showdown between the executive and legislative branches of government if the administration ignores the court and fails to bring Abrego Garcia home, triggering a constitutional crisis. 

The ruling notes that, though Abrego Garcia is in El Salvador, “this court retains subject area jurisdiction” to order his return in order to “preserve the status quo and preserve Abrego Garcia’s access to due process in accordance with the constitution and governing immigration statutes.” 

The AP reports that Jennifer Vasquez Sura, Abrego Garcia’s wife and a U.S. citizen, urged supporters to keep fighting for “all the Kilmars out there whose stories are waiting to be heard.” 

“To all you wives, mothers, and children who also face this cruel separation, I stand with you in this bond of pain,” she said, calling the situation “a nightmare that feels endless.” 

Original story:

On March 12, 2025, Kilmar Abrego Garcia finished his shift as a sheet metal workers apprentice at a Baltimore jobsite, picked up his 5-year-old, special-needs son from his grandmother’s house, and began to drive home to Beltsville. “Shortly after he picked up our son, Kilmar called me, saying he was being pulled over,” his wife Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura wrote in court filings. “I told him to put me on speaker when he was talking with the police because he does not feel confident speaking English.”

According to Vasquez Sura, who is a U.S. citizen, Abrego Garcia thought it was a routine traffic stop and pulled over into the College Park Ikea parking lot. “The person at his window told him to turn off the car and get out. In English, Kilmar told the officer that his son was in the backseat of the car and had special needs,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “At that point, I heard the officer take Kilmar’s phone and hang up.”

A few minutes later, someone from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security called Vasquez Sura and told her she had ten minutes to pick up their son before they brought Child Protection Services into it. She arrived a few minutes later to see her husband sitting on the curb in handcuffs. “They had taken his work boots and his belt off. There were two male officers and a female officer with my child,” Vasquez Sura wrote. The agents told her his “immigration status had changed” and they were taking him into detention and offered her a chance to say goodbye. 

“Kilmar was crying and I told him he would come back home because he hadn’t done anything wrong,” she recalled. After all, they had been through this before, and Abrego Garcia had a status that made it illegal to deport him to El Salvador. 

***

Kilmar Abrego Garcia was born in San Salvador, El Salvador in 1995. His mother ran a pupusa business called Pupusa Cecilia from their home in the Los Nogales neighborhood and everyone in the family had some role in the business. Kilmar both bought the ingredients for the pupusas and did deliveries. Eventually, according to court documents, the gang Barrio 18 began to demand “rent” for doing business in the neighborhood. His mother Cecilia paid the extortion, but eventually the gang said they wanted Cesar, Kilmar’s older brother, to join the gang. The family sent Cesar to the U.S. and the gang then tried to recruit Kilmar when he was only 12. According to court filings, Kilmar’s father saved him from the gang at that time by paying them a large amount, but they would not leave Kilmar alone. The Abrego family moved to another neighborhood, but the gang followed them. Kilmar had to spend most of his time inside, hiding. After further death threats, the family moved again. But after four months of more threats and fear, the Abregos sent Kilmar to the U.S. in 2011. 

Five years later, in 2016, Abrego Garcia met Jennifer Stefania Vasquez Sura, who already had two children, and who, like the children, is a U.S. citizen. In late 2018, when she was pregnant, Abrego Garcia moved in and began to support the growing family through construction work. In March 2019, he went to the Home Depot in Hyattsville, looking for work as a day laborer. While waiting around for a job, Abrego Garcia and three other men were stopped by police, according to court documents. “At the police station, the four young men were placed into different rooms and questioned. Plaintiff Abrego Garcia was asked if he was a gang member; when he told police he was not, they said that they did not believe him and repeatedly demanded that he provide information about other gang members. The police told Plaintiff Abrego Garcia that he would be released if he cooperated, but he repeatedly explained that he did not have any information to give because he did not know anything,” a 2019 court filing reads. 

“At the end of my work shift, I texted him asking him to pick me up. I remember seeing that the message was marked as ‘read,’ but Kilmar did not respond, which was not like him,” Vasquez Sura recalled in an affidavit. “I called him, but he did not answer. Shortly after, his phone was turned off.”

Abrego Garcia was held in custody and ICE ultimately declared that he was a gang member based on the fact that he was wearing a Chicago Bulls hat and hoodie. They later claimed that a confidential informant told them that he was “an active member of MS-13 with the Westerns clique,” even though the Western clique is located in Long Island. Vasquez Sura was in the third trimester of a high-risk pregnancy and, not knowing if he would be deported, she and Abrego Garcia were married in the Howard County Detention Center in June 2019 in a ceremony that was “far from how we ever imagined it.” 

“I coordinated with the detention center and a local pastor to officiate our wedding,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “We were separated by glass and were not allowed physical contact. The officer had to pass our rings to each other. It was heartbreaking not to be able to hug him.”

Abrego Garcia had a hearing on August 9. During the hearing, “I began having contractions. Our son…was born two days later on August 11, 2019,” Vasquez Sura wrote. Abrego Garcia was not able to be there or to meet his son. Finally, in October 2019, after months of incarceration, a judge granted Abrego Garcia “withholding of removal” status, which made it illegal for him to be deported to El Salvador because of “past persecution based on protected ground, and the presumption of a well-founded fear of future persecution,” which means that the government could not deport him to El Salvador because to do so would cause irreparable harm based upon past threats. The government denied his request for formal asylum and rejected his claims under the Convention Against Torture, but still, Abrego Garcia was free.   

“That day, Kilmar’s attorney called and told me the news: Kilmar won his case. She explained that the judge granted him a special status that allows him to stay in the U.S. and makes it illegal to deport him to El Salvador,” Vasquez Sura recalled. “She told me that he cannot leave the country or he would lose his status.”

Abrego Garcia began to work in a five-year metal worker apprentice program, where he was a member of the Smart Local 100 union and enrolled at the University of Maryland, while helping care for the family’s three children, including their new son, who was diagnosed with autism and is nonverbal.

“Kilmar continued to be the supportive, loving, reliable, and law-abiding man I know and love. He was never arrested or accused of a crime. And to my knowledge, he never again was stopped by the police officers that accused him of being a gang member in 2019,” Vasquez Sura wrote. It’s why she believed things would be cleared up following his March 2025 detention. 

But that is not what happened. 

***

“At approximately 9:00 PM the night he was arrested, Kilmar called me from Baltimore,” Vasquez Sura recalled. “He told me that he was questioned about a past traffic stop and that out of nowhere, they were bringing up the old, false accusations of MS-13 gang membership that we thought were behind us. He said that when they interrogated him about his connections to MS-13 that they asked him about his visits to Don Ramon, a restaurant we frequented as a family, and asked him about a photo they had of him playing basketball with others at a local public court. Kilmar did not understand what was happening or why. He was reassured he would see a judge.”

But, like hundreds of others recently detained by ICE and deported without due process, he did not see a judge, and after one more call, was transferred to an ICE detention center in Louisiana. On the morning of March 15, Abrego Garcia called his wife one more time. “That call was short and Kilmar’s tone was different. He was scared. He was told he was being deported to El Salvador…to a super-max prison called ‘CECOT,’” Vasquez Sura wrote. “After that, I never heard from Kilmar again.” 

The next day, her brother-in-law sent her a photo of the alleged gang members who had been deported to the CECOT prison. “It was a group of men bent over on the ground, with their heads down and their arms on their heads,” Vasquez Sura wrote. “None of their faces were visible. There was one man who had two scars on his head like Kilmar does, and tattoos that looked similar to Kilmar’s. I zoomed into get a closer look at the tattoos. My heart sank. It was Kilmar.”

***

Abrego Garcia’s life-and-death case has prompted a furious response from his attorneys and advocacy groups like CASA, unions such as SMART, and Maryland’s governor, Wes Moore. 

“We can be pro-public safety and pro-Constitution at the same time,” Moore said in a statement. “No one should be deported to the very country where a judge determined they will face persecution. It’s outrageous that due process means nothing to the federal administration. They’ve admitted to making an error and I urge them to correct it.”

These complaints have been met with the equivalent of a dismissive shrug by Homeland Security, whose director Kristi Noem staged a photoshoot with an obscenely expensive watch in front of the shirtless prisoners at CECOT, calling his illegal deportation an “oversight” and an “administrative error,” while simultaneously claiming that because Abrego Garcia is not in the U.S., courts cannot order to have him returned to the U.S. and that the “irreparable harm” he faces in El Salvador is OK because it might not technically be torture. 

“ICE needs to return him safely to the United States,” CASA wrote in a statement. “They are paying for his imprisonment in El Salvador and are maximizing their close ties to Salvadoran leadership to expel many men – without due process – to El Salvador. ICE needs to bring Kilmar home to Maryland, immediately.”

“Plaintiff has requested that this Court order Defendants to request his return from the government of El Salvador: first, just ask them nicely to please give him back to us,” Abrego Garcia’s attorney argues. “It is inexplicable that Defendants have not done so already. Meanwhile, Plaintiff also asks this Court to order Defendants not to mix their messages by continuing to pay the government of El Salvador further compensation to hold on to him.”

Attorney Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg’s April 2 filing concludes with a fierce rebuke of the government in this case. “In the end, the public interest is best served by restoring the supremacy of laws over power,” he writes. “The Department of Homeland Security must obey the orders of the immigration courts, or else such courts become meaningless. Noncitizens — and their U.S.-citizen spouses and children — must know that if this nation awards them a grant protection from persecution, it will honor that commitment even when the political winds shift.” 

According to a recent report by the Comptroller’s office, Maryland had 436,000 ”unnaturalized residents,” or immigrants who have not become citizens, in 2021 — the most recent data provided. And that number was expected to grow. “I have no higher priority than the safety of Marylanders,” Governor Moore said in his statement. 

A federal judge will hear further arguments on the issue in federal court in Greenbelt on Friday afternoon, rousing hope that Abrego Garcia may be reunited with his family again. Vasquez Sura notes that the separation has been especially difficult on their special needs son. “Although he cannot speak, he shows me how much he missed Kilmar. He has been finding Kilmar’s work shirts and smelling them, to smell Kilmar’s familiar scent.”

This story will be updated. 

The post “I told him he would come back home”: Wife of Kilmar Abrego Garcia presents court with emotional story of immigration, love, hope, and loss appeared first on Baltimore Beat.

Go here to read the first part of the story. 

This story was produced in partnership with Type Investigations with support from the Wayne Barrett Project.

Around 3:10 p.m. on Feb. 19, 2022, on a residential street in northeast Baltimore, four police officers cornered 18-year-old Donnell Rochester after a brief chase. Rochester and his passenger briefly got out of the car and tried to escape on foot before Rochester got back in the car. 

“Get out of the car now!” Baltimore Police Officer Antoine Galloway yelled. 

The car started rolling slowly forward. Officer Connor Murray was running down the middle of the road. 

The car continued to move forward and rather than move out of the way of the car, Murray fired three quick shots, which hit the slowly rolling vehicle, but did not stop it. Then Murray fell over to the side and fired a fourth shot. 

Though these four shots—and two more fired by Officer Robert Mauri—were the result of a split-second decision, as police unions and apologists often remind the public after a shooting, they were also only the final link in a series of systemic issues that put an 18-year-old queer Black youth in the sights of the four police officers who chased him down. 

The Beat and Type Investigations obtained documents and witness statements that shed new light on the events precipitating the chase and the officers who fired their guns, ultimately killing Rochester. 

Warrants

Events were set into motion weeks before the chase. On Jan. 11, the Anne Arundel County Police were called to investigate claims that a ride-share driver had been allegedly assaulted and robbed by a group of teens, including Rochester, when he told them he could not fit all four into his car. 

In his report, Detective Cory Heathcote wrote that the driver told the four young people he could not accommodate all of them. One, Heathcote wrote, got back in the car and allegedly started “punching and kicking” the driver from the back seat. The driver took that person’s blue slipper and the person took the driver’s camera. 

“At some point during the altercation, the subject displayed a knife” to the driver, who exited the vehicle along with the person in the back, who, according to Heathcote, “was still holding a knife.”

Heathcote wrote that the youth offered to trade the camera for the slipper. When the driver put the slipper on the ground, the youth allegedly kept the camera and fled. 

In investigative files obtained by Type Investigations and Baltimore Beat through Public Information Act requests, there are images of several young people and one, who is identified as  a young woman, seems to be holding a blade pointing down, as Heathcote notes repeatedly in his report. There is no image of Rochester with a knife.

But the assistant property manager of the apartment complex who provided the camera footage of the area “immediately recognized the subject with the slippers as a resident of the complex…and provided the name of the suspect as Donnell Raquan Rochester.” 

She told the detective that she was “1000 percent sure” that his suspect was Donnell Rochester. 

With this information, Heathcote identified Rochester as the person who allegedly struck the driver, pulled a knife and took the camera. 

“According to Detective Heathcote, the victim described the suspect and the clothing,” Jacklyn Davis, Anne Arundel County Police spokesperson, wrote in an email to Baltimore Beat/Type. “Another witness was familiar with the suspect and positively identified him as Mr. Rochester. Subsequent interviews and search warrant/s were conducted, and corroborating evidence was gathered from Rochester’s residence.” 

When the detective searched the apartment where Rochester lived with his family, they did not find a knife. But they did find a pair of slippers. Rochester was charged with armed robbery, robbery, second-degree assault, theft, and malicious destruction of property. 

The Anne Arundel County Police issued a warrant for Rochester around the same time his family moved back to Baltimore. 

“Once a warrant goes out for serious charges, it’s hard to reverse them,” says Jonny Kerr, a former public defender and a clinical teaching fellow at the Criminal Defense and Advocacy Clinic at the University of Baltimore School of Law. And if the warrant is for an armed robbery, as Rochester’s was, then when police officers see it, they’re “looking for a violent offender just based on that.”

Rochester told his mother, Danielle Brown, a different story about that night, claiming that the driver had locked him in the car, which is why he took the camera. 

“Donnell was trying to get out the car,” she says, but the driver “had the doors locked.” (Anne Arundel police did not respond to questions about this version of events.)

The case was never resolved. Rochester would never have a chance to defend himself in court. 

Proactive Policing

On Feb. 19, 2022, when Rochester’s car passed near the intersection of Erdman Street and Belair Road, two members of the Baltimore Police Department’s (BPD) Mobile Metro Unit (MMU) ran Rochester’s tags through their computer. 

The MMU was created in 2018 by then-commissioner Darryl De Sousa to serve as a “10^th district” that added additional police presence to “hot spots,” or areas where crimes had recently occurred. According to police, the unit took 10 guns off the street during its first two months.

Unlike patrol officers who spend much of their time answering calls for service, “flex squads” such as the MMU make stops that are proactive and discretionary, meaning that in each of these cases, someone in the unit made a decision to initiate a stop. 

Most police officers are not clear about the criteria they use when making these decisions—and studies of implicit bias show they are often not even aware. Maurice Ward, a former detective in a proactive squad in Baltimore, testified in federal court that his sergeant instructed them to pull over “dope boy cars,” among which he counted Acura TLs, Honda Accords and Honda Odysseys.

With its ability to make discretionary, pretextual stops, the MMU can function as a kind of automotive stop-and-frisk team, much like the SCORPION unit in Memphis that killed Tyre Nichols after a routine traffic stop. Amid national protests over Nichols’ death, the New York Times examined a selection of SCORPION cases and found that about 90 percent of the people arrested by the unit were Black.  

We see a similar pattern with the MMU. Despite multiple requests, the Baltimore Police Department did not provide demographic data on the stops made by the unit and does not have a publicly available roster of officers in the squad. But the Type-Beat investigation shows that of the 27 cases involving Officer Robert Mauri that were referred to Circuit Court in the year prior to Feb. 19, 2022, only one defendant was white. Out of the 16 cases involving Galloway, only one was white.

And like other specialized units in Baltimore, the MMU has been accused of using excessive force. In August 2019, 13 police officers– eight of whom were MMU members – fired more than 150 shots at a busy Baltimore intersection, killing Tyrone Banks, a man police believed had attacked them the day before, and hitting an uninvolved bystander who was sitting in her car at the intersection (the bystander is now suing the officers).

Despite the controversy, BPD continues to feature the MMU in various plans to address crime. 

“The biggest take away from 2021 was the need to focus on vehicle-based crime. Carjackings were a major issue in 2021,” a short-term crime plan for 2022 noted of Baltimore’s Northeastern District (NED). “Additionally, NED saw many vehicle-based suspects. In short, victims were in cars when they were victimized and suspects were using cars to commit crimes. In response, command believes that NED needs to focus more on traffic proactivity along major thoroughfares in 2022.”

So, on Feb. 19, 2022, officers Mauri and Galloway were assisting the Northeast District, due to the reported increase in carjackings and fake paper (license) plates. The pair had called in 23 tags by the time they saw Rochester’s recently purchased, white Honda Accord, which still had paper temporary tags, according to a report by the Attorney General’s office. 

“It’s an individual with multiple warrants, including robbery and carjacking,” one of the cops said into the radio. “I believe the driver is in the driver’s seat, occupying the vehicle. I haven’t tried to attempt a stop yet.”

Neglect of Duty

Two other officers, Connor Murray and Joshua Lutz, were patrolling the area in an SUV and heard the call about Rochester’s car. They waited for the Honda to come past and also began to follow it. At the time, both Murray and Lutz were facing neglect of duty charges from the BPD’s Internal Affairs, of which they have since been cleared.

A few weeks earlier, on Jan. 27, according to an Internal Affairs report, someone named Robert called 911, saying another man was threatening him. Murray and Lutz responded to the call. Before they got there, Robert called again to say the other man was acting like he had a gun. 

When they arrived, Robert told Murray the other man had threatened to kill him. “The threat went unnoticed by Murray,” the report noted later. “Throughout the investigation process, it can be clearly noticed that threat of violance [sic] were being quoted by both parties involved.”

Throughout this encounter, according to the internal investigation, neither Murray nor Lutz asked about the gun Robert had reported when he called 911. Neither Murray nor Lutz identified either of the men in any way. Robert said “that if the officers left the location without attempting to assist with the situation on what he believe to be a law enforcement level, they would return to a ‘murder scene.’ Both officers ignored the statement and cleared the call.” 

That was at 8:37 p.m. At 9:10 p.m., the report of a stabbing came in to the Northeast District reporting “20-year-old, male, consciousness unknown. Breathing. Caller statement: friend was stabbed.” 

Robert “was located by officers lying on the dining room floor in a pool of blood.” Only then did they bother to learn his last name. It was Parker. 

Jamal Smith, the other man in the initial altercation, was charged with the murder. Soon after, Murray and Lutz faced Internal Affairs complaints for “neglect of duty.” Both officers were  eventually cleared of these allegations, although the later report noted that the “investigation on Officer Connor Murray believed the officer may have used better judgment in handling this call; however, the investigation was unable to determine, by a preponderance of the evidence, whether the alleged misconduct occurred was against policy.”

In some cases, the investigation of such complaints might result in a suspension or reassignment to administrative duties while the case is investigated– but not always. 

“Allegations would not automatically cause someone to be removed,” BPD spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge wrote in an email. “We would rely on the case’s circumstances, the findings of the investigation and recommendations from both the [Public Integrity Bureau] and Legal.”

In this case, Murray and Lutz remained on the streets, leading them to fall in behind Rochester, joining the chase. 

The Chase

The officers told investigators that they slowly followed Rochester from a distance of 400 to 600 feet, without giving chase, in accordance with BPD policy, and eventually lost sight of his car before spotting it again on Chilton St. 

Laverne, who is being identified by a pseudonym because of fear of retaliation, was in the passenger seat of the car as the officers gained on them. “They chased us down this block, and we got out the car and tried to run,” she recalled in a short speech on the anniversary of the shooting. “But we stopped running because…there was nowhere for us to go. The police was right here. There was nowhere for us to run. Donnell tried to run and get in the car and pull off.”

According to body camera footage (which you can see in its entirety here) and a report by the Maryland Attorney General, Galloway and Lutz each left their police vehicles and began running toward the doors of Rochester’s car. Mauri and Murray, the drivers of the two police vehicles, parked and followed shortly behind them. Everyone but Lutz had their guns out. 

“Get out of the car now!” Galloway yelled. He later told investigators that he was waving his weapon, and that Rochester looked at him and then put the car in gear. 

“Stop the car! Stop the car!” Murray screamed. 

Galloway noticed that Murray “was directly in front of the car.” 

Galloway told investigators he “thought he was going to get run over.” 

The car continued to move forward and rather than move out of the way of the car, Murray fired three quick shots. Then he fell over to the side and fired a fourth shot. Then Mauri fired two shots from the other side of the car. 

The car stopped a few houses from Hillen Street. The door opened. “I can’t breathe,” Rochester said, blood dripping from his mouth as he fell out of the car onto his knees.

“Put your fucking hand behind your back,” Mauri yelled as he turned Rochester onto his stomach. 

“Signal 13,” Murray said into the radio. “Start a medic.”

Galloway ran to get a medical kit and when he returned he saw that Rochester had been hit in the arm and the armpit. 

Six minutes after the shooting, a medic still had not arrived. Police policy indicates that officers in such a situation can directly transport someone to the hospital, but no one did. 

As more police arrived on scene, police body cameras caught several conversations where Murray vacillated about whether or not he had been hit by the car. 

“Do you need a medic, because if the car hit you, I mean …?” Sergeant Polanco asked. 

“I don’t remember if it did or not. I don’t think it did. I think I just fell. I was close to it, but I just fell. I don’t think it hit me. I’m good,” Murray replied. 

“If you need a medic, I’ll call a medic for you,” Polanco said. 

“I don’t feel any pain,” Murray said. 

According to HuffPost, BPD claimed in a warrant issued three days later to search Rochester’s car that the former had hit Murray with his car and cited attempted murder as probable cause. 

Rochester was conscious when medics arrived but he was struggling to breathe. It was 3:22 p.m., nine minutes after the shooting. Rochester did not finally arrive at Johns Hopkins Hospital, which was less than three miles away, until 20 minutes after the shooting.

“I actually went in the emergency room there, in the back, saw him on a gurney, identified him,” says Charles Melchoir, Rochester’s stepfather. “I think police were already there.” 

Donnell Rochester was pronounced dead at 3:41 p.m. 

The next day, Dr. Richard Morris, an associate pathologist with the Medical Examiner’s office, performed an autopsy and deemed the cause of death as “homicide.” 

“Dr. Morris noted two gunshot wounds. Mr. Rochester’s injuries appear to consist of two wounds caused by a single bullet. It appears the round traveled through Mr. Rochester’s right tricep, then into his right chest,” the Attorney General’s report later noted. 

The fatal wound was caused by Murray’s fourth shot, which he fired through the passenger window after falling out of the way of the moving vehicle. 

Investigation

In January 2023, shortly after taking office, State’s Attorney Ivan Bates issued a statement that he would not charge any of the officers involved in Rochester’s death, along with an 11-page report

“Ultimately, we could not ethically bring this case to court, given the circumstances in which these officers discharged their weapons,” Bates said. “As the current Baltimore City State’s Attorney, it is my duty and ethical responsibility to follow the law.” 

After that announcement, Danielle Brown, Rochester’s mother, started showing up in front of the State’s Attorney’s office every Thursday, usually accompanied by half a dozen or so people who support the cause. Some, like Duane “Shorty” Davis and Kinji Scott, are well-known in activist circles, while others were drawn into issues around policing by this case. 

Scott was one of Bates’s most vocal supporters during the 2018 campaign for State’s Attorney. Now, in front of the looming building with security guards peering out the window and police cars parked across the street, he yells out that “Ivan Bates is a coward.” 

“In this matter, the SAO [State’s Attorney’s Office] investigation was performed by the previous administration, and we cannot speak to their determination,” SAO spokesperson James Bentley wrote in an emailed statement in response to questions from Type/ Beat. 

After initially agreeing to provide notes, memos and other documents pertaining to the decision not to charge the officers in response to a public information request, the SAO said that they would be unable to comply with the Beat/Type Investigations request because the internal police investigation is ongoing. 

Shortly after the State’s Attorney’s declination, however, the Attorney General’s Internal Investigations Division released a much more detailed report that drew different conclusions about the shooting. The report acknowledged that it would be hard to charge officer Murray for the first three shots. While he was in clear violation of BPD policy by putting himself in front of the car, his actions would likely be construed as self-defense in a court of law. Murray’s fourth shot, however, could have crossed a line, the AG argued. 

“With respect to Officer Murray’s fourth shot, which struck and killed Mr. Rochester, it is

possible the state could prove Officer Murray acted unreasonably, thereby overcoming a

complete self-defense argument,” the report notes. “When he fired this shot, Officer Murray had dodged the Honda and was to the side of the car, falling to the ground. At that time, Mr. Rochester no longer posed a threat to Officer Murray, and Officer Murray had no reason to believe that Mr. Rochester posed a threat to any other officer or civilian. No other officers or civilians were in the path of Mr. Rochester’s vehicle and officers had no reason to believe that Mr. Rochester was armed or otherwise imminently dangerous.”  

The report goes on to say it is unclear how a fact-finder—judge or jury in the case—would rule given the “circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving.” 

At the time of the report’s release, the decision to prosecute an officer lay solely with the SAO, which defended its judgment in the case. 

“State’s Attorney Bates spoke at length to the General Assembly about the deficiencies in the OAG’s analysis,” Bentley responded to Type/Beat inquiries about the discrepancies in the two reports. “In addition, retired Judge Wanda Heard reviewed the case and determined she would have dismissed any charges against the officer citing defenses the OAG’s report had not considered.”

The SAO, Bentley said, requested that Judge Heard “review the matter in case we missed anything.” 

The different conclusions of the SAO and the AG were symptoms of a larger issue being debated by Maryland’s General Assembly. Earlier this year, the legislature passed a bill that would give the IID power to prosecute police officers in the case of a police shooting, because of potential conflicts of interest resulting from the necessarily close daily working relationship between police and prosecutors. The bill was signed into law in May and went into effect on Oct. 1. 

The law seeks “to restore that relationship and to restore that trust so that the communities can work with law enforcement and public safety officials to make sure that we’re all safer,” said Senator Will Smith (D-District 20), who introduced the bill. 

But because the law is not retroactive, “our office does not have jurisdiction to prosecute any incidents occurring prior to Oct. 1, 2023,” AG spokesperson Thomas Lester wrote in response to questions about the case. 

Rochester’s family has few avenues left to them. In February, they created a petition asking Gov. Wes Moore (D) to declare a change of venue and allow the AG to prosecute the case. It has more than 2,000 signatures, although the governor has not responded to the petition. 

“This is a tragic situation, but the governor doesn’t historically intervene when the State’s Attorney has conducted an investigation and determined not to prosecute,” wrote Brittany Marshall, the governor’s senior press secretary in response to Type/Beat questions about the Rochester petition. 

“Twice in the last three years the General Assembly has exercised its authority over which entities should investigate and prosecute these officer-involved fatalities,” Marshall wrote. “The governor supports the General Assembly’s comprehensive police reform efforts and respects the legislative intent in granting the Attorney General the authority to prosecute these cases after Oct. 1, 2023.” 

“I just hope that these officers do get some type of accountability,” Brown says. “They don’t realize that when you take somebody’s life that the family has to suffer.”  

But she knows that nothing will ever bring back her son. And though Murray and Mauri were the officers who shot at her son, his death shows the ways in which such police shootings truly are systemic, put in motion by bureaucracy. 

Brown continues to fight and to organize events such as Donnell’s Day during Pride Month in June, which was intended to keep his name out there and bring good into the city – especially its LGBTQ+ community. “It’s still hard every day dealing with the trauma, the stress, the grief,” Melchoir told the press at the event. “You know, but pretty much right now, do what we can to get his name out there with events like this.”

The one thing Danielle Brown knows is that she can’t quit on her son’s memory. “I’m going to continue to fight for accountability for Donnell.” 

Additional reporting by Jasmine Braswell and Brandon Soderberg

The post Anatomy of a Police Shooting appeared first on Baltimore Beat.