Life and Death in Sandtown, Baltimore

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Montana Malik Barronette was born in 1995 in the richest country in the world. Yet by virtue of his race and gender, statistically speaking, he had from his first breath a much smaller chance than most American children of reaching adulthood alive, avoiding prison, or enjoying even modest legitimate success—a college education, say, or a steady job. If he failed to finish high school, he stood a less than fifty-fifty chance of holding a full-time job by the time he was thirty—for white Americans the chances were close to 90 percent. If he did everything right, finished high school or even college and found employment, he would likely earn 20 percent less than a white man. The poverty of Montana’s family alone would drag him down, but so would his race—a white child born into a similar situation was three times more likely to escape it. The community around him further reduced his chances; there were few examples of legitimate success and many of failure. In this, he was no different from many other Black American children, particularly those from blighted urban districts and, in Baltimore, even more particularly those from Sandtown. Writing about the neighborhood in his book Black Baltimore, published two years before Montana was born, author Harold A. McDougall noted that, in the “virtually all black” district, “unemployment is high, and there are a significant number of female-headed households living at or below the poverty line,” and its overall crime rate was the highest in West Baltimore.

Statistics are not destiny, of course, and there are many things that can and do help defeat those odds—good parenting, a strong family and community, good schooling, role models, opportunity, and, not the least, character. Most Black children, by far, do defeat those odds, even those from Sandtown. They not only survive their youth; they avoid the pitfalls on their path and thrive. Kurt Schmoke, the former mayor, estimates that in every high school homeroom class in Baltimore, there is likely one child fully lost to street life. “But in a large school,” he says, “that becomes a big number.” Without any of the advantages listed above, a child’s character, the crucial check on criminal behavior, is strongly tested well before maturity has armed him to resist.

Montana had no advantages. Born poor, he grew up mostly fending for himself. Parents? Selling and using drugs was the family way, one that had brought little beyond misery. Father exiled to Jamaica, mother somewhere in the neighborhood doing her thing. Community? With drug markets openly working the corners, addiction and violence were rampant. There were other hazards. Living in a rundown old town house on Harlem Avenue, the children had a strong chance of being exposed to mentally debilitating lead paint—an enormous problem in Baltimore’s poorest neighborhoods. Schools? Harlem Park, the grade school Montana attended, was consistently ranked one of the worst in the state. Opportunity? When he was old enough to look for work, if he chose to look, competition was fierce for the few legitimate jobs, most of which paid only minimum wage.

On the corners, by contrast, The Game paid handsomely.

The pull was gravitational. Montana’s path was greased. He was, Shanika would recall, “the baby on the block,” running errands for those working the corners, who ridiculed his fondness for the police. Concerned adults, especially late at night, would stop to question him or his siblings. Who did they belong to? What were they doing out by themselves? Montana was a fast learner. Soon he was selling drugs and committing bolder crimes. At nine he was arrested for stealing a car. The police, no longer his friends, took an arrest photo. It shows a frightened slender boy with dark skin, short hair, ears poking out of his small head, big eyes under worried raised brows. He looks younger even than nine, weighing in at all of sixty-five pounds and barely tall enough to see over a steering wheel. By then the street had him.

He was already working for one of the local heroin dealers, Davon Robinson, selling a product labeled “Get Right.” It was a complex operation. In little processing and packaging shops, the heroin was cut with any number of white powders—quinine, powdered caffeine, chalk, baking soda, mannitol, crushed pain pills, a substance known as “benita” (said to be “baby laxative”), and so on—reducing the kick but stretching the product and upping the profit. It was delicately apportioned and sealed in gelcaps, which were sold in packs of twenty-five or fifty. The “corner men” directed traffic, dealt with buyers as they drove or walked up, and took their money. Since they were the most visible of the drug shop’s workers, out in the open all day and night, they never handled the drugs. A “pack runner” was dispatched to report the sale. The drugs were delivered by “hitters” from the hidden stash—usually in a nearby vacant house—to the buyer. Since this was the overtly criminal part of the exchange, hitters were often the crew’s youngest members, who, if arrested, would be charged as juveniles. Both Montana and his half brother Terrell started out as hitters. Industrious and smart, they were soon running their own shop.

When the boys peddled their own product as “Get Right,” Robinson complained, and they changed the name to “True Bomb.” Besides heroin, they sold fentanyl, cocaine, marijuana, and Percocet, Xanax, and other pills.

Very soon they were making good money. They were Tana and Rell, familiar and feared, players in The Game, part of a strutting, darkly fatalistic street subculture with its own hip style, language, and music. The dead-end nature of the enterprise was part of its attraction. Disputes over status and turf were routinely settled with handguns, readily obtained. This was not, as we tend to think of outlaw behavior, rebellious. Tana simply embraced what he found. Children adapt readily to their environment. His world had been violent from the start, from the beatings meted out by his frustrated grandmother when he misbehaved to those delivered by bullies on the street. And beatings were the least of it. Children in Sandtown learned early to duck and run for cover at the sharp pop of gunfire. They were accustomed to seeing the oily pool of blood on the sidewalk under a victim, its oddly metallic odor, and the sight of spilled viscera or brains. These were not singular traumatic events but as ordinary as ice cream trucks tootling down suburban streets. They were also formative, particularly when the victim was a relative or friend, altering normal expectations for a long life. Fatalism came naturally.

As did contempt for the police. The brothers’ rise as Sandtown street dealers coincided with a complete breakdown of law enforcement in Baltimore. The divide between Black communities and police was a given, rooted in a long history of racial injustice and insensitivity, but in Baltimore it was aggravated by the force’s futility. Getting away with murder was routine. Citywide, the homicide clearance rate—just arrests, not convictions—was less than one-third, and it was far worse in Black neighborhoods. In 2015, the year Tana and Rell were in full stride, there were sixty-four killings in the Western District, the Baltimore Police Department division comprising Sandtown and several other neighborhoods. By the end of that year, only eighteen culprits had been charged—less than half the citywide rate. This both encouraged shootings and severely discouraged witnesses from helping the cops. Often the killers were well known, but so long as they remained at large, it meant talking to the police—snitching— wasn’t just pointless, it was dangerous. So ordinary citizens turned their heads, which, as many cops saw it, made the community itself complicit. Any tenuous bridges between police and community collapsed in April 2015, when a Black twenty-five-year-old named Freddie Gray was arrested in Sandtown and suffered injuries in a police van on the way to lockup that resulted in his death a week later. The arresting cops were accused of first injuring Gray’s back and then taking him for a fatally rough ride, unsecured in the back of their vehicle. Protests flamed into riots. Failed attempts to prosecute the arresting officers fed the anger.

And when the mayhem subsided, the police, stung by community antagonism and outraged by efforts to prosecute their brethren, effectively stopped policing Sandtown and other Black neighborhoods. This, predictably, fed still more violence. In a lawless place, people seek their own justice. Shooting or robbery victims exacted their own revenge or were avenged by family and friends. Gun violence took off like a runaway chain reaction. In the first half of the decade the number of murders citywide annually was about 200; in 2015 it was 344, and totals in following years stayed in that vicinity. Sandtown and neighborhoods like it had slipped out of control. All of this would lead to a federal takeover of the city police department in 2017.

This calamitous descent was, for the most part, extraneous to Baltimore’s wider white community, where violence was rare and law enforcement more diligent, efficient, and respected. For suburbanites and those whites living in the city’s most affluent areas, like nearby Bolton Hill, Roland Park, or Guilford, the shootings were a Black thing. This racist assumption formed an inferential loop: if one assumed violence was common in Sandtown because Black people lived there, the more violent it became, the more the assumption seemed true. It had always been thus.

Sandtown was a particularly egregious example, but Baltimore was not the only city plagued by gun violence in Black neighborhoods. During the first eighteen years of the twenty-first century, about 162,000 Black people were murdered in America, notes sociologist Elliott Currie in his 2020 book A Peculiar Indifference, citing figures from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Black men between the ages of fifteen and twenty-nine made up more than half of that number. A young Black man has sixteen times the chances of dying from violence as his white counterpart—this in a country whose young white men are, according to Currie, five times more likely to be murdered than young German men and twenty times more likely than young Japanese men. Somehow this is not, and never has been, considered a big deal in white America. On New Year’s Day in 2022, Amy Goldberg, a veteran trauma surgeon at Philadelphia’s Temple University Hospital, after treating twelve shooting victims, two of whom died, tweeted, “Where is the outrage . . . from everyone?” In an interview with the Philadelphia Inquirer, she explained, “I was just so angry, as we all should be. The number of homicides are outrageous, more than ever. I just couldn’t understand. We need to be moved. What’s it going to take [for] us to be moved to do something?”

But doing something about Black on Black violence has never been a social priority. The epidemic of violent death in Black communities is rarely even mentioned by political candidates, other than those running in afflicted localities. Newspapers and local media typically ignore all but the most shocking incidents. The shooting and killing has become, simply, urban background noise, shrugged off as thugs preying on thugs or, to put a finer point on it, Blacks preying on Blacks. Even though social scientists, beginning with Du Bois, have roundly debunked the idea that Blacks are inherently more violent than whites, this myth is widely, if not always consciously, accepted by whites who do not consider themselves racist, for the same reason that most whites do not see racism in the hugely disproportionate percentage of Black people behind bars. I can remember my grandfather, as we drove through a Black neighborhood in Chicago in the 1950s, telling my brothers and me, “Roll up your windows and lock the car doors. These people are dangerous.” He didn’t use the word “people.” In my early years as a reporter in Philadelphia, I remember asking my white city editor why we weren’t writing more stories about the murders happening in the city every night. “It’s not news,” he said, flatly. “Those people are always killing each other.” It goes without saying that the violent deaths of 162,000 whites would not be background noise.

In the worst afflicted neighborhoods, murder and maiming by gunfire are so much a fact of life that they have spawned an aberrant subculture. Exiled in their own cities, Black Americans by necessity had always formed separate local societies. In some cities, Baltimore included, these produced a flowering of discrete music, dance, painting, and literature in the early twentieth century. But they also produced a criminal class regarded, as Du Bois pointed out, with a measure of sympathy, if not esteem, by the very communities it preyed upon.

Today, those young Black men who drift away from school— Schmoke’s one child per homeroom class—compete for status and success on their neighborhood corners. They war ferociously. In Baltimore, city police have identified 320 distinct local gangs. For each, The Game is lethally serious. Where death is normalized, life is cheapened, especially when it is so little noted by the larger world. Centuries of that disinterest, along with social and economic isolation, have bred violent cultism in places like Sandtown. One of the consequences of being relegated to the lowest caste, Du Bois noted, was “recklessness.” This was certainly true for Tana. Discarded by society—in his case by his own family—he embraced his dead-end status, living fast and expecting to die young or to face long imprisonment—which was actually less likely than being felled by a bullet. Who cared? What did it matter? And if his own life meant so little, how much did anyone else’s matter?

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Excerpted from Life Sentence: The Brief and Tragic Career of Baltimore’s Deadliest Gang Leader, by Mark Bowden. Copyright 2023. Published by Atlantic Monthly Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted with permission.

Featured image: Rowhouses, 1126-1130 N. Fulton Avenue (west side), Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore, MD 21217 United States Photograph by Eli Pousson, 2018 October 1. Via Wikimedia Commons / Flickr

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