There were 275 murders in Baltimore City in 2006, up by six from the year before. That's an average of five a week. Among the dead are 249 males and 26 females. Twenty-eight were minors. Of the victims, 254 were African-American, 13 were Caucasian, five were Hispanic, one was Asian, and two were labeled by police as "other." The longest amount of time the city went without a murder was six days. Shootings made up the vast majority of homicides with 227. Of the shooting deaths, 205 were African-American men, accounting for nearly 75 percent of all 2006 homicide victims; 101 of those victims--49 percent--were in their 20s.

Since the Murder Ink column began tracking homicides in July 2004, the Baltimore Police Department has officially recognized 679 murders. During those two and a half years, certain things have changed a bit--fewer Caucasians were killed this year, 13 compared to 26 in 2005; beating deaths and asphyxiations were down; the Eastern police district beat out '05's leader, the Southwestern, as the most murderous part of the city, a dubious honor the Eastern claimed in '04 as well--but for the most part the changes were minor. The statistics can't capture the specific horrors--children beaten to death, robberies ending in blood-stained pavement, women killed by or killing their boyfriends--but reading through old Murder Ink columns, it's striking how similar most of the murders seem. While the names of the victims change, the circumstances repeat themselves with little variation, often making the murders hard to tell apart not just from week to week, but from day to day--a seemingly endless parade of African-American men shot to death in the street.

This sameness caught Chuck Amos' eye. After two shootings in quick succession near his Highlandtown home garnered barely any media attention, Amos' personal blog morphed into Murderland.org, an obituary site for the slain. And he wasn't the only one tracking the deaths over the last two years. Marcie Brennan created the Baltimore Crime blog in January 2005 after a man died under mysterious circumstances in Hampden, not far from where she was living at the time. In early '06, research scientist Chris Nelson started Burgersub.org in an attempt to see what a map of Baltimore City would look like with all the city's homicides plotted on it. Liz Richardson was inspired by Amos' personal blog to start From My Point of View: Baltimore, a chronicle of her grief and her experiences dealing with the police and courts after her brother Sam Richardson's murder in 2005.

Their reasons for writing vary from idle curiosity to personal loss, but they all do something that the city as a whole often seems uninterested in doing: They pay attention to the men and women that make up Baltimore's homicide statistics. The result is an interconnected web of local bloggers watching the death toll rise and refusing to let bodies stack up unnoticed.

 

If there is a nexus for this seemingly random group of people, it's Marcie Brennan's site, the Baltimore Crime blog. The most well-known of the four, it's something of a virtual clubhouse for people interested in local crime. Amos, Nelson, and Richardson all post comments on the site, and Amos and Nelson have even filled in for Brennan while she was out of town. It also provides the widest variety of information. Brennan looks at violent crimes and occasionally politics in Baltimore and across the state, consolidating information from newspapers and TV news into one spot and providing commentary that often says what those in traditional journalism can't--that this shit is crazy.

In an October 2006 post, Brennan linked to a Sun article giving an update on the case against a couple charged with murdering their 1-month-old twin daughters Emonney and Emunnea in 2004. "More on the story of Sierra Swann, Nathaniel Broadway, the two infants they starved and beat to death and how not a thing has changed to prevent a similar incident from happening in the future," she wrote. "Pass the Prozac, this is easily, by far, the most depressing thing I've ever read about in this town, and that is saying a lot."

Visiting Brennan's home in the Evergreen neighborhood near Roland Park, you see nothing to suggest her unusual hobby. Her 5-year-old daughter Zoe's Christmas presents are scattered across the living room when Brennan, 33, answers the door barefoot, dressed in loose-fitting clothes with a cup of coffee in her hand. It's an image that brings to mind Brennan' day job, co-authoring a series of pregnancy and child-rearing books called Great Expectationsûunder her maiden name, Marcie Jones, with her mother, Sandy Jones. Brennan spends most of her day upstairs in her office/guest room, where she works on her latest book and answers expectant mothers' questions at HappyHealthyPregnancy.com. According to Brennan, the first Great Expectations book has sold more than 135,000 copies since it came out in 2004, and the web site and a pregnancy calendar Brennan created for iVillage get millions of hits each day. But in Baltimore, Brennan is known as the crime-blog lady.

"It's funny to be known for this blog that probably gets, I don't know, 1,000 hits a day," she says.

Brennan started the blog partially as a writing exercise--she wanted to practice writing consistently in a different style. A blog seemed like the way to go, but she didn't want to do the usual journalesque blog chronicling the minutiae of her daily life. "I think the blog as a personal medium is really limited," Brennan says. "If you don't write anything that's really personal, then what's the point? And if it is really personal, then you have to accept that your worst enemy or your great-grandmother is going to find it."

Brennan had long been fascinated by the often bafflingly bizarre local crime stories she read about in the newspaper and saw on TV, but what finally spurred her to start the blog was the death of Nick Marsalek. It was January 2005, and Brennan had just moved to Hampden when she received a copy of a local newsletter called Historic Hampden Happenings and read a story about Marsalek being found dead just three blocks from her house. The police had not classified Marsalek's death a homicide, but his parents were sure he had been murdered. Brennan was shocked that the only coverage this 26-year-old musician and teacher's unexplained death beneath a bridge in Wyman Park received was in a newsletter, so she began the Baltimore Crime blog with a piece on his death.

Her original plan was to do the blog for a year, but as time went on, Brennan got hooked. "Every single day there was some shocking weird story," she says. "There was never nothing to write about." While she has dropped in on a few court cases over the years, she usually finds plenty to write about online from her home office.

And despite the day-in day-out overload of tragedy she compiles for her site, there are still certain murders that really get to her. "I mean really, just when you think you have total outrage fatigue, Baltimore makes it possible," she says.

The murder of cab driver Oumar Bah stands out in her mind: "That was very tragic. He came over from Mali for a better life. He ends up getting jacked by this 15-year-old kid." And the 2004 slayings of three children in Falstaff continue to haunt her: "I was in the courtroom when they were talking about how one of the kids peed his pants before he was killed. [Having] a 5-year-old, that was just awful."

Brennan is a mother and someone who has written extensively on childcare, so it's not surprising that kids concern her deeply. And the involvement of minors in homicides, both as victims and perpetrators, has been an issue this year. In 2005, the number of children killed dropped dramatically from the year before, with 14 minors murdered in '05 compared to 31 in '04. The city touted the decrease, but neither the police nor the Department of Social Services could give a specific reason for the change. And this year the numbers have risen. In 2006, 28 minors were killed.

But the number that really created an uproar this year--if a piece or two in a couple of newspapers counts as an uproar--was the number of juveniles who committed homicides. According to the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office, 20 people under the age of 18 were charged with 2006 homicides, among them two 14-year-olds and nine 15-year-olds, including Zachary James, who was charged with two separate murders last year. Baltimore State's Attorney Patricia Jessamy has commissioned a study to look into the rise in violent crime perpetrated by juveniles.

After two years of chronicling crime in Baltimore the rise hardly surprises Brennan.

"Suddenly there is more of them? Well, that's the criminal-making system getting more and more efficient," she says. And she feels that the problem won't be fixed by a study or even tougher law enforcement. Brennan feels we have to look at our entire attitude toward Baltimore's youth.

"We seem to be really hostile toward young, poor, juvenile males--I mean, to really hate them," Brennan says. "And you know these kids are the future of our city. We need to educate them so they can work in our city, keep our city running, keep our city safe, fix the pipes when they break, clean your teeth when you have to go to the dentist. But it's almost like we've collectively decided to let this population go. We've decided that we would rather warehouse them in jails and pay $30,000 a year than invest up-front in programs for these kids."

 

Brennan's first post is dated Jan. 16,2005. Thirteen days later, Chuck Amos started his first blog at TaoTeChuck.com. When the now-36-year-old computer programmer and former professional musician started out, crime was not on his mind. "I just wanted a blog like everybody else," Amos says. "I wanted to write. I'd grown up in a family of writers, and books and words have always played a major part of my life, so it just started out as something fun to do."

His initial mission statement was to keep the blog's subject matter as varied as possible, praising the randomness of many blogs and condemning whiny, politically charged blogs that tend toward "incessant blathering about one topic."

But his very next post foreshadowed a path Amos himself didn't know he was pursuing. Titled "To Live and Die in Baltimore," the post discussed the murder rate and the fact that the murder of Johns Hopkins University student Linda Trinh created a media frenzy while other deaths went largely ignored. In the years that followed, the question of why some murders seem to matter more than others would be the topic that Amos focused on almost exclusively.

Amos' interest in crime was spurred when two men were shot a few weeks apart near his Highlandtown home. He looked to the newspapers and TV stations for information and was shocked by how little he could find. "When I first started, I would look through the Metro Digest in The Sun, and invariably the first piece in the Metro Digest would be on train tracks getting repaired in Harford County, and then four or five pieces down there's 70 words about a 23-year-old man shot to death in West Baltimore."

At first, Amos mentioned murders every couple of posts, promising his readers he wouldn't get fixated, but gradually his emotional eulogies of murder victims he had never known seemed to dominate nearly every entry.

"It got to the point where I felt like I was completely disrespecting the families of the people who I was writing about, if one day I'm writing about how this 15-year-old kid got shot to death in East Baltimore and the next day I'm writing, `Oh, I heard this CD, I love it,'" Amos says. So last March he started a separate site, Murderland.org, dedicated solely to his profiles of homicide victims. The idea was to research the victims and provide information on who they really were, what they were like as kids, their accomplishments, all to show readers "that every dead body in Baltimore City was once a living, breathing person." But finding that information proved harder than Amos expected. He spent hours searching news sites, driving around the neighborhoods where the homicides occurred, and trying to contact the victims' families, only to come up empty again and again. Eventually he burned out.

"Murderland as I originally envisioned it has kind of been a failure, because I got seriously depressed," Amos says. "I could only write, `Somebody in Baltimore got killed, I don't know anything about them, the press didn't write anything about them,' so many times. What good am I doing?"

A June 15, 2006, post on the murder of Edward Jeter illustrates both what Amos was trying to do and the difficulties he ran up against. "Edward Jeter was the 61st person murdered in Baltimore City in 2006," he wrote. "According to the people and press of our city, his 28 years of life can be summarized in 207 words, or about seven words for each year of his life. Unfortunately, the only seven words that anyone cared to write about his last year were, `Edward Jeter was shot in East Baltimore.' Rest in peace, Edward. May the next stop on your journey be filled with love and light."

In June, he stopped updating Murderland and has stopped writing about murders on TaoTeChuck.com. "I thought what I was doing was just trying to put a face on all these victims, and that's ultimately what I would like to do, but I can't do that by reading the newspaper reports. And until I find a way to do that the way I want to, I can't write," Amos says. "I'm worried that people will think that I've stopped caring."

That's hardly the case. Amos is currently working with the State's Attorney's Office-administered Family Bereavement Center, which provides counseling and other services to the families of Baltimore homicide victims, to turn Murderland into memorial site for victims' families.

For Chris Nelson, a 24-year-old Frederick native who moved to Baltimore to attend Johns Hopkins University, the who is less interesting than the where. Nelson started Burgersub.org early last year because he was interested in geography. "I guess I just wanted to see what the map of Baltimore would look like if you put all the murders on it, because you always hear the number of people that got killed, and that doesn't really mean much," he says. "When you actually see so many dots just covering the entire map, the extent of it really is mind-blowing."

Standing in the house he rents with friends, the room dotted with books, DVDs, and two guitars that appear to hook into a video-game console, the shaggy-haired, glasses-sporting Nelson looks more like a Hopkins underclassman than a graduate working as a cancer researcher. He speaks about his web site in a laid-back monotone that lacks the palpable outrage of Amos and Brennan, making him seem every bit the scientist he is.

Like Brennan and Amos, Nelson combs through web sites every day looking for the dead. And as he has struggled to make his site as accurate and thorough as possible, Nelson has learned just how difficult it can be to collect information about homicides. He gets his information from newspapers and TV news web sites, as well from police department sites, at least the few that offer the information he seeks. The Prince George's County and Washington police web sites are particularly good, Nelson says. "They actually issue a press release every time there's a murder and half the time when they arrest somebody for a murder, which I think is pretty cool," he says. "Baltimore doesn't do that at all. The actual official police web site [is] totally useless. Their press releases are like, `We're holding this charity drive, and this guy got promoted.'"

As Nelson (and Murder Ink) have discovered, the information that is received from official sources can't always be trusted. Comparing data from the Baltimore Police Department and the Baltimore State's Attorney's Office for this article reveals a host of inconsistencies. The two agencies don't always agree on the names of the victims and suspects, never mind the circumstances of their deaths. According to police, the suspect in the Oct. 17 murder of Marcus Rogers is 29-year-old Zukael Stephens, but a press release from the State's Attorney's Office says 19-year-old Stephens Zukael was indicted for the murder. A search of the Maryland Court Database returns hits only for the name Zukael Stephens, but entries show him born in both 1987 and 1977.

But what fascinates Nelson most as he plots murder after murder on his online map is how pervasive homicides are in Baltimore. They are often much closer to home than many residents would like to believe. "No matter what neighborhood you're in, you can find something that happened within a few blocks of you," he says. He has also watched the shifts in homicides over the last year, pointing to improvements in some of 2005's deadliest neighborhoods while other areas racked up bodies.

The four most murderous neighborhoods of '05 were Sandtown-Winchester, with 11 homicides; Carrollton Ridge, with 10; and Broadway East and Ellwood Park/Monument, with eight each. In 2006, murders were down in all of those neighborhoods except Broadway East, which, along with Cherry Hill, was '06's most murderous neighborhood, with 10 homicides. Central Park Heights had nine, and four different neighborhoods share the third-place spot, with seven homicides apiece. But as Nelson points out, neighborhood names don't tell the whole story: "A lot of those neighborhoods, it's kind of misleading, because they're huge neighborhoods."

Northwest Baltimore's Greenspring neighborhood had seven homicides in 2006, with six of them within a four-block square. And there were six murders last year within the borders of Harwood, a tiny two-block-by-four-block neighborhood that runs alongside Charles Village. There was only one murder in Harwood in 2005 and none in '04.

As a former Hopkins student, Nelson was surprised by the rise in fatalities. "We used to live on Guilford [Avenue] and used to occasionally hear a couple gunshots far away to the east at night," he says. "But Harwood, I never realized how bad it was."

 

Liz Richardson doesn't blog about crime, at least not crime in general. Her web site, From My Point of View, is about one crime in particular, the murder of her brother. On June 2, 2005, Richardson's older brother Sam was walking home with his girlfriend from his job tending bar. It was only a couple of blocks from the Rendezvous Lounge on West 25th Street to the house the couple rented in Remington, but along the way Sam was shot in the face and died.

Richardson was 25 years old when Sam died; he was 30. She describes him as a protective older brother and a level-headed friend. "He was always the one that everyone kind of listened to with no question," she says. "He was the one who would tell you if you were doing something messed up." Though they really didn't grow up together--Richardson lived in Philadelphia with their mother while Sam lived in Baltimore with their dad--they became close in the last year or so before Sam's death, hanging out every weekend.

The night Sam died he called Richardson and asked her to come to the bar. She said no. She had work in the morning and was going to see him the next day. She went to bed and at about 2:30 a.m. her phone rang. It was her father telling her that Sam had been shot and was in the hospital.

When Richardson, her husband Larry Jordan, and her father arrived at the hospital, she recalls, no one would tell them anything, and Sam's girlfriend was too hysterical to give them a clear idea of what happened. "I didn't have a feeling he was dead per se--not like I knew," she says. "I just had a feeling it wasn't going to be a good outcome because we didn't have any details. They wouldn't tell us anything on the phone."

That feeling just got worse as Richardson and her family were ushered into a small room where they waited and waited until a doctor finally came in gave them the news that Sam had died.

"It seemed like after that everything else just kind of blurred by," she says. Her one distinct memory from that night was going outside for a smoke, where a man told her that her life wasn't so bad because, unlike him, she had bus fare home. She jumped up, ready to grab the man, but either her father or Jordan--she can't remember which--stopped her. When they got home, Richardson went into hyperdrive, calling people--including her mom in Pittsburgh--to tell them Sam had died and working on funeral preparations.

Later that morning, she ended up at the Rendezvous with a bunch of Sam's friends. "They don't usually open that early, but in this neighborhood everything spreads so fast. If something happens on 25th Street, everybody on 29th Street knows before the end of the day," Richardson says. "Nobody was even drinking. It was just like everybody . . . kind of met up there to grieve together."

As the funeral approached, Richardson tried to keep busy. The day before Sam's wake Richardson couldn't sleep and ended up cooking dinner at 5:30 a.m. "I remember my mother being here like, `You've been up for two days. You should go to sleep,'" she says. "I just stayed busy until I couldn't stay busy anymore. . . . After the funeral, that night, I kind of broke down."

Over that summer Richardson kept to herself, only hanging out in the tight group of friends and family that came together in the wake of Sam's death. Besides missing her brother, Richardson had to contend with neighborhood gossip about his death and people treating it as a conversation piece: "These two girls came into the bar--we were just all there that night--and this girl was like, `Yeah, this is where that bartender who got his head blew off used to work.'"

Four months after Sam died, Richardson Googled her brother's name and found a mention of his death on Amos' site. "I ended up e-mailing with him because he had the story kind of mixed up," Richardson says. (Amos had repeated a widespread rumor that Sam died in his girlfriend's arms.) "So I ended up talking to him from that, but then I got kind of interested in the blog, because it seemed like everybody was just venting on their blogs, getting everything off their chests."

Richardson had never done a blog before, but with encouragement from Amos she got From My Point of View up and running in October 2005. It was a place for her to express her feelings about the senselessness of her brother's death, and in early entries you can feel the rawness of her emotion. She has had bouts of anger as she deals with rumors about his death and strangers teasing her for wearing a jacket with a Tool band pin on it that had belonged to Sam.

She also has had moments of gut-wrenching sadness, and on some occasions the anger and the sadness sat side by side in one post. In December 2005, Richardson wrote about getting a fortune cookie that made her think about Sam and the way he had changed his life. "The reason this fortune made me think of this was Sam got it right late, but he was happy, even more happy than we{ family}were. He was happier than the ones who had to wait for this late awakening were. Sitting here thinking of this brought water to my eyes, so I took a deep breath and signed in to blogger and typed this to get it out and off my chest." In the next paragraph she explodes into an all-caps tirade against the man who killed her brother: "I HOPE YOU ROT IN HELL . . . AND IF INSIDE YOU 1 DAY YOU EVER FEEL SORRY IT WILL NEVER MEAN SHIT TO ME BECAUSE NOTHING YOU CAN ENDURE, NOTHING YOU CAN SAY OR DO WILL EVER MAKE YOU WORTHY OF ANY RESPECT, NOTHING WILL EVER MAKE YOU FIT TO WALK THIS EARTH FREELY AND ENJOY LIFE IN MY EYES."

Richardson's writing is so personal, so unabashedly emotional, largely because she never really expected anyone to read it. "I didn't think anyone would see it at first . . . unless I told them," she says. "It got kind of weird when people I didn't know were just randomly finding it . . . then I realized that other people were reading it."

On Dec. 13, 2005, Richardson got to type the post she had been waiting six months to write. It was titled "They Caught the Bastard." She was at her job at an optical lab when she heard about the arrest. "It was probably like 15 minutes before we got off," she recalls. "I remember yelling out. And my boss, he was kind of like an in-control person--he didn't want any commotion, too much excitement, or drama either way. And I remember yelling out, and he was like, `Hey, calm that down.' And I remember telling him, `Fuck that, I'm not calming down. They caught the guy that killed my brother, I got to go.' And I ran out of work."

Everyone met up at the Rendezvous to celebrate, but the euphoria of that moment was short-lived, as the arrest led to more than a year of drawn-out court proceedings. "The postponements are the worst," Richardson says. Each time a date was set, she and Sam's friends and family would go to court only to hear another excuse for why the case couldn't proceed. The last time there wasn't a courtroom available and the trial was pushed back to this coming March, nearly two years after Sam's murder.

"You're putting the families through more unnecessary grief," Richardson says. "As long as it's postponed, I've got another three months that I have to keep this in the back of my mind about going to court. At least if we can get court done, it'll put that chapter to rest, and I can just deal with whatever personal feelings I have."

Since the arrest, much of From My Point of View has focused on her frustrations with the court system, her anger at Ameer Taylor, the man who has been charged with Sam's murder, and her continuing sense of loss. As more people have started reading the blog, she has been touched by the support she's received from strangers, but she's also had to deal with hostility.

"I've had people tell me I need God and I have no consideration for [Taylor's] family," she says. "I found it kind of disturbing at first. Are these people serious? I lost my brother, and I'm supposed to feel pity for [Taylor's] family? He's not dead, he's in jail. They can still see him."

Richardson now tends bar at at the Rendezvous. She moved into Sam's old house. She sports an angel tattoo on her arm featuring a banner reading rip sam, and she still sometimes wears the jacket with the Tool pin, even though she is totally unfamiliar with the band's music. She signs her posts "Sam's Lil Sis." It was something of a nickname before Sam died. "That's what people have been calling me for the longest time," she says. "Some people actually really didn't know my name, they just knew me as Sam's little sister."

And if there is one thing she hopes people will take from her site, it's that her brother was more than just a homicide victim. "A lot of people look at it, and it's in Remington and there's drugs throughout the neighborhood, [so] they probably think it was about drugs," she says. (According to Richardson, the murder was retaliation for Sam having thrown Taylor out of the bar months before.)

It is a common assumption, and one that aggravates the other bloggers as well: the idea that all, or most, homicide victims are criminals who are somehow ultimately responsible for their own deaths. Of the 275 Baltimore homicide victims in 2006 roughly 222 of them had criminals records in Maryland--the exact number is difficult to pin down. But not all criminal records are serious.

According to the Maryland Court Database, Biafria Thomas' criminal record amounts to a 2003 trespassing charge that the state declined to prosecute. Stephen Brunson had a charge of "forgery-tickets/coupon" in '01 that the state didn't pursue, and Jeremiah Pinder received probation before judgment for public urination in 1997.

 

If 2006 homicide numbers seem horrifying, they are nothing compared to the numbers racked up so far this year. Just 10 days into 2007, 15 people had been killed, and the lack of public outcry has affected Brennan so profoundly that she's considering giving up her blog all together. On Jan. 10, Brennan went to a meeting of the city's Criminal Justice Coordinating Council, an interdepartmental task force charged with reducing crime. Despite a spike in homicides that puts the city on track to blow the previous record high of 353 murders in 1993 out of the water, the meeting was almost deserted. "And some gal talked about taking their department manuals and merging them into one big manual or something, and at that point I could barely hold it together," Brennan writes in an e-mail. "I just went in the bathroom and cried my eyes out."

As Brennan said, "Just when you think you have total outrage fatigue, Baltimore makes it possible."

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