At Baltimore restaurant, staff grieves loss of 16-year-old dishwasher: ‘I want answers’

The pain in Ricky Johnson’s eyes was obvious. Swollen, they looked like they belonged to a man who had been crying for a few days now.

The owner and chef at Forno, an Italian restaurant and wine bar across the street from downtown Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre, Johnson has been grieving the youngest member of his staff during the past week.

Izaiah Carter, 16, was a Patterson High School student, a Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps cadet and a dishwasher at Forno, where he worked alongside his stepfather, a pizza cook who has spent the past five years as a member of the restaurant’s staff.

A shy, quiet kid when he started at Forno, Carter became comfortable with the staff, playing music as he washed dishes and making the occasional dance move, Johnson said. He was curious, too, asking questions about ingredients and dishes, almost to the point of annoyance.

On Monday, Carter was gunned down next to his East Baltimore school in Joseph E. Lee Park. An arrest has not been made.

“You usually don’t get too attached to the youngest member of your staff,” said Johnson, standing outside his kitchen in a quiet restaurant. “It’s just a special circumstance to have someone walk through the door as family already.”

Johnson closed his restaurant Tuesday to grieve — he spent the day there alone, cooking. It’s what he does, he said, when he needs to process his emotions. He took what he made to Carter’s family. Simple food, he said.

Thursday night, Johnson held an extended happy hour, with 20% of the proceeds going toward the family’s needs. Diners also could make separate donations, either to a GoFundMe or to the restaurant, for Carter’s funeral expenses.

“I wish I was in the position to close the restaurant for a week, pay for the funeral myself, but it’s just not the reality,” Johnson said.

Servers, bartenders and cooks wore shirts and buttons with Carter’s photo. Placards with the photo and a QR code to donate to the fund were on the bar and around tables. Outside, messages like #Stoptheviolence, #WeLoveYouZaiah and #Justice4Izaiah were written on the kind of sandwich board that is usually reserved for that day’s specials.

The staff smiled at patrons, but inwardly they still were mourning. They exchanged hugs and knowing looks in between serving appetizers and pouring wine.

One bartender, Katie Koestler, said her day job, until recently, had been working as an emergency room nurse. Bartending was a way to unplug from those stresses.

One couple at the bar, seemingly unaware of what happened, asked Koestler about her T-shirt, and she had to explain again what happened to Carter.

Koestler said dealing with life and death as a nurse is hard enough, and she never expected to have to do it at her job that was just supposed to be fun.

“The mental burnout is so hard,” she said.

Other employees have moved beyond sadness to something else. They, like so many others in Baltimore, want to know why so many children are being shot and killed.

“My sadness has turned to anger,” said Forno manager and bartender Heather Pollack. “I need something to change in this city. I want answers.”

Shootings and homicides in the city are down this year compared with the same time last year — about 23% and 26%, respectively. But gun violence among people 17 and younger remains prevalent.

Carter was the fifth school-age child killed in Baltimore this year. At least 22 others have been shot and injured. Three of the killings have happened near the students’ schools, less than a few blocks away at most.

“I don’t know how parents are parenting anywhere, but especially here,” Pollack said.

One man at the bar, Frank Sobczynski, a barbecue chef and friend of Johnson’s, wondered whether the public had become desensitized to death, seeing headline after headline in the nightly news and the morning paper.

“Children shouldn’t be dying,” he said.