Outreach teams head for Brooklyn Homes to ‘continue this loving process’ as pain from Baltimore mass shooting lingers
Hundreds of residents filled the courtyards of the Brooklyn Homes community Saturday night, dancing to local musicians during an annual celebration of the neighborhood in South Baltimore that abruptly turned into chaos when multiple gunmen opened fire on the block party, killing two people and wounding 28 others.
On Monday afternoon, the neighborhood was quiet as residents stayed indoors.
“It looks straight like a lockdown,” said the Rev. Shawn Freeman, a member of a Baltimore outreach group that led a Monday evening peace march through the Brooklyn neighborhood to Gretna Court, where the largest mass shooting in the city’s recent memory unfolded shortly after midnight Sunday.
In the wake of the shooting, resource groups and city agencies descended on Brooklyn, where residents recently cited the neighborhood’s lack of institutional support and resources as one of the forces driving violence in the area.
Brooklyn Homes Tenant Council President Erika Walker, who said her nephew and his best friend were both injured in Sunday’s shooting, said the neighborhood is short of recreational opportunities for youth.
“We need something for these kids to do. We have nothing,” Walker said.
Members of Freeman’s group, We Our Us, handed flyers with information on community resources, such as employment assistance, a conflict mediation hotline and life coaching courses to the few residents who came outside. A young resident complained of the television cameras near her home as area ministers and community groups spoke about the need to spread love through the damaged community.
It was routine work for We Our Us, a group that focuses its outreach on communities in Baltimore that are particularly hurting — either due to a notable recent act of gun violence or a lack of institutional support and resources, or both. Brooklyn has been a primary target of the group’s outreach since the movement started five years ago.
“We’re not new to Brooklyn,” said Kevin Daniels, a professor at Morgan State University’s School of Social Work who volunteers for the nonprofit outreach team. “We’re going to continue this loving process.”
Aiming to guide boys and young men in Baltimore toward productive life pathways, We Our Us offers a seasonal mentoring program for teens and young adults, where “Life Coaches” lead weekly courses in Baltimore’s east and west sides. The group also runs a 24/7 conflict resolution hotline, and partners with the city government for an employment program that connects young people with jobs.
“If you call us today, we’ll have you at least an interview by Thursday,” the Rev. Cory Barnes, the group’s director of operations, said Monday, noting many employment opportunities offered by the group are “friendly” to those carrying criminal convictions or a history of substance abuse.
Earlier Monday, representatives from city agencies and local organizations set up tables in the Brooklyn Homes Community Center, which Baltimore Mayor Brandon Scott said Sunday would become a “central place for various city agencies to provide residents immediate aid and services” in the neighborhood.
As groups prepared for residents to arrive at the community center Monday morning, one city worker warned the volunteers and outreach workers that “some people may come in angry and traumatized.”
Cyrus Nusum, marketing director of Transformation Health, promoted the mental health center’s “therapeutic dance hall,” along with its other services. With locations in Baltimore City and Odenton in Anne Arundel County, the organization offers counseling and psychiatric care to people with Medicaid.
“In Baltimore, dancing is healing and everyone dances,” Nusum said “It’s just a way to release the whole week’s issues and problems.” She said she arrived in Brooklyn on Sunday afternoon, where workers from the therapy center reconnected with at least one former patient. On Monday afternoon, she talked animatedly with a group of teenage girls who said they fled the gunfire Sunday morning.
“Right now, this is the trauma part, the heavy part, but eventually, we need to have some healing,” Nusum said.
State Del. Gary Simmons, whose Anne Arundel district includes Brooklyn Park, was at the community center Monday to offer help as a Red Cross volunteer. “People here refuse it, because they don’t think it’ll last,” Simmons said, adding that he believed the city was committed to a lasting response.
Simmons said a resident asked him, “Do we need a shooting for the help to come?”
The delegate, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee in the Maryland House of Delegates, called Brooklyn “an anti-law enforcement community,” where people did not want to cooperate with Baltimore Police.
Other Brooklyn residents said they believed it was unlikely that witnesses would speak to police because they feared retaliation from their neighbors.
“I think there’s no chance, and that’s sad — that you have to be so fearful,” said Iris Henry, who lives in Brooklyn Homes but wasn’t at the event Saturday.
The city government is also aiming to address trauma in the community with a neighborhood stabilization response alongside local organizations.
“It’s important to talk to someone for support” following an event as traumatic as Sunday’s shooting, said Kyla Liggett-Creel, an assistant clinical professor at the University of Maryland School of Social Work who founded the institution’s Healing Youth Alliance.
Seeing news about the shooting on social media or hearing details about the event could also unearth prior trauma in those who were not present during the violence, said Liggett-Creel, whose group aims to address untreated trauma in the African American community by training youths to engage with their peers on mental health topics.
Liggett-Creel said residents struggling with the trauma from Sunday’s shooting may notice they are oversleeping, feel scared to talk or leave their home. She encouraged anyone in need of help to dial 988 to receive free and confidential support for distress and crisis resources.
