This story was originally published by The Trace, a nonprofit newsroom covering gun violence in America. Sign up for its newsletters here.

In early July, more than 100 people stopped by Sawmill Creek Park just across the Baltimore City line in Glen Burnie for the third-annual “Aaliyah Day.” It was a good turnout, especially given the triple-digit temperatures that threatened to keep some away.  

The stifling weather didn’t stop attendees from playing basketball or entering raffles for cash, shoes, and Orioles tickets. A DJ played upbeat music as family and friends handed out food and cold water. People chatted and exchanged quiet smiles. Many paused to look at the tribute on the black metal fence, where Aaliyah’s portrait hung alongside eight others, all young people lost to gun violence. 

The day before the event, Krystal Gonzalez, Aaliyah’s mother, felt overtaken by emotions.

“Yesterday was full of tears, a rollercoaster,” she said. “This was the last day that I saw my baby alive on July 1, three years ago.”

For Gonzalez, the July 2 celebration was meant to be completely different from the block party where her daughter died. It was her way of reclaiming the day and restoring hope.

“But it’s also inspiring change,” she said.

Aaliyah was 18 and a recent high school graduate when she was shot and killed. She was one of two people who died after shots erupted in the largest mass shooting in modern Baltimore history. Twenty-eight others were also wounded—including 15 minors.

They were shot at the Brooklyn Day block party, an annual community event in the Brooklyn Homes section of Baltimore. The event was banned after the shooting, and the city Housing Authority is now being accused of negligence in a lawsuit filed by Gonzalez and the family of 20-year-old Kylis Fagbemi, the other victim who died in the shooting. Four people injured in the shooting have also filed lawsuits.

“My eyes were opened to the many disparities and injustices that caused this awful event to happen,” Gonzalez says. “There were a lot of missteps and finger-pointing, and as a result, my daughter is no longer here.”

Gonzalez’s journey from grief to activism has been driven by her desire for answers and change. She has become a prominent voice in the media and at the Baltimore City Council, calling attention to systemic failures around Brooklyn Day. She has pointed to years of unpermitted block parties that were allowed to continue, a public housing authority that looked the other way, and police officers who did not respond to several 911 calls about guns at the scene.

The last moments Gonzalez shared with her daughter felt strangely eerie. She had cooked Aaliyah’s favorite meal for dinner, and her gut had urged her to pull Aaliyah into a tight embrace in the hallway, for no particular reason. They had shared similar moments many times— quick hugs before Aaliyah’s shifts at Starbucks, after rides to school, or during late-night check-ins. But this time felt heavier, as if Gonzalez sensed something was wrong that July evening. 

When Aaliyah stopped by her bedroom to say goodbye before leaving for the party, Gonzalez again felt she needed to pay close attention. Aaliyah’s last words to her mother were, “I’m leaving. I love you, Mom. I’ll see you later.”

That night around 1 a.m., Gonzalez was woken up by her husband’s screams. Aaliyah had been shot. They hurried to Brooklyn Homes, hoping to find their wounded daughter. First responders told them to go to MedStar Harbor Hospital, but the hospital told them to go back to Brooklyn Homes. Back on the scene, Gonzalez found Aaliyah’s body, identified by the tattoo on her arm, lying on the ground covered with a sheet. 

Shocked and inconsolable, she learned Aaliyah had been pronounced dead at 12:34 a.m. and that her body had been waiting there all along amid the chaos of overturned tables and broken glass, blood spatters, exhibit tags, and crime scene tapes. 

“I could feel the fear of people in that place,” Gonzalez says. “I knew Aaliyah might have been scared. It was an awful thing for any parent to experience. It never leaves you.” 

Five people have pleaded guilty to charges related to the Brooklyn Homes shooting, but no one has faced murder charges for the two deaths. The Baltimore Police Department has not responded to requests for comment. 

The lawsuits filed by Gonzalez and the other victim’s families claim the Housing Authority failed to provide proper security that could have prevented the shooting.  

The city’s “after-action” report, released in August 2023, placed much of the blame for events spiraling out of control on the Baltimore Police Department. The report noted BPD’s failure to gather intelligence around the event, to deploy needed officers, and to respond to 911 calls prior to the gunfire.

The report added, “Officer indifference may have compromised the awareness, planning, and response to Brooklyn Day prior to the large crowds arriving.” Ultimately, one police officer was terminated along with one BPD civilian employee. Seven other officers and three other civilian employees were assessed days of lost pay.

“There’s nothing that they can do criminally to give me justice for my child,” Gonzalez says. “What I can focus on is seeing my community change as a result of my daughter losing her life.” 

As one of the few victims’ family members to speak out publicly since the tragedy, she realized the community had come to accept violence as normal because it had gone on so long. Without action, this cycle would likely continue.

“Bullets have no name—wrong place, wrong time,” Gonzalez says. “I refuse to let this be a world that we live in. We have to do so much to change the culture.”

That’s how her nonprofit foundation, Redirecting Our Culture (ROC), was born seven months after Aaliyah’s death. The organization helps families rebuild after trauma, focusing on mental health and interrupting the cycle that turns traumatized youth into future perpetrators. 

Key initiatives include bi-weekly peer-to-peer meetings for bereaved mothers affected by gun violence, grief support sessions, and youth character development workshops. ROC also serves as a bridge, connecting survivors with community violence interrupters to access wrap-around services through the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE). 

“Our vision is to turn those same moms into victim advocates, which is going to open up more of a space for more victims to be touched,” says Mark Mason, who oversees victim services at MONSE.

During this year’s Aaliyah Day, representatives from the Anne Arundel County Workforce Development Corporation provided job resources, while officers from the Baltimore Police Department were present not just to ensure safety, but also to engage with the community, Gonzalez says. 

Sitting on a shaded bench, Tamica Howard looked at her son’s portrait displayed on the fence across the field. A rush of emotions came over her as she took in the tribute. Her oldest son, 19-year-old Diamante Howard, was killed in April 2018 during a dice game, and even now it still feels like it happened yesterday.

“I am just trying to bear with it,” she said. “So it’s rough.”

Howard was attending Aaliyah Day for the first time, having recently joined ROC. She takes part in the group chats, Zoom calls, and in-person meetings with the other bereaved mothers. 

“We went through the same thing, but differently,” Howard said. “If you need someone to talk to, you can call them. It’s awesome to have support from people who know what you’re going through.”

Baltimore has seen historic reductions in gun violence in recent years, in line with the national downward trend. Research suggests this is driven by the city’s approach—a coordinated system that combines focused deterrence, community violence intervention, victim services, and improved investigations under the sustained leadership of the Mayor’s Office.  

Nationally, though, gun violence remains the leading cause of death for Generation Z, something that has held true since 2017. That’s where Aaliyah Day comes in, and why it can play a key role in maintaining progress toward reducing gun violence.

From the start, Gonzalez has framed Aaliyah Day as more than just a vigil. She views it as part of a greater effort for community safety, with city agencies, violence interrupters, neighborhood leaders, and survivors all working together.

“It absolutely is a collective effort,” she says. “Everybody has to work together in order to see any kind of change.”

Mason, MONSE’s chief of victim services, says events like Aaliyah Day complement government-led initiatives and can be “hugely effective” in changing how young people see violence and their options. 

“Which is why [Aaliyah Day] is so unique,” he says. Gonzalez “has put things together where, everywhere you turn, as a young person, you can find something or someone to engage with.”

For young adults like Kayla Green, watching people from different backgrounds and cultures come together at Aaliyah Day was inspiring.

Green, a 25-year-old makeup artist from Baltimore, had planned to go to the Brooklyn Day block party three years ago, but ultimately stayed home. Even though she did not know Aaliyah personally, Green was deeply affected by her story. Almost attending the deadly block party changed how she thinks about safety and community responsibility. 

She believes government programs are important, but says survivor-led events like Aaliyah Day “just take away the tension.” She feels that while politicians should do more, the community often does better.

“I feel like we as a community could work faster than them,” she said. “We want the younger community to have a say in protesting, getting out in the field, and sticking up for ourselves.”

On the same day Gonzalez brings families and young people together for Aaliyah Day in Sawmill Creek Park, MONSE, through its Safe Streets Baltimore program, hosts a quieter wellness event at Brooklyn Homes to mark the anniversary of the mass shooting there. These healing events are designed, as Mason puts it, to bring “a more serene type of atmosphere” to Ground Zero.

Along with promoting community events like the bi-annual healing hikes and the annual Aaliyah Day, Gonzalez has spent many hours meeting with lawmakers. She met with Maryland Governor Wes Moore about the ENOUGH Act to fight child poverty after Brooklyn Day, testified for gun control laws to stop DIY machine guns, and spoke at rallies. 

Recognized as a leading advocate for victim services, she attended the Biden-Harris administration’s Mother’s Convening on Improving Services for Gun Violence Victims at the White House in March 2024.

Even as she navigates unresolved grief, Gonzalez is intent on widening the reach of Redirecting Our Culture. She wants to build on her partnerships with MONSE and to one day open a trauma recovery center for youth and parents. 

Gonzalez, who now works as chief of staff for a state delegate in Annapolis, says she feels “no trepidation, no fear, no anxiety” when it comes to standing before those in power to prevent other families from enduring what her family has. 

“There are days where I sit with my tail down, but I let those days come and go,” Gonzalez says. “In the meantime, I have to keep moving forward, because the only things in life that are guaranteed are death and change.”

Through its administration of several Safe Streets violence-interruption sites in Baltimore, LifeBridge Health has been directly involved in efforts to prevent gun violence since about 2021. Twice last year, Neil Meltzer, the hospital and urgent care system’s CEO, went to the White House at the invitation of its Office on Gun Violence Prevention, including serving as one of the lead presenters at a June summit on public-health and hospital-based strategies to address gun violence.

In December, under Meltzer’s leadership, LifeBridge Health launched a public-education campaign, called Stop the Iron Pipeline, to build statewide awareness around the trafficking of illegal guns into Maryland.

Launching a public awareness campaign about gun violence seems like an unusual initiative for a hospital system. What was the impetus?
What has been frustrating to me is the fact that our communities have been deeply affected by gun violence—every day, we and every other hospital system see the impact of that violence—and we also know what the situation is. At the White House, I learned specifically that so much of the gun violence in Maryland is [traced back] to guns that were trafficked from out of state.

This is an issue that LifeBridge has been intimately involved with through its administration of several Safe Streets violence-interruption sites in the city.
What we’re trying to do is get to the root cause of gun violence, and Safe Streets programs and interventions address what’s happening in the streets of Baltimore, specifically. But we also know that we’re the number-one state in the country for trafficked guns…This is an issue that’s statewide.

LifeBridge has produced a short film and song, “Pipeline” (dropping Feb. 13), by Grammy-nominated rapper Logic and young singers from Resonate Baltimore, the Parkville music school. What does the campaign entail? How do you plan to get the word out?
Everything has gone out on social media, Facebook, Instagram, etc., and on the website of the movement. It’s a highly visual website that we hope will connect to a younger audience and get them engaged. Our goal is to educate them around the issue and then have them take action by signing a petition to the governor, asking him to prioritize this issue.

Maryland has comparatively strict gun laws, which obviously doesn’t prevent the inflow of guns. Is the idea ultimately to put pressure on other states to act as well?
We’re hoping this begins to put some pressure on maybe Virginia or the Carolinas. It’s possible to pinpoint a gun shop in Georgia, for example, where illegal guns are coming from. So, we’re also hoping there’ll be more aggressive action in Maryland, such as what [New York] Attorney General Letitia James did in New York, filing lawsuits against out-of-state ghost-gun retailers. We really just hope to break the cycle some way.

When his wife wasn’t around and he “started thinking about things,” they got even worse as his mind drifted back to the afternoon of June 28, 2018 and the brutal deaths of Gerald Fischman, Rob Hiaasen, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, and Wendi Winters. One moment Gillespie had been editing photos of an Anne Arundel County crew pulling up stormwater piping, the next he was hiding, terrified, beneath his desk. During a break in the shotgun blasts, Gillespie had raced past Winters’ prostrate body and through the newsroom’s shattered glass doors, yelling for help at a nearby bank.

A half a year later, he was unable to get much done unless he was on an assignment for work, passing the hours at home staring at the television and surfing the internet. He was sinking further into depression, and he knew it.

A documentary he caught about the austere, black-and-white portrait work of British photographer Platon Antoniou eventually offered a flicker of creative inspiration and a small promise of relief. Gillespie decided he’d make some portraits in a style similar to the simple set-up Antoniou utilized in his celebrity portraiture. He cleaned out a makeshift studio space in his basement. Then he wondered, “Who can I get to sit for me?”

When Time named the Capital Gazette team a “Person of the Year” and pulled the staff together for their December cover image, Gillespie was reminded how much he loved his colleagues. He asked a few of them to sit first. Fellow photographer Joshua McKerrow came over and posed with one of his own cameras. Reporter Pat Ferguson placed a baseball cap with the words “Not the Enemy” on the table in front of him. Reporter Chase Cook—whose tweet, “I can tell you this: We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow,” went viral an hour after the mass shooting—held a copy of their newspaper. Others, too, stopped by and sat for Gillespie.

Twenty-year-old Summerleigh Winters Geimer, wearing a “Journalism Matters” T-shirt, brought a graduation picture with her deceased mother. So far, Gillespie’s ongoing project: “Journalists Matter: Faces of the Capital Gazette,” includes more than a dozen and a half portraits.

“I borrowed the idea from Platon, but I’d like to think I’ve made it my own. For one thing, my basement ceiling is only 7 feet, so everyone’s sitting in my portraits,” Gillespie says with laugh. “I’ve tried to capture who each person is and bring that out. It’s been a creative outlet and something I have complete control over, which feels good.

“They’ve also been therapy sessions,” Gillespie acknowledges. “We started talking about the portrait and we end up talking about that day.”

The evening after the single deadliest attack on American journalists in recent history, hundreds of Anne Arundel County readers and residents walked in a candlelight vigil for the shooting victims down historic Main Street in Annapolis. Hundreds more attended the heartbreaking memorials and services for Fischman, Hiaasen, McNamara, Smith, and Winters. In the days that followed, editor Rick Hutzell pulled an already tight-knit newsroom even closer together. Despite their own shock and suffering, they kept reporting on local law enforcement efforts, the suspect’s complicated history with the paper, and the community’s outpouring of grief. They penned heart-wrenching first-person recollections of their colleagues and kept reporting the news, too, earning a Pulitzer citation for their courage and compelling journalism in the wake of the horrific tragedy.

Hutzell called the Pulitzer “a great and terrible honor.”

Led by some of its young staffers, Capital reporters and photographers have not only managed to put out a great local newspaper every day since last June, but form a union, the Chesapeake News Guild, winning volunteer recognition from Tribune Publishing. Through it all, they’ve pressed on through near-constant reminders of their loss and trauma.

“I don’t like the phrase ‘moving forward,’” says Cook after covering the funeral of longtime Maryland Speaker of the House Michael Busch, who passed away toward the end of the 2019 General Assembly. “I’m an Annapolis reporter, and I have to be here, but covering this funeral made me think about the five other funerals I attended for my friends this past year.

“You find a way to keep going because you have no other choice.”

Those killed in the attack of the 135-year-old newspaper were four veteran journalists and Capital editors and Smith, a sales assistant who sat near the front door and was admired for her kind nature. Whether the editors were specifically targeted among the staff remains unknown. (The suspect, whose trial has been pushed to November, held a deep grudge against the paper, but it was linked to a lawsuit that named a former columnist and former editor who are no longer there.) Gerald Fischman, a quiet, exacting professional with a wickedly dry sense of humor, was the longtime editor of The Capital editorial page and “the best writer I have ever had the privilege to know,” reporter Danielle Ohl says. Writer and editor Rob Hiaasen, who previously worked as a feature reporter at the Baltimore Sun, was probably the best known of Capital journalists among Maryland media circles. Older Sun colleagues recall Hiaasen’s humor, storytelling ability, and deft touch on the page; younger colleagues gush about the 6-foot-5 gentle giant’s intelligence and light touch as an editor and mentor. John McNamara, a dedicated, old-school journo and obsessed local sports fan—he authored books about the history of the University of Maryland football and basketball programs—most recently served as the jack-of-all-trades editor of the Bowie Blade-News and the Crofton-West County Gazette. Wendi Winters knew everyone in Annapolis and everyone knew her.

The daughter of a Naval Academy graduate and mother of four, including three Navy officers, Winters led a Girl Scout troop, participated in Unitarian Universalist Church of Annapolis activities, and organized biannual blood drives. Journalism had been her third vocation, following careers in fashion and public relations. She found her calling as a community reporter, which she did on a freelance basis for more than a decade before The Capital finally hired her fulltime. She wrote “Teen of the Week” and “Home” columns, and pointed readers to overlooked, and sometimes secret, spaces and places in her “Off Limits” series.

Incredibly, the 65-year-old Winters grabbed her trash can and recycling bin and charged the shooter, likely saving the lives of several of her 11 colleagues in the office at the time of the attack. Just weeks before, Winters had taken an active shooter training at her church, where a police officer presented the options: Run, if possible. Hide, if not. And finally, fight only as a last resort to save yourself and others. Maryland’s Capitol Hill delegation, including retired Sen. Barbara Mikulski, formally requested that the White House award Winters the Presidential Medal of Freedom. (Not surprisingly, given the current occupant of the White House’s hostility toward the press, Maryland’s congressional delegation has not yet received a response.)

Janel Cooley, a sales consultant, told The Capital that Winters shouted, “No! You stop that!” or “You get out of here!” as if she were shooing a bully from a schoolyard. At an Annapolis blood drive earlier this year in Winters’ honor, which brought in hundreds of donors, 25-year-old Montana Geimer said she was not surprised by her mother’s actions. “She wanted to protect her co-workers. That’s who she was,” Geimer says. “So many people who I don’t even know have come up and told me stories about my mom.”

“It just rang true to me when I read what she said [to the attacker],” Geimer continues, adding with a smile through some tears, “I’ve heard that voice before.”

As Winters’ children are honoring their mother through their volunteer work with the blood drives, Rob Hiaasen’s wife, Maria Hiaasen, and John McNamara’s, Andrea Chamblee, are honoring their deceased husbands by getting their literary passion projects published. Hiaasen’s first novel, Float Plan, was released last fall by Loyola University’s Apprentice House Press. A collection of his columns is due to be published June 28, which the General Assembly unanimously named “Freedom of the Press Day” in recognition of the fallen journalists.

Hiaasen spent years on the book (his older brother, Carl, is an accomplished novelist), writing on nights and weekends in his Timonium home. In the car, on vacation, between work, he filled notebooks and Post-its with scratches about the characters, amalgamations of him and his wife and people they knew.

“It brings a lot of joy to me and our children in seeing the fulfillment of Rob’s dream—and our dream for him, but it’s bittersweet,” says Maria Hiaasen. “He should be here for this.” The novel, she adds, tells the story of math teacher Will Larkin, who in one disastrous year loses his marriage, job, boat, and basset hound. A “float plan” is literally a written plan that boaters like Hiaasen, who grew up in Florida, file with a reliable person or rescue agency in case something goes awry. The title is a metaphor for surviving “the loss of the thing you care about the most,” says his wife. “And we lost him. It turns out he left us instructions how to manage. But it doesn’t change the fact the house is empty when I get home from work, and I still wait for him. Or that, for the first time, I’m not looking forward to the end of the school year because I will be alone this summer.”

Chamblee, an FDA attorney, is getting her husband’s final labor of love, a collection of Washington, D.C.-area hoop stories and photographs, published this fall through Georgetown University Press. Similarly, Erica Fischman, who recited a selection of her husband Gerald’s poetry at his funeral, has said she’s considering organizing a collection of her husband’s poems.

Hiaasen and Chamblee have also turned their grief into political action. Both have become outspoken gun violence prevention advocates, fighting this past General Assembly to close a long gun loophole that could’ve prevented future murderers from legally purchasing the pump-action shotgun used at the Capital Gazette. Rachel Pacella, who covers Bowie and the environment and survived the shooting, made a difficult decision for a journalist and also testified on behalf of the bill. It did not pass, however. “The way I feel about the advocacy is that I want to prevent the next family from going through what we did,” Chamblee says, adding she and her husband counted the days to their retirement together daily—“March 21, 2021—1,008 from the day he was killed.”

“The vision John and I had for our future was blown up. Needlessly,” Chamblee says. “These gun deaths are needless, that’s part of what makes it so painful.” Both Hiaasen and Chamblee were named vice-chairs of Anne Arundel County’s Gun Violence Prevention Task Force by County Executive Steuart Pittman.

“What happens,” says Hiaasen, a former journalist who met her husband when both worked at the Palm Beach Post, “is you become a member of a club you never wanted to belong to. I can’t tell you how many people I’ve met who’ve told me about a family member or friend who was shot. Sometimes it’s a sibling. Sometimes it’s a girlfriend who was a victim of domestic violence.” Two members of the gun violence survivors network Hiaasen met at a forum at the National Cathedral in Washington this year were the parents of Alison Parker, the Virginia television news reporter killed along with photographer Adam Ward in 2015. It was just one more reminder, she says, that journalists are working in an ever more fraught environment today.

The killing of five American newspaper employees reverberated around the world last summer because it targeted the press specifically, standing out among the epidemic of mass shootings long plaguing the country. In turn, it placed the Capital Gazette staff, used to reporting events, including murders and trials, squarely in the middle of not one, but two issues dividing us like no others over the past few years. The first is the epidemic-level of gun violence and mass shootings, and the inability of elected leaders to address a crisis that killed nearly 40,000 people, including suicides, last year.
The second, more recent, is the rhetoric from the contentious president of the United States, who habitually directs tirades at journalists.

Donald Trump’s “enemy of the people” characterizations of the press and occasional incitements of violence at his rallies can’t help but create an environment in which individuals with violent tendencies are more likely to lash out against the press, says CNN’s media critic Brian Stelter, a Maryland native, who has closely followed the Capital Gazette shooting. Case in point: The Silver Spring U.S. Coast Guard lieutenant arrested earlier this year while plotting a massive attack was a white nationalist who had MSNBC and CNN media personalities on his hit list. Same for the Florida man arrested for planning bomb attacks this past fall. More recently, there was an assault of a press cameraman at a Trump appearance. It’s a frightening enough combination of events that CNN and other news media outlets now employ security guards to protect reporters covering the president’s rallies.

“Almost everything Trump says about the media Nixon said, but he did so privately,” Stelter says, referring to secret White House recordings later made public through the Watergate hearings. “It’s unlike anything in our lifetimes.”

Out of concern for their security, the Capital Gazette staff moved into a new location after the shooting, which they do not publicly disclose.

Not much is known about the reason for the timing of the shooter’s sudden outburst. His original complaint against the newspaper centered on a 2011 story that covered his criminal harassment of a female former high-school classmate. In 2012, he filed a defamation lawsuit against then-columnist Eric Hartley, Capital Gazette Communications, and the paper’s then-editor and publisher Thomas Marquardt. Prosecutors in the shooting case have been playing their cards close to vest, but it has been reported he visited right-wing conspiracy websites.

McKerrow, the photographer, is frustrated by the dearth of information coming in regarding the shooter’s motives. But he also understands prosecutors want to be able to make their case to an untainted jury. “I’m hesitant to talk about the trial, I think most of us are, although we are certainly following it closely,” he says. “I’m not going to say Donald Trump set him off,” McKerrow adds. “I don’t know what did. But it is interesting that we hadn’t heard anything from him [the suspect] for years and then, all of sudden, he goes off. Do I want to know why? Yes.”

Cook and Ohl, meanwhile, are tasked with covering the trial and then potentially a sentence hearing that would likely include testimony from colleagues and former colleagues’ spouses and adult children. “We’re professionals, we cover trials, and we can set aside our personal interests,” Cook says. “That said, it’s a high-profile trial, and our own memories are still very raw.” As a journalist, he adds that he’s always thought of himself as compassionate and empathetic—“we’re used to talking to people at the worst moments in their lives”—but the experience has changed his perspective. “Until you go through some things, you can’t really understand it.”

If anything, the tragedy has made the survivors more committed to truth-telling journalism. Former Capital Gazette staffers and colleagues from newspapers around the country, including the Los Angeles Times, Allentown Morning Call, Delaware News Journal, Virginian-Pilot, and The Baltimore Sun, returned for three, four, and five days at a clip, and longer, to lend a hand in the weeks and first months following the shooting. Readers expressed their support for their commitment in the best way possible—buying 800 new subscriptions in the days after the tragedy.

The only staffer to leave over the past year is reporter Phil Davis, who essentially took a promotion to The Sun, which is also owned by Tribune Publishing.

Late last summer, a group of 30-plus Capital Gazette staff and local alumni, who have referred to themselves as the Rolling Donut Society since the mid-’80s, gathered to eat crabs at Hutzell’s home in a show of solidarity.

“We took a pause with forming the union for a few months,” Ohl says. “We had to ask ourselves, ‘Is this the right time to do this?’ We had a lot on our plates. More than usual. Although we got help, which was so appreciated, we felt overwhelmed at times, too. In the end, we want to ensure this newspaper remains, these jobs remain, and the work that Rob, John, Wendi, Gerald, and Rebecca did continues. The best way to do that is to fight for livable wages and good benefits and working conditions.”

And today, the job of reporting the news is both more difficult and more meaningful.

McKerrow, who was particularly close to Winters, assumed his friend’s role as the dispenser of the newsroom’s weekly most valuable player award—a cheap, 5-inch newspaper boy in golden trophy form—and $5 gift certificate for coffee.

Late last year, he shot the paper’s annual holiday decorations feature at the Governor’s residence. For years, it was a light yet fun story he did with Winters, his reporting partner, who loved such occasions and always remained awed by the majesty of the day. This past December, his partner was colleague Selene San Felice, who was in the office the day of the attack.

McKerrow tried to hold it together throughout the day, but ended up crying to himself in the Governor’s Mansion. Late that evening, after he got home, he saw Donald Trump had fired off another all-caps tweet: “FAKE NEWS-THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!”

What had provoked the tweet, McKerrow did not know. It appeared to him another random broadside. He responded with a thread, essentially recounting his experience that afternoon and how much he missed his patriotic former colleague Winters, killed by a man trying to silence journalists. It received hundreds of thousdands of responses.

“This has been tough for everybody here,” says McKerrow, sharing that he has been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. “This is what I know. You don’t heal from something this like you heal from a broken arm. You carry it with you. You have to adapt and you have learn how to do that. I think most of us are still learning how to do that.”

The first portrait Kimberly Sheridan painted was a close-up of James Smith III, smiling in a barber chair, and holding, symbolically, a small lamb and lion cub in his lap. On his third birthday, in 1997, at a barbershop near Sheridan’s Pigtown home, James had been shot in the head and killed as he waited with his mother to get his hair cut.

That painting, made six years ago, was a reaction, Sheridan explains—“after Congress couldn’t even pass a gun bill with background checks,” following the massacre of 20 Sandy Hook kindergarten and first-grade students. “I had become enraged. The next morning, I stood outside the Plaza Art store on Cathedral before they opened to buy supplies.”

A 58-year-old self-taught artist with impaired sight but genuine vision, Sheridan had never forgotten James. Nor had she forgotten local church custodian Ron Waggener, her best friend, killed around the corner from her home in 2004. Waggener became her second portrait a few days later. “It’s healing to paint,” she says. “It’s my way of advocating for stricter gun control laws. It’s the way I reach out to others who are grieving.”

Taking her cue from Yoko Ono, who tweeted after Sandy Hook that more than one million people in the U.S. had been killed by guns since her husband’s death, Sheridan pledged to paint a million victims of gun violence—starting with those in close proximity. “I wondered, who were these million people?” she says. “Especially the forgotten people. The ignored. What if we brought them into the light?” Today, 176 of her works fill a second-floor front room of her modest rowhouse. Colorful, joyous, and imaginative, they are informed by whatever pictures and biographical details Sheridan can cobble together. They are, overwhelmingly, portraits of people cut down before their lives had fully formed. “For some, I have to draw from mug shots,” Sheridan says. “But I paint everyone with the same sympathy. Picturing them at their best. When they were their true selves.”

Subjects include a father and son, cousins killed months apart, a pair of girlfriends, a police officer, a young man killed by police, former Councilman Kenneth Harris, and Charmaine Wilson, a 37-year-old mother of eight, who was targeted in 2017 after reporting to police that her son was being bullied. There’s also Raquan Campbell, a 15-year-old football player and honor roll student, affectionately nicknamed Ra-Ra because of his ebullient personality, who was shot 10 times in 2010. “I met with Raquan’s mother a week before Christmas this year at the Cherry Hill Shopping Center,” Sheridan recalls. “She does an annual coat drive there. She saw me coming, holding the painting, and started to cry.”

To date, Sheridan has exhibited at a Pigtown church, the former Liam’s Pub in Station North, and a small business in Canton. She doesn’t sell her work, instead offering her paintings to each victim’s family for free. She has coordinated more than a dozen such “homecomings” as she calls them, with more on the way. In terms of painting a million portraits of victims of gun violence, she says the only thing required is more artists, “There’s one in St. Louis and another in Miami doing something similar I know of,” she says. “It’s a start.”

Meanwhile, she keeps a running list of everyone killed in Baltimore. “More than 5,000 this century,” she says, shaking her head. “We are all witnesses to a slow-motion genocide of black males in this city.” Recently, Sheridan formed a nonprofit to partner with other anti-violence and family survivor organizations.

“It’s a never-ending treadmill of pain and anger leading to murder,” she continues. “We keep making little kids orphans when we kill their father, their mother, their brother and sister, and then they end up shooting someone else’s father, mother, brother, and sister.

“Why aren’t we seeing the whole picture? That’s the question I ask myself when I paint.”

An exhibition of Kimberly Sheridan’s portraits will be on display May 11 at Union Mill in connection with Ceasefire Weekend.

For those of us who are residents of, working in, or certainly covering the city of Baltimore, there is a dangerous notion of existing in a bubble. Of course, we are well-aware of the city’s exponential violence since the death of Freddie Gray in 2015, but a recent article in The New York Times Magazine that’s been making its rounds on social media forces us to take a step back, seeing the events of the past four years in succession—rather than one at a time.

Of course, little of ProPublica’s Alec MacGillis well-reported findings are exactly news to us. But what he’s done in his recent piece, entitled “The Tragedy of Baltimore,” is put things into clear context, both setting up the framework that led to the events of April 2015 and its devastation aftermath. No matter what you choose to call the Uprising (which, MacGillis points out, reveals “a lot about the politics of the person”), there is an undeniable fact: the events surrounding it have been exponentially more damaging than the thing itself.

This aftermath has been widely reported before in many local outlets, as we reflected one year out, took a close examination into how the Baltimore Police Department is trying to recruit and retain officers, and done consistent reporting on the Gun Trace Task Force. But MacGillis’ synopsis of the past four years chronicles this unraveling in one scrolling, long-form piece that details the city’s mayoral policy changes, string of police commissioners, and unimaginable corruption.

“It may come up as a surprise for some to see my name on an article that puts the city in such a stark light, given what a notorious booster I’ve been for Baltimore,” MacGillis wrote in a statement. “But I love the city, and I believe that its recovery—which I still think is possible—will require honesty and accountability. The city deserves better than it’s had.”

The story certainly doesn’t wrap up these deep-seated, systemic issues in one neat package or solution, but instead pits two perspectives against each other through the lens of distinct characters. On the one end is Tony Barksdale, former deputy police commissioner in Baltimore, who advocates for tougher police tactics and argues that the consent decree has left officers powerless. Then there is Shantay Guy, whose stepson Da’mon was wounded in a shooting in October, and believes policing in Baltimore is broken and the solutions lie in responding to community needs first.

While there is no definitive right or wrong answer, the perspectives of both Barksdale and Guy reflect conversations being had all over the city, both inside and outside government headquarters. This most recent piece, and the continued dialogue that it will inspire, does implore an important message to its readers, one that is echoed by Erricka Bridgeford in a recent Baltimore Ceasefire slogan: “Don’t be numb.”

This year, like every year, there was rampant speculation about the unveiling of Time magazine’s Person of the Year. Will it be Donald Trump? Robert Mueller? Dr. Christine Blasey Ford? Instead, in a surprising and moving gesture—a clear repudiation of Trump’s war on the press—the magazine chose “The Guardians of the Truth.”

Among them were slain Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi; Filipino journalist Maria Resser, whose online new site Rappler exposes human rights violations in her country; and two Reuters journalists, Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, who were framed and falsely imprisoned in Myanmar.

But locally, the inclusion of the staff of the Capital Gazette stirred powerful memories and emotions. The picture of the surviving staff and family is inspiring. In black and white they stand, unsmiling, arms locked, resolute. Andrea Chamblee, wife of the late John McNamara wears a T-shirt that reads “Journalism Matters.” Reporter Katherine’s shirt is emblazoned with the now famous words of her colleague Chase Cook: “I can tell you this. We are putting out a damn paper tomorrow.”

The article includes a video where reporter Selene San Felice says, “Someone wanted to silence us. We will not be silenced.” On Twitter, reaction was swift and emotional.

This Time magazine interview, which took place on December 9 in Washington, D.C., was the first sit-down interview that Capital editor Rick Hutzell agreed to do since the June 28 shooting. “I’m here today because members of my staff wanted to come down and participate,” he explained to Time. “Journalists have never been held in high regard—nobody like Thomas Paine. I think at this moment in history, where words of violence are so easy to throw out there, it’s a little scarier.”

Police responded to the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh on Saturday during morning services following reports of an active shooter. The shooter has been identified as Robert Bowers, who walked into the synagogue with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and three pistols and began shooting, killing 11 and injuring six more.

Bowers is being charged with 29 federal counts, including several hate crimes.

“They’re committing genocide to my people,” he told a SWAT officer after being shot and captured, according to a federal criminal complaint released ­Sunday. “I just want to kill Jews.”

The Anti-Defamation League, an international Jewish organization that fights anti-semitism and bigotry, says that this shooting is the the deadliest attack on the Jewish community in America.

The names of the victims were released on Sunday, the oldest being 97-year-old Rose Mallinger, who lived in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood and was a faithful member of the Tree of Life temple. Bernice Simon, 84, and her husband, Sylvan, 86, were married at the Tree of Life synagogue in December 1956, and died together there on Saturday along with brothers Cecil and David Rosenthal.

This tragedy has sparked worldwide outrage with local officials and clergy speaking out about the horrific loss.

The Baltimore Hebrew Congregation held a special service on Sunday morning to mourn with the families who lost their loved ones in the shooting. Rabbi Elissa Sachs-Kohen addressed the congregation detailing how devastated she is at the loss of life in the Jewish community.

“My heart is so heavy this morning,” she said to the congregation. “And my heart is heavy with fear. Not fear that I, or someone I love will be the next target, though that is real. My heart is heavy with fear that we will send our thoughts and prayers; that we will go on Facebook and Instagram and with a tear on the face of a yellow emoji express our sadness and that we will think that is enough. That is not enough.”

Senator Ben Cardin, who attended the service on Sunday, took to social media to express his outrage about the act of hate.

“Heartbroken and horrified by the mass shooting at the Tree of Life synagogue,” he said in a tweet. “Just appalling. I’m thinking of and praying for the entire Squirrel Hill community today. And I’m grateful as ever for our first responders. We cannot—we WILL NOT—accept this as normal. I refuse.”

Governor Larry Hogan also expressed his grief on Twitter, even reaching out to the Governor of Pennsylvania to offer assistance “to help our neighbors.”

“We are deeply shocked and saddened by the horrific shooting at Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh,” he wrote. “Our prayers are with the victims and those were were injured.”

Senator Chris Van Hollen took to Twitter to plead for a stop to gun violence.

“Horror strikes again,” he wrote. “My heart goes out to Pittsburgh. We must end the hate. We must stop the gun violence. We have it in our power to save lives. Hate, silence, and failure to act have deadly consequences.”

We encounter the protagonist, Willa, as a child, a college student, married with kids, and then a senior citizen. Could you have written this book when you were in your 30s?
No, come to think of it, I don’t suppose I could have. There are some advantages to getting old! Well, a lot, actually. For instance, in her 60s, Willa’s attitude toward her mother is much kinder than it was in her youth. A certain sense of acceptance creeps in with age, and I wouldn’t have known that if I’d tried to write about a 61-year-old when I was a young woman.

Did you start with the idea of breaking the novel into these pivotal moments of her life, or did the characters come first and reveal this format?
Initially I thought the book would begin when Denise gets shot and would refer just in retrospect to those pivotal moments. Which shows you how a story can take over the reins from the writer: it had its own ideas. Then I decided to present those moments as widely separated episodes, leaping across great spans of time, because as a reader, I always feel a sense of relief when the author trusts me to imagine the intervening years for myself.

Why was it important to include gun violence in Clock Dance’s Baltimore?
Shortly before I started writing Clock Dance, I read in The Baltimore Sun about yet another random shooting victim—this one a toddler who was just sitting in her father’s lap on their front porch. The police did ask around, but nothing came of their inquiries, and eventually the whole subject disappeared from the news. I was struck by how we all moved on from it—not that we didn’t care, but that we’d grown accustomed to such things, in the same way that we’re no longer shocked by school shootings. Once you give that any thought, it seems almost surreal.

The saguaros seem symbolic of a woman’s natural versus domesticated nature. Why did you choose this recurring image?
I had never seen a saguaro till I made a trip to Arizona in my 50s. I was struck by them in the same way Willa was; I didn’t know why, but they gave me a kind of physical ache. Even now I can’t put into words why Willa has that reaction, but I think it has something to do with their power and their reserve and their dignity—qualities that Willa, so conventional and so compliant, would instinctively long for.

A lot of people talk about writing a novel but never do, much less more than 20 of them. How do you stay disciplined to continue writing books?
It would take more discipline not to write a book. I don’t seem to feel that my life is properly filled unless I’m living some other, imaginary life at the same time. Not that it isn’t a chore, often, to plod through the practicalities—getting my characters from room to room and remembering that they have to eat lunch. But their conversations, the moments when they start talking to each other and I feel like merely their scribe: I love that part.

Are you working on, or planning for, another?
Yes, I’m in the early stages of another.

Is there a particular place you go to write?
I have an upstairs writing room at the front of my house, overlooking the street, and I sit at a desk in front of a window where I can be in touch with ordinary life. I like to hear people talking while I work, and I especially like to hear children playing. There is a scarcity of children on my street, but I’m always hopeful.

What writers are you reading these days who inspire you?
I was bowled over by Rachel Kushner’s new novel, The Mars Room. Its subject—women in prison—is hard reading, but every word of it was brilliant. And I loved Fatima Farheen Mirza’s A Place for Us, a novel about a family from India living in the U.S. Families and immigration: two of my favorite topics.

All across the country, in all 50 states, demonstrators came together to demand stricter gun control laws in the United States. Organized by the survivors of the Parkland shooting, the March For Our Lives protest brought hundreds of thousands of students, teachers, and concerned citizens together, imploring people to register to vote and put an end to gun violence. 

Many of the speakers were students from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, as well as several other young people including 11-year-old Naomi Walder of Alexandria, Virginia, and 9-year-old Yolanda Renee King, granddaughter of Martin Luther King Jr., who told the D.C. crowd that she had a dream of “a gun free world, period.” 

Shortly before 8 a.m. this morning, Austin Wyatt Rollins, walked into Great Mills High School in St. Mary’s County with a handgun and began shooting students. Two students—a 16-year-old female and 14-year-old male, were shot and remain in critical and stable condition, respectively.

School resource officer Blaine Gaskill responded to the scene in less than a minute and fired a round at the shooter, who was pronounced dead. It has yet to be confirmed if Rollins’ fatal injury came from Gaskill’s bullets or the shooter’s own.

Parents of Great Mills students were directed to report to nearby Leonardtown High School for reunification. Shortly after the shooting was reported, Governor Larry Hogan reassured residents via Twitter that the situation was being addressed.

“We are closely monitoring the situation at Great Mills High School,” he said. “[The Maryland State Police] is in touch with local law enforcement and ready to provide support. Our prayers are with students, school personnel, and first responders.”

Other local officials and politicians were quick to offer “thoughts and prayers” to the victims of the shooting.

“My thoughts are with the Great Mills High School community as we grapple with yet another school shooting,” Rep. Elijah Cummings tweeted. “I pray for the victims of this horrendous tragedy and my heart goes out to their families.”

Sen. Ben Cardin expressed his anger and frustration saying that at a minimum, universal background checks and a ban on assault-style weapons are needed. He said he believes the momentum for gun reform is building and is fueled by student activism.

“These students are literally just not taking ‘no’ for an answer,” Cardin said. “I can tell you that Americans are listening to our students. I think our political system will respond.”

Rep. Steny Hoyer praised the first responders, more specifically Gaskill who “answered the call this morning with swiftness, professionalism, and courage.” Hoyer believes now it’s time for Congress to act.

“We sympathize. We empathize,” Hoyer said. “We have moments of silence. But we don’t have action. Wringing our hands is not enough.”

According to the Never Again Movement, this incident at Great Mills marks the 11th time a gun has been discharged in a K-12 school since the Parkland shooting in Florida on February 14. 

Last week, students at Great Mills participated in the National School Walkout to protest gun violence.

“Headed to St. Mary’s County to be with the students, teachers, and families of Great Mills High School,” said Sen. Chris Van Hollen. “Much gratitude to all the first responders. We must stop the epidemic of gun violence.”

Jake Turner was in his U.S. History class at Hereford High School when his teacher announced that a nearby high school, Loch Raven High School, was on lockdown because a student brought a gun into the school. Turner and his classmates were in the middle of a discussion about the previous day’s shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida that killed 17 people, when it clicked for him that it could happen anywhere and at any school.

Turner, who is the student council president of Baltimore County Public Schools, is one of the thousands of students across the country who are calling upon government officials and school administrators to reform gun laws and revaluate school safety measures.

“I don’t feel safe knowing that somebody could come into my school with an assault rifle at any moment,” says Turner. “Anyone could end my life, one of my peer’s lives, and I don’t like knowing that over the next few months or years there’s going to be more shootings if we don’t do something.”

In order to put those concerns into action, Turner will take part in The National Student Walkout on March 14, exactly one month after the shooting in Parkland. It’s scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. in every time zone and last 17 minutes to honor each of the victims who died in one of the deadliest school shootings in American history. The goal of the walkout is to put pressure on Congress to pass gun reform and make schools safer.

Also being dubbed the #Enough walkout, the demonstration is being organized by the Women’s March youth branch EMPOWER, started as a Facebook event and has grown to include schools across the country—including ones in Baltimore County.

Baltimore County Public Schools released a statement to Baltimore from Interim Superintendent Verletta White that details how the school system will handle the upcoming walkout.

“In order to maintain a safe environment for students who wish to exercise their civic rights during the school day, we provided guidance to our school principals and their staffs to plan for potential or spontaneous peaceful demonstrations or protests,” the statement read. “We view these moments as learning opportunities while providing structure and protecting the instructional focus of our schools.”

One day after the shooting in Florida, a 14-year-old Loch Raven High School student was arrested by Baltimore County Police for bringing a pellet gun to school. This is the second of these incidents in just under a month, as 18-year-old Darren Bennett was arrested for bringing a pellet gun to Perry Hall High School on January 19. Just this week in Howard County, Clarksburg High School student Alwin Chen was arrested after bringing a loaded handgun to school, and authorities found a variety of weapons inside his home.

“This is not a partisan issue. This is a, ‘I am scared to go to a place that I thought was safe’ issue,” said Pikesville High School student Josie Shaffer, who serves on the Baltimore County Board of Education and spoke on the issue of gun violence and school safety during Tuesday night’s board meeting.

In a passionate speech, Shaffer called on the board to support the March for Our Lives protest in Washington D.C. on March 24 that holds the same mission as the #Enough walkout. “Show that you are listening to the students in our system and all over the country that are now using their voice to say enough is enough,” she said.

The Baltimore Teachers Union voiced their support for the National Student Walkout, saying that the protest signifies that it’s time for community members to take action.

“As we mourn the lives lost in Florida, we must also mourn those young people whose lives ended too soon due to gun violence in our own backyard,” says Marietta English, president of the Baltimore Teachers Union. “It is my hope that our collective voices demanding change will get the attention of our congressmen and congresswomen, letting them know that now is the time to do what is right, which is to enact stricter gun laws.”

Though this certainly isn’t the first conversation about gun violence in the U.S., it is unique that high schoolers like Turner are leading the charge. He also urged the board to take action by encouraging open conversations, strengthening student mental health services, and enforcing updated safety measures and protocols.  

“Even though we’re students and we’re under 18, our viewpoints still matter,” says Turner. “We go through this every single day and we know what it’s like inside of a school. There’s no one better to tell people about the issues we’re going through.”