January 3, 2010
Baby Boy's 21 years in the 'hood
The corner where Baby Boy met his end, the morning after.
“Pop-pop.” Pause. “Pop-pop-pop-pop-pop-pop.”
Without saying a word to each other, Lamont and I began
moving. I heard him pick up the phone and report to 911, “There’s been a
shooting at the corner of Pratt and Durham streets.”
I climbed cautiously to the roof deck to peer out on the corner, which was strangely empty. No pedestrians, and few parked cars, given that many Hopkins students were gone for the holidays. I looked over neighbors’ roofs to see if anyone was fleeing yet another police raid at 1811 E. Pratt. Nothing.
No sign of smoke or glitter that it could be fireworks,
either. Lamont was right: The sound was louder, sharper, more human directed.
We walked together downstairs, out the front door and rounded the corner onto Pratt. Already an ambulance and numerous police cars
were on the scene, and officers were beginning to tape off the crime scene.
A prone figure lay utterly still in front of Pratt Street
Liquors, on the drug hot spot we’d been complaining about for years.
“It’s Baby Boy,” said Robert, a neighbor. Without thinking,
I began walking toward the figure. A police officer ushered me back and began
unrolling tape. Dozens of neighbors gathered on both sides of the scene.
Medics hovered over the victim. He didn’t waggle a foot or a
hand, like NFL players do to signal they are OK after a bad hit. Deputy Major
Bill Davis of Southeastern District came over. He confirmed it was Baby Boy.
“Pretty bad,” he replied when I asked how he was doing.
“I’ve known him since he was a little boy,” I said in shock,
still hoping it wasn’t him. The victim was loaded into a gurney, his face
largely obscured by an oxygen mask. That smooth forehead topped by bristly
black porcupine hair. My stomach lurched. It was Baby Boy, unless there somehow
was another similar-looking 21-year-old Lumbee Indian kid running the
streets.
Lamont stood near the ambulance, his brow knitted in
concern. I walked toward him, saying to Robert as I passed him, “I loved Baby
Boy.” The words just came out. Robert shrugged. “We watched him grow up. That’s
why we called him Baby Boy.”
Kinlaw Craig Jones was declared dead on arrival at Johns
Hopkins Hospital, around 12:30 a.m., Dec. 27, 2009.
***
James Jones, left, and Kinlaw Craig Jones, right, enjoy an ice cream on Ann Street. My 1998 photo shows Craig's open expression and crinkly-eyed grin.
Baby Boy and his brother, James, lived with their
grandfather, who was said to pass the time “huffing” (sniffing) glue, at 109 S.
Ann St., one block up. I asked Baby Boy his real name one day, and learned that
his family called him Craig, his middle name, not Kinlaw. I called him Craig
thenceforth, to keep the street a little bit at bay. His father and mother also
lived in the neighborhood but did not raise him or James under their roof.
They were among 10,000 Lumbee Indians, originally from the
Carolinas, who now live in East Baltimore. Kinlaw is a common Lumbee surname,
along with Locklear and Jones.
Craig had gotten lead poisoning as a child, and as a result
was short in stature, but still strong and clever. That combination caught my
eye. I thought this kid might be able to help solve a problem.
I asked Craig the father for permission to hire Craig the
son to run a new circuit to my refrigerator. The rehabbers of my house had left
the fridge on the overall kitchen circuit, and it blew constantly. I couldn’t
myself crawl under the heating ducts the 60 feet or so back to the crawlspace
area under the far end of the kitchen. Craig looked like he was small enough to
squeeze past the ducts, brave enough to essentially tunnel in dirt dating from
the 1840s, smart enough to follow my instructions.
The father gave his permission. I put an old T-shirt over
Craig’s clothes, sent him along with a flashlight, a trowel for digging and the end of a length of
12-gauge wire, and he delivered the wire to an area underneath the fridge, where we
figured out a way to haul it through the drywall. He backed his way out and
stood in the basement by the crawlspace opening with reddish Maryland clay dust
in his raven hair, on his face and the T shirt.
“Stand right there,” I said, and got a broom to brush him
off. He took some cash in payment and nodded when I said to ask his mother if
he could keep it, having said very little, and headed off.
The house where Craig grew up, 109 S. Ann St.
After that, Craig and his sidekick, Michael Cuffey—“Fat
Mike,” tackled many more house rehab projects during summer vacations. We
called Fat Mike “Big Mike” to his face to spare his feelings. He was a much
taller and heavier Lumbee kid, like Craig with a mother battling addiction
problems, and raised by his grandmother, Miss Linda, up on the 1900 block of
Pratt Street.
They tore the plaster off the central stairway and wielded a
Sawzall like a light saber, wearing their dust masks. That their edumacation
hadn’t made great strides was on display when asked to do anything involving
reading, writing and arithmetic.
“Here’s the wood vices,” I said to Craig. “Put them away
downstairs in the drawer labeled ‘vices.’” He tried his best, but couldn’t
spell well enough to figure out where to put them, and came back upstairs to ask for my guidance.
“You worked six hours at $5 an hour. What do I owe you?”
Neither could say.
They excelled however at a few things, including buying rap
and eating. Big Mike loved DMX’s rap album “Ruff Ryders, Ryde or Die Vol. 1”
and carried it over every day in an ever more tattered CD cover to play while
they worked. I tried to play them some more Old School music, while they waited
stoicly for DMX to reappear on the boom box. Lamont was appalled when after
unrelenting exposure I broke down and bought DMX myself, with his gangsta lyrics. We
changed the main line of one of the worst offending songs to “I love my
shelties and but where’s my corgis?” from the original lyric involving lovely "n" and "b" words.
Craig, Mike and I went for lunch most days that summer of 1999 (gauged by
the release of “Ruff Ryders”) at the McDonald’s at Highland Avenue and Pulaski Highway in
Highlandtown. “Give me some fries n-----,” Craig ordered Big Mike one day. The word made me wince. They
listened respectfully but as if dealing with a senile old fogey to my
explanation of why the “n” word was pretty bad. It just wasn’t bad to them, the
music they loved swam in the word. They humored me enough to not use it in my
earshot.
Big Mike was sloppy at the work, while Craig was methodical
and determined. When we finished the stairs, I gave Craig other work whenever
he came by. He did a flawless job cleaning the kitchen floor. I peaked at him once as he worked, and he was focused and meticulous. Often he asked,
“Miss Jeannette, will you hold my money for me?” I put it in an envelope. This
is how you bank in the city, when you are small and the kids on the bus might
rob you.
It was obvious that Craig, then about 11 years old, would
make an excellent drug salesman, being streetwise as he was, as well as under
18 and thus not eligible for adult sentencing. “Craig, you are smart and
strong, and the drug sellers will want to have you sell for them,” I said one
day at the Highlandtown McDonalds. “They are using you, you will be at risk and
they will get away with making money off you. If you ever need money, come to
me, I’ll give you some work.”
He listened and nodded.
By this time, he was less solemn and often quite jolly as we
worked together. We drove off to get supplies for another project, and got in
the drivethrough at the North Avenue Taco Bell. I made up a Ruff Ryders-type
rap about what we were going to order at Taco Bell, and how it would compare to
McDonald’s, and Craig giggled happily and just said, “More!” He was always
laconic, and sometimes unintentionally adult. “Ain’t that a mother,” he said
once to my complaint about something.
Lamont took him to soccer on two occasions, and we both
noted he was far more willing than the true bad-to-the-bone street kids to try
new experiences.
Craig and James showed up one snowy evening to borrow our
snow shovel and make money shoveling. They returned happy with a fair showing
of earnings, but soaked to their knees. We gave them some of Lamont’s much too
big clothes and belts to hold up his pants. While their clothes tumbled in the drier, we made
them hot chocolate and hung out in the dining room. The brothers were like stray cats, they had found us and picked us, and for that night at least, they were with two adults
that got along well and didn’t “use” and spoke kindly to them. After a similar
visit, Craig asked to lie down for a while. After a few hours, I tried to shake
him awake. Something about life exhausted him that night, and he wouldn’t wake.
After a while, I just threw a blanket over him and let him stay. Somewhere in
the back of my mind was whether he needed to be formally fostered, but he had a
mother and father of his own, right in the neighborhood.
Craig’s grandfather, known as Mr. Bob or "Pop Pop," moved out of the neighborhood, over to
Erdman Avenue. I still saw Craig in and out of the neighborhood. Granddad, a
solemn, high-cheekboned, quiet and very Indian-looking man, came down with
throat cancer. I delivered Craig to him one day, in a grim public housing
project. He couldn’t talk. He did gesture for me to look at the baby pictures
of Craig and James, framed on a shelf, with their black eyes and bristly hair looking like
papooses in a tintype from an early American settlement.
Somewhere around 1999, Craig’s grandfather died,
and Craig lost his tether of stability. In August 2004, he committed an armed
robbery. We didn’t see him for a while while he was put away. He returned a
summer or two later, much more muscled and ripped and tattoo’d. Was that Craig
sitting on the parking lot barricade beside the Ann Convenience Store? I walked
by with the dogs. He put his head under his T shirt, hiding from me. “Craig is
that you?” No response. “Craig, I know that’s you.” He stayed under the shirt.
He was on the bookstore corner a few days later with a giant
thug pal of his. “Hi Craig.” This time he kept his head unhidden. “You know
what you’re like?” He looked off into space, humoring me. “A salmon, you know
what that is?” Shake of the head, no. “It’s a fish that comes home to the place
it was born, year after year.” He looked a bit amused.
He built his rap sheet. August 2006: drug charges. June
2007: Implicated in the notorious killing of a U.S. Marine home on leave a few
blocks north of here, on the border of the Washington Hill and Butchers Hill
neighborhoods.
He was out again, racking up drug charges in November 2007,
July 2008 and August 2008.
The prosecutors who work with us in East Baltimore wanted a
community impact statement for Baby Boy at a sentencing hearing held Oct. 21,
2009. They made a plea for input at our community association meeting in
September, if memory serves, noting that they had caught him with a driving
violation and gotten him back in jail on a relatively small charge. And they
wanted to put him away for longer. No one ever wrote a statement for them, and
I’m sure the prosecutors were very disappointed. Craig’s drug trading was far
more discrete and less blatant than that of other dealers. He walked quietly in
the shadows of the trees on Ann Street, to and from his deals. We wanted the
more blatant, cheesy dealers put away first. In retrospect, we probably should
have suggested that Butcher’s Hill take the lead on keeping him in jail; he
dealt drugs in our area, and probably was our worst homegrown criminal, but he got tangled up with serious violence only off
his home territory.
If he had been kept in jail, he’d likely still be alive, and
have a chance at redemption.
I saw him alive the last time this past summer, as I rounded the
corner of Ann and walked with Pierre up Pratt. He was on the corner of Pratt
and Durham, the south side, steps away from the north side, where he would be executed later. He stood with some of the other hoodies, them sullen and vacant as ever in my presence, Craig alert and aware but relaxed. I
was happy as always to see him, because of our history before his grandfather
died. We exchanged smiles and a soul shake. “How you doin’,” he said, his voice and
accent now thoroughly street, like his one-time muse DMX.
He was on his road to his ultimate fate. Yet it was still a horror to see his poor still body, to watch him depart with strangers in an ambulance, to read later in the paper he had been shot in the head and shot repeatedly as he lay fallen.
The Baltimore Sun reported in City surpasses '08 homicide
total:
The man, identified as Kinlaw Jones, was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead at 12:30 a.m. Sunday, Agent Donny Moses said. Jones had a long criminal record, according to electronic court records. He was convicted of drug distribution in December 2008 and sentenced to 10 years in prison, with nine years, seven months and 21 days of that sentence suspended.
In June 2008, he was acquitted on charges of attempted first-degree murder, pleading guilty to assault and possessing a deadly weapon with intent to injure. For that conviction, he received five years in prison, with four years and about four months suspended. He was charged with violating his probation in October 2009, receiving a two-year suspended sentence.
Homicide put several of its aces on the case, including Detectives McGraff and Joseph C. Landsman, the model for Jay Landsman on "The Wire," whose findings are reported in the Baltimore Sun's Cockeysville man arrested in deadly Pratt Street shooting:
According to charging documents, witnesses identified Antonio Edwards, 26, of the 6000 block of Clovercrest Way in Cockeysville as the man who shot Kinlaw Jones in the 1800 block of E. Pratt St. Witnesses said the men were arguing when Edwards pulled out a gun and shot Jones several times, then stood over him and continued to fire, Detective Joseph C. Landsman wrote in charging documents.
So that is our story from our version of “The Corner,” where
many who visit my deck -- fellow publishers, carpenters, others -- look down on Pratt and Durham and
see the predictable way the trading down there is going to turn out for
everyone. Even the police were appalled that he died at 21, the 235th fatality
of 2009. Officer Zayas, who covers our local beat, had recently warned Baby Boy of a drug turf battle on Pratt Street
and to stay a few blocks away for a while.
I agree with what Lamont wrote on my Facebook page:
“I used to take him to play soccer when he was really tiny, I mean really tiny. He was a good kid. Its disgusting to see him like that. The people who led him down that road should take a look at themselves and be ashamed, though I know they won’t.”
Kinlaw Craig Jones, Oct. 27, 1988-Dec. 27, 2009
- posted by jbelliveau at 10:20 PM in The Neighborhood
- permanent link
