By The New York Times
BALTIMORE, Md. -- In this city where 60,000 people, about one in 10 residents, are addicted to narcotics, a simple message appears on billboards, police cruisers, city buses, T-shirts, brochures and in television advertisements: “Believe.”
That slogan, from a $2 million antidrug campaign Baltimore began six months ago, is part exhortation, part call to action, part desperate plea to take back the neighborhoods, to report drug dealers, to seek drug treatment, to become a police officer or a mentor to a troubled youngster. Advertisement
But for many, it just became harder to believe that the war on drugs and violence can be won. Angela Dawson believed enough to confront dealers outside her East Baltimore row house and report them to the police - with horrific results. Early Wednesday morning, Mrs. Dawson, who was 36, and five of her young children burned to death in their corner row house in a fire the authorities said a 21-year-old drug dealer set in retaliation for Mrs. Dawson’s crusading against the drug market outside her home. Mrs. Dawson’s husband, Carnell Dawson Sr., was struggling to live after suffering serious burns over half his body.
Now Baltimore is trying to come to grips with what Mayor Martin O’Malley calls “the most barbaric act in the recent history of our city.”
The fire heightened already rampant fears about possible retaliation by drug dealers, but community activists promised to fight back against the dealers and demanded more police protection in violent neighborhoods.
Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development, a citywide group of about 50 religious congregations, said it expected 500 members at a rally on Sunday outside the Dawson house. “There are people willing to stand up to drug dealers in this neighborhood, but for people to stand up, this mayor has to offer them protection,” said Robert English, an organizer with the group. “We’re calling on the mayor to devise a plan to protect this neighborhood and others because people are being terrorized.”
Mr. O’Malley, who has made crime-fighting the chief goal of his administration, praised Mrs. Dawson’s antidrug crusade and clung to the belief that the deaths would galvanize the city in its fight against drugs. “These deaths are a strange combination of line-of-duty deaths and the slaughter of the innocents,” said Mr. O’Malley, a Democrat. “There are a lot of us who have been asking what will make us stand up and say, `Enough is enough.’ Maybe this it. This city is in crisis.”
Mr. O’Malley has repeatedly criticized what he called lax prosecution of gun and drug crimes by the city state’s attorney and the United States attorney for Baltimore.
Today and Thursday at closed-door meetings attended by the city’s police commissioner and city and state lawmakers, there were heated exchanges and criticism of what many view as inadequate police protection and a criminal justice system that routinely returns violent offenders to the streets quickly.
“The Police Department locks drug dealers up, they make cash bail and they’re out again,” State Senator Nathaniel J. McFadden said. “It’s a revolving cycle that we are going to break. This arson has made the Dawson family martyrs in our efforts to rid the streets of crime.”
Mr. McFadden said he would push for more crime-fighting help from the governor, the Legislature and the Maryland Congressional delegation.
“Just like resources have been made available for fighting Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden, we want the same thing available for the citizens in Baltimore City,” Mr. McFadden said. “We consider this an absolute terrorist attack on the community.”
Downtown at a hearing, the suspect in the case, Darrell Brooks, was ordered held without bond today on six counts of first-degree murder, arson and related charges.
Prosecutors read witnesses’ accounts detailing how Mr. Brooks kicked open the door of the Dawsons’ home after 2 a.m. Wednesday, poured gasoline on the floor and ignited it, then went back to his house a few doors away. Inside a closet at Mr. Brooks’s home, the police said, they found a measuring cup and a jar containing gasoline.