His Brother’s Keeper
In America’s deadliest big city, the task of announcing each new murder falls to police spokesman T. J. Smith. One year ago, he confronted a killing like no other.
LUKE MULLINS
JUL 2, 2018
It was an early sunday evening, July 2, 2017, and T. J. Smith, the chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, wanted a plate of Maryland crabs. He plunked half a bushel onto the kitchen counter of his suburban home and began pulling ingredients from his cabinets and refrigerator. He let the crabs steam until their shells turned the color of fire. But before he could eat, Smith had to run two errands. He slid a dozen crabs into a brown paper bag for his mother, collected his 5-year-old son, and hopped into his police-issued Ford Explorer.
The sun was drawing down over the Northwest Expressway, and as Smith cruised south, he felt a rare lightness of spirit. The past two days had been quiet. On Friday, he’d said goodbye to a top homicide commander with what had become their signature sign-off: “I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I don’t have to talk to you.” Unlike during most 48-hour stretches in Baltimore, this weekend there had been no murders requiring the pair to coordinate. The following morning he would begin a 10-day vacation.
He swung by his mother’s house, handed off the crabs, then headed to the home of his son’s mother, who would care for their son while Smith was away. As he turned into her driveway, his phone lit up. The police department’s paging system alerted Smith to every carjacking, stabbing, sexual assault, and other violent crime that occurred in the city. With intelligence flowing back and forth, his phone could buzz up to 100 times a day. He peered down at the screen.
His insides clenched when he saw the name. How many Dionay Smiths could there be? He texted the officer handling the case. I know that name, Smith told him. The officer replied that he was standing beside the body in a West Baltimore rowhouse. The crime scene was secure, but the medical examiner was still on his way, so the body had not yet been rolled onto its back. Identification might be tough. But he would send a picture. Then the image flashed onto Smith’s phone. He could make out the light-brown skin, the pudgy frame, the tattoos.
And so, on a summer day last year, Baltimore’s police spokesman informed the city about homicide victim No. 173, his younger brother.
In america’s deadliest big city, T. J. Smith is the bearer of bad news. Amid a historic spike in violence, Baltimore’s murder rate exploded to 56 per 100,000 people in 2017. The rate of the nation’s second-most-dangerous large city, Detroit, was 40 per 100,000 people that year, according to an analysis by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. It is Smith’s job to stand at the podium and give citizens the details of each new homicide. His broad shoulders and thick frame project authority, and he takes care to dress in a manner that reflects the gravity of his task. In person, Smith has the friendly smile and thank-you-ma’am instincts of a politician in an early-primary state. His regular and punchily forthright presence on the 5 o’clock news—“The motive is foolishness, period”—has made him so well known in the Baltimore area that he sometimes leaves his house wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap.
With nearly a quarter of its residents mired in poverty, Baltimore has long been plagued by violence. However, the current homicide crisis materialized only after a 25-year-old African American man, Freddie Gray, died as a result of a spinal-cord injury he suffered while in police custody in April 2015. Gray’s death sparked nationally televised riots and put Baltimore at the center of a heated debate over police tactics in predominantly black communities. Other cities—such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee—have experienced upswings in violence following similar high-profile incidents of alleged police misconduct, but the reasons behind the increases remain clouded in dispute. Many in the law-enforcement community insist that police officers have been forced to disengage in the face of heightened scrutiny from activists, politicians, and the media. Some academic researchers argue instead that communities have lost faith in the police and stopped providing the tips that would lead to the arrest of criminals. It’s a debate with crucial consequences for policing policy in America.
T. J. Smith near the University of Maryland Medical Center in the aftermath of a shooting. (Devin Yalkin)
Smith returned to Baltimore, his hometown, in the tense months following the riots, hoping to help the department rebuild its shattered relationship with the African American community, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the city’s population. Over the next two years, as residents watched him decry the impact of drugs and violent crime during his frequent press conferences, they had no idea how profoundly the city’s troubles were affecting him and his family.
Smith was raised by his mother in a quaint red-brick house with a shady front porch in Northwest Baltimore. The property belonged to her father, a retired post-office supervisor who recounted stories about the civil-rights demonstrations he’d marched in, read the newspaper cover to cover, and served as the ballast for the rollicking family that branched out from his 10 children. As Smith grew up, the house was perpetually crammed with aunts, uncles, and cousins. “It was literally a family raising us,” recalls Alibe Robertson, a cousin of Smith’s. “Our parents were really interchangeable.”
By then, Baltimore’s fortunes had already turned. During the buildup to World War II, the city’s bustling shipyards and whistling steel mills had attracted African Americans from the South and whites from Appalachia. But as the postwar industrial boom lost steam, the plants closed and the manufacturing base collapsed. Unemployment rose, population dropped, tax revenue plunged. Poverty was most crippling in the sections of the city with high concentrations of African Americans. In 1968, riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. helped precipitate a white-flight response that only worsened Baltimore’s negative trends.
Perched on a tree-lined street, Smith’s grandfather’s house offered a middle-class refuge for Smith and his cousins. Everyone pitched in to ensure that Smith never drifted into trouble. Each day after school, Smith’s grandfather would summon him to his knee and have him explain what he’d learned in class. His mother, who’d become a Baltimore-public-school teacher after graduating from college, made sure he finished his homework, and she forbade him from spending time on the street corners where the “troublemakers” gathered. “I see 30-year-old men hanging on [those] corners,” she told him. “That is not going to be your life.”
Smith with his grandmother (top center) and mother (top right). Smith, pictured holding his son, grew up surrounded by a tight-knit and supportive family. (Devin Yalkin)
In America’s deadliest big city, the task of announcing each new murder falls to police spokesman T. J. Smith. One year ago, he confronted a killing like no other.
LUKE MULLINS
JUL 2, 2018
It was an early sunday evening, July 2, 2017, and T. J. Smith, the chief spokesman for the Baltimore Police Department, wanted a plate of Maryland crabs. He plunked half a bushel onto the kitchen counter of his suburban home and began pulling ingredients from his cabinets and refrigerator. He let the crabs steam until their shells turned the color of fire. But before he could eat, Smith had to run two errands. He slid a dozen crabs into a brown paper bag for his mother, collected his 5-year-old son, and hopped into his police-issued Ford Explorer.
The sun was drawing down over the Northwest Expressway, and as Smith cruised south, he felt a rare lightness of spirit. The past two days had been quiet. On Friday, he’d said goodbye to a top homicide commander with what had become their signature sign-off: “I hope you have a fantastic weekend and I don’t have to talk to you.” Unlike during most 48-hour stretches in Baltimore, this weekend there had been no murders requiring the pair to coordinate. The following morning he would begin a 10-day vacation.
He swung by his mother’s house, handed off the crabs, then headed to the home of his son’s mother, who would care for their son while Smith was away. As he turned into her driveway, his phone lit up. The police department’s paging system alerted Smith to every carjacking, stabbing, sexual assault, and other violent crime that occurred in the city. With intelligence flowing back and forth, his phone could buzz up to 100 times a day. He peered down at the screen.
Male found in a pool of blood, appears to be a gunshot wound to the head. 1400 Block of Argyle Avenue. Twenty-four-year-old male. Dionay Smith.
His insides clenched when he saw the name. How many Dionay Smiths could there be? He texted the officer handling the case. I know that name, Smith told him. The officer replied that he was standing beside the body in a West Baltimore rowhouse. The crime scene was secure, but the medical examiner was still on his way, so the body had not yet been rolled onto its back. Identification might be tough. But he would send a picture. Then the image flashed onto Smith’s phone. He could make out the light-brown skin, the pudgy frame, the tattoos.
And so, on a summer day last year, Baltimore’s police spokesman informed the city about homicide victim No. 173, his younger brother.
Homicide Crisis
In america’s deadliest big city, T. J. Smith is the bearer of bad news. Amid a historic spike in violence, Baltimore’s murder rate exploded to 56 per 100,000 people in 2017. The rate of the nation’s second-most-dangerous large city, Detroit, was 40 per 100,000 people that year, according to an analysis by NYU’s Brennan Center for Justice. It is Smith’s job to stand at the podium and give citizens the details of each new homicide. His broad shoulders and thick frame project authority, and he takes care to dress in a manner that reflects the gravity of his task. In person, Smith has the friendly smile and thank-you-ma’am instincts of a politician in an early-primary state. His regular and punchily forthright presence on the 5 o’clock news—“The motive is foolishness, period”—has made him so well known in the Baltimore area that he sometimes leaves his house wearing sunglasses and a baseball cap.
With nearly a quarter of its residents mired in poverty, Baltimore has long been plagued by violence. However, the current homicide crisis materialized only after a 25-year-old African American man, Freddie Gray, died as a result of a spinal-cord injury he suffered while in police custody in April 2015. Gray’s death sparked nationally televised riots and put Baltimore at the center of a heated debate over police tactics in predominantly black communities. Other cities—such as Chicago, St. Louis, and Milwaukee—have experienced upswings in violence following similar high-profile incidents of alleged police misconduct, but the reasons behind the increases remain clouded in dispute. Many in the law-enforcement community insist that police officers have been forced to disengage in the face of heightened scrutiny from activists, politicians, and the media. Some academic researchers argue instead that communities have lost faith in the police and stopped providing the tips that would lead to the arrest of criminals. It’s a debate with crucial consequences for policing policy in America.
T. J. Smith near the University of Maryland Medical Center in the aftermath of a shooting. (Devin Yalkin)
Smith returned to Baltimore, his hometown, in the tense months following the riots, hoping to help the department rebuild its shattered relationship with the African American community, which makes up nearly two-thirds of the city’s population. Over the next two years, as residents watched him decry the impact of drugs and violent crime during his frequent press conferences, they had no idea how profoundly the city’s troubles were affecting him and his family.
“Charge It to the Game”
In the summer of 1973, Smith’s mother was a young college student working as a waitress in a Baltimore restaurant, trying to scrape together enough cash for her tuition at nearby Morgan State University. One evening, she broke a glass and sliced tendons in her hand, near her thumb. At the hospital she met a 19-year-old nursing assistant named Marlin Smith. The two exchanged phone numbers. Although the couple never married, she gave birth to a son, T.J., who would grow up as an only child. A few years after T.J. was born, the couple split.
Smith was raised by his mother in a quaint red-brick house with a shady front porch in Northwest Baltimore. The property belonged to her father, a retired post-office supervisor who recounted stories about the civil-rights demonstrations he’d marched in, read the newspaper cover to cover, and served as the ballast for the rollicking family that branched out from his 10 children. As Smith grew up, the house was perpetually crammed with aunts, uncles, and cousins. “It was literally a family raising us,” recalls Alibe Robertson, a cousin of Smith’s. “Our parents were really interchangeable.”
By then, Baltimore’s fortunes had already turned. During the buildup to World War II, the city’s bustling shipyards and whistling steel mills had attracted African Americans from the South and whites from Appalachia. But as the postwar industrial boom lost steam, the plants closed and the manufacturing base collapsed. Unemployment rose, population dropped, tax revenue plunged. Poverty was most crippling in the sections of the city with high concentrations of African Americans. In 1968, riots following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. helped precipitate a white-flight response that only worsened Baltimore’s negative trends.
Perched on a tree-lined street, Smith’s grandfather’s house offered a middle-class refuge for Smith and his cousins. Everyone pitched in to ensure that Smith never drifted into trouble. Each day after school, Smith’s grandfather would summon him to his knee and have him explain what he’d learned in class. His mother, who’d become a Baltimore-public-school teacher after graduating from college, made sure he finished his homework, and she forbade him from spending time on the street corners where the “troublemakers” gathered. “I see 30-year-old men hanging on [those] corners,” she told him. “That is not going to be your life.”
Smith with his grandmother (top center) and mother (top right). Smith, pictured holding his son, grew up surrounded by a tight-knit and supportive family. (Devin Yalkin)