They Just Aren't Like Us: The Story of the 2002 Murder of the Dawson Family in Baltimore, what was dubbed the city's "Alamo"

PK NOTE: If you make a comment using racial epithets, the comparison of humans to animals, or anything that can be deemed as "advocating violence" or "endorsing ideas that advocate violence," your comment will not be posted. 

This is policy. It is a chore to administer the comment section, and while I enjoy doing, a steady source of revenue this site generates (roughly $3,000/year) has been negated because of a poor job on my part of policing the comments section --- and comments were moderated. 

I don't do SBPDL to make money or get rich, but with this loss of revenue, well, that takes away a sizable chunk of forecasted revenue for the year. 

So, if you post any comment that uses a pejorative, advocates violence (or posts references to organizations - fictional or non-fictional - advocating such), it won't get posted. 


In reading about Baltimore and its 63.5 percent black population, no story highlights the insanity of the majority demographic (or perhaps typifies) better than the 2002 murder of the Dawson family. "No snitching" took on a new meaning, when the home of Angela and Carnell Dawson was set ablaze Oct. 16, 2002, after they dared report drug dealing to police. Angela and the couple's five children perished in the blaze and Carnell died a week later in a hospital. 

After calling police more than 109 times to report black drug dealers ruining their community in a majority black city, the Dawson family's house was firebombed by a black male in a terrifying example of witness intimidation. All seven members of the family died... all because they dared try and make the city a better place (as opposed to canonizing drug dealers as David Simon did in The Wire)

The family was black, fighting to stay in the city of Baltimore where their fellow black citizens were doing their best to make the city unlivable for any ethnic group (calling police 109 times between 2000-2002 to report drug dealing). 

Then again, this is a city where a 1992 report found that 56 percent of the black male population of Baltimore between the ages of 18 and 35 years-old were in some form of trouble with the 'racist' judiciary system [Legal system betrays young black men, Baltimore Sun, 9-1-1992]:

The National Center on Institutions and Alternatives is reporting today that well over half of the young black men in this city are entangled in the criminal justice system on any given day. 

NCIA's study found that 56 percent of Baltimore's black men between 18 and 35 years old were either incarcerated, on probation or parole, awaiting trial or sentencing, or being sought on an arrest warrant. 

The one thing the NCIA study does not show is that an increasing percentage of the decision-makers at every level of the criminal justice system are black, as are an increasing percentage of the lawmakers on both the state and local level. 

The black community had hoped that putting black law enforcement officials in decision-making positions would make a difference, that they would set different priorities, find different solutions. 

But for the most part, blacks are making the same decisions that their white counterparts made. 

And they are making the same excuse.

"The report said 34,025 of the 60,715 young black men in Baltimore, or 56 percent, were "under criminal justice supervision on any given day in 1991," and still this wasn't enough to keep Darrell Brooks from taking a can of gasoline to the Dawson home and setting it ablaze... all because this family dared try and make the city a better place. Though he was on probation, Dawson was one of those local thugs the New York Times mentioned as not taking kindly to Angela reporting black drug dealers to the police. 

But her entire family would pay for the shared desire to make Baltimore a better place with all of their lives. [In Baltimore, Slogan Collides With Reality, New York Times, 9-2-2003]:

Darrell Brooks stood at the front of a courtroom, tears streaming down his cheeks, and choked out an apology.

He had killed seven people, five of them children, and now he said he felt sorry.
''I will never, ever, as long as there is breath in my lungs, ever forgive myself,'' he said last Wednesday. ''I knew those kids. I loved them. I swear I didn't mean it, I swear.'' 

The lanky Mr. Brooks was off to prison for life for burning down a house full of people last October, a crime that seared the heart of this city and blasted a signal that things in Baltimore were still out of control. 

Mr. Brooks, a drug dealer, did not Believe. He had not gotten the message, stamped all over the city, on garbage cans, squad cars, T-shirts, skyscrapers, even thumping basketballs. 

Believe. One word, printed in black and white, as if things were that clear. It began as a high-concept public relations campaign, begun by the mayor, Martin O'Malley, to tackle Baltimore's most infamous problem, drug crime. For years, the city had been at or near the top of the list of per-capita misery statistics: most murders, most addicts, most high school dropouts, most cases of H.I.V. and syphilis. 

Believe was a way to address those ills, not through programs, but through commercials, banners and bumper stickers. Few cities had ever tried anything so abstract. 

''It's spiritual warfare,'' Mr. O'Malley said. 

But just as the mayor's new religion was taking off, Mr. Brooks reached for the gasoline.

Witness intimidation, Baltimore-style. 

Once the slogan for Baltimore, what exactly did "Believe" even mean? That if they "believed" enough, the black population could replicate the same type of success white people once had had in the city? 

It's an impolite, a publicly unmentionable fact that it's the black population of Baltimore monopolizing the role in ensuring Baltimore leads the nation at the top of the list of per-capita misery statistics, with Johnnie Cochran Jr. even suing the city for $14 million (it would be dismissed): the rationale for the suit being the city's "Believe" campaign encouraged black residents to report black dealers and the city was negligent in not providing police protection/witness protection for those who put themselves in danger. [Mayor derides Cochran's claims: Lawyer's blaming city for arson that killed 7 is labeled `pretrial hype', Baltimore Sun, 1-9-2003]:

In addition to the Believe campaign, Cochran has blamed the deaths on the criminal justice system's failure to lock up Brooks for having violated his probation, which is a state responsibility.

A lawyer with Cochran's firm said Tuesday that the city's Believe campaign, which encourages residents to report dealers, was "reckless" because it urged people such as the Dawsons to put themselves in danger without providing effective witness protection.

Quality of life can truly be measured by the percentage of the black population found in a city: the higher the percentage, the closer you'll be to the situation in Baltimore, where citizens hide behind locked doors and those who dare snitch are barbecued; the lower the percentage, the greater the odds the sound of children's voices on Halloween night will be heard as they trick-or-treat through safe neighborhoods without adult supervision. 

The white mayor of Baltimore (at the time of the horrific Molotov cocktail firebombing of the Dawson house), Martin O'Malley would label the event, "The hardest moment of this administration was going to March Funeral Home and filing by five tiny caskets. But the Dawson loss just strengthened my resolve. The tragedy was our Alamo, it was not our Waterloo."

But Baltimore's Waterloo came long ago, when blacks rioted in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King assassination. It took 5,500 National Guardsmen, 400 state troopers, and 1,200 city cops to occupy Baltimore and bring order to a lawless black population then; it's doubtful these same numbers could replicate that same feat today. 

It's difficult to determine if law ever came back, with white flight rendering the city yet another majority black, urban disaster. [100 Years: The Riots of 1968: Part of our "100 Years: The Twelve Events That Shaped Baltimore" series, Baltimore magazine, May 2007]:

And yet, nearly 40 years after the riots, Ruby Glover still laments that "so much in the city today almost brings back those memories—with the gangs, and the way that police have to work on streets where I grew up, where I laughed and entertained. There's still great fear, but it's coming not just from whites to blacks—now it's blacks to blacks." 

The Dawson house would be rebuilt, re-branded as a sanctuary from the violence of black Baltimorians. Though if you try hard enough, the eerie smell of gasoline remains, a signature of witness intimidation even the Italian mobs would never dare employ. 

Darrell Brooks, like 56 percent of the black males aged 18-35 years old in Baltimore (according to the 1991 study) was  under criminal justice supervision - probation - when he torched the Dawson house, killing all seven family members

 More than $1 million was spent to erect the Dawson Family Safe Haven Center in East Baltimore, on the exact footprint of the house which was burnt down. In assessing the state of the neigbhorhood 10 years after the tragedy, one resident stated they felt more at home in American military occupied Iraq than in black occupied Baltimore [10 years after Dawson killings, uneven results in Oliver: Family was killed in fire after complaining about drug dealers, Baltimore Sun, 10-13-2012]:

Wanda Brewer, 52, who operated heavy machinery for Halliburton at Camp Anaconda in Iraq, returned to the neighborhood to look after her ailing grandmother. She looks back bleakly on the last decade.

"Nothing changed," said Brewer, who lives on East Oliver Street. "We just got poorer — a lot of us went to jail."

After returning, she found that she was "more at war here than I was in Iraq."

Still, there is evidence of positive change. Crews are at work renovating some of the neighborhood's vacant houses — there are nearly 1,000. And as he looks down the

hill from where the Dawsons lived, Deputy Housing Commissioner Reginald U.

Scriber said the streets were never as clean 10 years ago as they are today.

His department spends $270,000 a year to run the Dawson community center and is proud of the investment. The program is intended to help children with their studies while keeping them away from the temptations of the streets.

A friend of the Dawson family would concur with Brewer's bleak assessment of Baltimore and the conditions found in the majority black city (made only possible by the black population). [Home Where Family Died Is Now Safe Haven, New York Times, 4-8-2007]:

Aaron Anderson, 15, who lives nearby and knew the Dawson children, added: “It’s sad. I’d rather not be here and them still alive, but the center will play a big role in keeping kids off the streets." 

“The streets are terrible,” Aaron added. “Anything can happen on any given day. You can get shot, killed, everything. Maybe it might save somebody’s life and make them realize they should come in here and do their homework. It’s easier.” 

 But why are the streets so terrible?

Why is a nation under the heel of U.S. Military occupation a safer place for a black woman than the streets of her majority black hometown?

In a city utterly purged of white privilege, shouldn't a utopia be found magically in its place?

No. That's why programs like Safe Streets are necessary. [Street cred used to disrupt the norm in some of Baltimore's most violent areas, ABC2news.com, 11-21-2013]:

Baltimore is infected. 

If violent crime is a disease, then after years of steady remission, a rise in homicide totals and non-fatal shootings shows it is starting to relapse. 

But, deep inside some of this city's most important arteries, much like a vaccine, old pathogens of violence are working to inoculate the very disease they once helped create. 

ABC2 spent a night with the Safe Streets operation in Park Heights. 

It is one of four chapters around the city run by the Baltimore City Health Department; others include McElderry Park, Mondawmin and Cherry Hill. 

In short, Safe Streets is a public health model aimed at curing violence as if it is a disease. 

ABC2 News is the very first media organization trusted to go inside this program at the street level with television cameras, spending hours on a typical canvass, walking the streets with the men who once ruled them. 

Reformed now as outreach workers and so-called violence interrupters, the employees of Safe Streets spread a different message to the high risk youth following their old path. 

What makes them listen?

A typical convenience store in Baltimore. Notice all of the products are behind plexiglass (as is the employee of the store) an inconvenient fact of doing business in the 63.5 percent black city of Baltimore...

“I come from these streets. I grew up here. This is where I am from… I am stopping another black brother from getting hurt, another black brother from going to jail. There are so many ways to throw your life away out here. Just trying to stop that, just trying to show them there is a different way," said an outreach worker known on the streets as Porky. 

They are showing them a different way from the normal the incredibly tough streets have taught them. Walking through their small part of Lower Park Heights on a Thursday night, it didn't take long to see. 

On the corner of a crowded McDonald’s parking lot, two young men began a back and forth that was immediately interrupted by Safe Streets violence interrupter Aaron. 

We have agreed not to publish or broadcast specifics, but Aaron put an end to it by simply telling both men there is a different way to resolve this and each should walk away. 

Both men did walk away peacefully, and Aaron will later write up the mediation to revisit it later. It seems like an obvious lesson, but the code of these streets is altogether different. 

Safe Streets data shows 96 percent of their mediations in Park Heights are “likely or very likely to result in gun violence.” Had the mediation not happened at the brush-up we witnessed, Aaron explained, a violent incident was likely to ensue.

But what is Baltimore infected with, good reporter at ABC's affiliate in the city? 

Cancer? 

AIDS?

Is it incurable? 

Inoperable at this point?

Fifty-six percent of black males between the ages of 18 and 35-years-old were under criminal justice supervision "any given day" back in 1991 in the city of Baltimore; what do you want to be that number is approaching 75 percent today?

In reading about Baltimore and its 63.5 percent black population, no story highlights the insanity of the majority demographic (or perhaps typifies) better than the 2002 murder of the Dawson family.

This black family dared to make their community - and by extension, the entire city - a safer place.

One of their own murdered the entire family.

Together, regardless of the contributions of good families like the late Dawson's, this entire population murders civilization in Baltimore.

They just aren't like us.