6

PARRISH, RAWLINGS, HOLLIS, AND FLYTHE, 2008

Randallstown, Maryland is one of those well-maintained middle-class suburbs, like Gary, Indiana, that over the past decades, without any fuss, has become almost entirely African American—more than eighty percent at last count. Regulation plastic garbage cans are left atilt at the curb in front of modest single-family houses. The cars are mostly Toyotas, though there’s an Infiniti in one driveway and the occasional beater or Harley. Unmowed lawns are rare. The air of conformity is standard-issue suburban.

Older people might mistake the town for an enclave of Polish autoworkers, because, frankly, it looks like the kind of place blue-collar racists tried to keep black people out of in the bad old days. Instead, no one has to think about integration here at all. As if bookending a whites-only past, nearly every face you see is brown—an even higher percentage of African Americans than in Baltimore next door.⁷

Many of the families in Randallstown came here to get out of crime-ridden Baltimore. Shrinking since 1950, Baltimore is now hardly more than a borough of the Boston-to-Washington megalopolis I-95 ties together. Thirty thousand old houses are abandoned and boarded up. The reputations of Edgar Allan Poe and Frederick Douglass have faded equally. The city’s new mythology has come from the TV show The Wire. To a visiting New Yorker (me), the crime-consciousness feels like a throwback to the 1970s. The local, alternative, free City Paper runs a roundup column called “Murder Ink.” A recent issue’s headline tally was, “Murders This Week: 6; This Year: 109.”

Randallstown has little in common with The Wire’s gangsta paradise of Section 8 housing, trashed row houses, and hyperalert but stoned-acting loiterers giving the four-fingers-down signal of dope dealers. In Randallstown the kids are good, though they mostly go to the not-so-good Randallstown High School. That sprawling brick pile couldn’t be more suburban, set amid acres of parking lots and tennis courts and basketball courts and playing fields. Almost hiding the entrance, a windowless, modernist Martello tower juts out toward a parking lot. Against the tower’s mass of brick, a banner of the school’s mascot ram is almost lost. A corner of the banner has come away and flutters briskly to the shouting of a thousand kids.

At the end of the school day the buses have lined up in front of the school. Most kids mill around waiting for their ride, but a lot walk home: a threesome of fat girls, an undersized, bespectacled loner with an oversized backpack, a knot of seniors with a student-comedian shuffling backward on the sidewalk in front of them telling jokes. Within an hour or so, like a wave into sand, the shrilling crowd disappears completely into the suddenly quiet suburb.

Sometimes Michelle Parrish, in every way an ordinary mother, would come to this school to pick up her son Steven and his best friend Steven Hollis. She’d drive them to her place and the two Stevens would have a sleepover. Or else the boys would walk from school several blocks to the Hollis home on Bengal Road, and they’d spend the night there. They were pretty much inseparable best friends.

Parrish more was more handsome and gregarious. His nickname was “Scooby.” Hollis’s academic problems were somehow reflected in his face—he was an odd-looking kid. His nose, cheeks, and jaw jutted forward. The top part of his head was smaller and narrower. Attractive eyes receded under a strange, sharply V-shaped brow, a permanent frown that made him appear both uncomprehending and on the verge of anger. He’d had a blood disorder when he was born and was diagnosed with ADHD as a seven-year-old, but neither would account for that scarily tragic expression. Maybe it was why they called him “Loco.”

In high school, a frustrated Loco discovered the one thing he excelled at, football. At six-one and 190 pounds, he was a good fit. Scooby encouraged him. As they got older the pair joined up with a whole band of school friends. Juan Flythe was “Woo.” Jasiah Carroll was “Scrappie.”

The boys found the Parrish place ideal for hanging out. Where the Hollises’ small Bengal Road house—white with black shutters—was crowded in amongst other houses, the Parrish’s place was in Gwynn Oaks Landing, a vast rental project of two-story tan brick townhomes. The homes came in eight- or ten-unit blocks arranged in simple patterns on short dead-end streets off a stretch of Essex Lane. The streets had cute names like Strawbridge Court and Cedar Park Court and Mountbatten Court. The Parrishes lived at 21 Thornhurst Court. Though all rental, the complex looked like a well-maintained condo project. A parklike barrier of woods and artful boulders separated Essex Road from the townhomes and parking lots. Unseen, vigilant neighbors were everywhere.

But what made it such a good place for hanging out was that all those dead-end “Courts” and townhomes backed up against a dense patch of woods, heaven for kids to play in, to explore, to make out in, to get drunk or high in. 21 Thornhurst Court was all the way at the back where, right next to a garbage bin, a path opened into the woods.

The forest has a name only a mapmaker would know (Villa Nova Park), but it is just called “the woods.” If you walk in past the garbage bin at the end of Thornhurst Court, you can go straight through brush down a steep ravine to Gwynns Falls Creek. Crossing the stream in a couple of hops, you can climb the even steeper far side of the ravine. Up there, trees and brush are suddenly replaced by lawns and gravestones, the more recent ones forlornly decorated with plastic flowers and burnt-out tea lights holding puddles of old rainwater like lachrymal vases. This is Woodlawn Cemetery, also a terrific place for a kid to play. Just the right mix of eeriness, emptiness, cranky groundskeepers, and a pond (a dammed stretch of the creek) almost too small for a huge, nearly tame flock of mallards. Idlers are always feeding them with crumbled bread.

If you turn sharply right from the garbage bin, you’ll follow a path along the crest of the ravine’s near side. This shortcut behind the townhomes of Gwynn Oaks Landing pops back out onto Essex Road where you can make a left on Windsor Mill Road. Down a hill is the area’s main drag with a Royal Farms store (a local chain of gas stations/quickie marts) and the police station.

Idyll though all this appears for a boy whose family doesn’t have a lot of money, when adolescence hits, and the shadow of Baltimore seems to inch closer, a boy’s thoughts can turn to gangs, even in Randallstown. Even good kids give it some thought. The universal alarm that gang life inspires in places like Randallstown looks like power to a kid who’s worried about disrespect. The all-diminishing mockery of high school can’t touch gang members.

Still, compared to criminal Baltimore City types, these particular boys from surrounding Baltimore County might as well have been country bumpkins. How serious can a gang get in a suburb? Maybe it was more like a fraternity, an in-your-face version of the “Greek Life” some African Americans embrace in college. These guys, Loco, Woo, were on the football team, after all. What does this have to do with crime? Their interest in a gang had to be juvenile swagger, play. Unfortunately, the nature of play is always to mimic the real thing.

About to graduate from high school, the boys found part-time jobs. They had to. A storage center. A day labor agency. They were getting a glimpse of the life ahead of them. Scooby found work at a pharmacy on Liberty Road, one of the big streets radiating from downtown Baltimore. A gay guy named Jimmie worked there too. He was older, in his thirties, perhaps. Though Scooby wasn’t bothered by a gay guy, the work was boring. Loco took a job as a cashier at a McDonald’s. It wasn’t exactly football and his permanent frown may have started to represent real surliness.

They all revered a slightly older guy with the street name “Murk” (Benjamin Wureh). And when they talked to him about forming a gang, he advised them, “You wanna make it real, you gotta go to Hood.”

“Hood” was Timothy Rawlings Jr. He was four years older than the two Stevens. He was much smaller as well, only five-nine and 157 pounds. He looked like a kid, an extremely grave kid. His hair was cropped short, no fancy dreads or cornrows or the gumball-sized twists Loco wore. His humorless charisma was just the kind to win young men over. Small as he was, he’d been the quarterback of the Parkville High School football team. He had a still, wild form of leadership, self-conscious of his power, forever poised, permanently insecure.

Real morality was probably invisible to a guy as focused as Hood. What took its place was ritual, rules, signs, the arcana of groups and obscure subgroups like FOE: “If you rep that FOE, you about Family Over Everything.”

Hood’s father was a career criminal with other things than family on his mind. Hood lived just inside the Baltimore city limits with his mother, Tereia Hawkins, who’d raised him alone. She was a long-time state employee, a corrections officer, ironically. A huge, slow woman, she had an air of long-suffering endurance. Under a smattering of unprofessional tattoos, her upper arms swung like wattles when she moved.

Once the boys hooked up with Hood, things changed quickly. They would be Bloods—that is, they’d side with the American archipelago of gangs who favor red and, along with the Crips, are one half of a modern underground version of the ancient Blues and Greens, the quasipolitical hippodrome fanatics who terrorized Constantinople. (Most old pictures of Scooby show him wearing a pregang blue bandanna, not the red one that became part of his gang wear and his last outfit.)

You couldn’t just be a Blood. You kouldn’t just start religiously avoiding the Crips’ letter C when you texted your boyz. History and heraldry were involved. Most gang names hark back to an address, street, or neighborhood in Los Angeles where the Crips and Bloods got their start. That’s where “Swans” came from, apparently. Under Hood the Randallstown boys would become “Family Swans 92” or the “92 Family Swans.” Each gang member had a swan or the name tattooed on their shoulder or arm.

When Michelle and Steven Sr. saw the tattoos Scooby had gotten on his forearms, they were furious. Scooby’s father, a large man with the weary manners of millions of American husbands, grumbled with repulsion and let his wife rail at their son. She was a sharp-tongued woman. But even she ran out of words eventually, and she threw up her hands and shook her head in bitter disappointment, a pot boiling dry though still on the flame.

Scooby was a charmer and tried explaining to his parents that, yes, it was a gang, but it didn’t mean he was going to have to do anything bad or illegal. It was just group friendship. Like the one between him and Loco. Nothing different. His parents challenged him: how would it look when he went for a job? He promised, he swore, it was nothing bad, not the big deal they thought it was.

Other parents had the same reaction. But how do you confront an ever-more-remote and indifferent kid? Woo’s (Juan Flythe’s) father didn’t even know what his son was up to until he found out from a cousin. She told him Juan was hanging out with a bad crowd. So Juan’s father went to his own mother, Bercille, a tough, almost mannish woman with whom Juan was living at that point. Father and grandmother discussed it. Yet they couldn’t do more than discuss and worry. They certainly weren’t going to talk to the police about the boy they loved, though a judge later wished aloud, idly, that parents would do just that in gang cases.

The Parrishes, at any rate, regained a little hope after the initial shock. Scooby really was an endearing kid. He was about to graduate. He went off to driving school every day around four thirty, taking that shortcut through the woods. He’d applied for a UPS job. And he was thinking about Baltimore Community College.

May 25, 2008 was Scooby’s eighteenth birthday. He was a senior, school was almost over, the weather was getting warmer, he was tight with the 92 Family Swans—things must have felt good.

He had friends over to 21 Thornhurst Court for a birthday party for himself. The inner circle came: Loco, of course, and Woo and some girls—the high school crowd. Murk came, but not Hood. This party may have seemed too suburban or kidlike to him. Or maybe he thought his absence would add to the mystique of leadership. Soon enough Scooby disappeared upstairs with his girlfriend. It was his birthday after all.

Downstairs the party continued. Why someone picked up Scooby’s cell phone, which he’d left downstairs, isn’t clear, but the lead detective on the case wonders whether the kids weren’t searching for naked pictures of the girlfriend so they could razz the pair about it later.

Anyway, they clicked their way through Scooby’s cell phone, and they did find a picture. It was a shot of Scooby’s penis. That might have been good—funny and embarrassing enough—but the photo was part of a text exchange between Steven Parrish and Jimmie, the older gay guy who worked at the Liberty Road pharmacy. The exchange was humorous, if anything. As recalled by the same detective, it went something along the lines of:

 

Jimmie, u see wat I got here? U wishin huh?

 

I don see nuthin much. Dat all u got me fo ur bday?

 

U see it good enuf.

 

Nobody told Scooby what they’d seen on his phone; he was still busy upstairs. Apparently the bedroom tryst didn’t seem significant compared to the queer texts. Loco and Woo became confused and angry. They left soon afterward. Maybe a faint, moblike outrage filled the air, because someone also stole the girlfriend’s iPod before leaving.

“Gayness” in this story is all but ungraspable. Everyone says Scooby was straight. A lot of them insist on it more than seems decent (as if his murder would make sense otherwise). He did have girlfriends. And it’s not uncommon for a straight boy to get a kick out of the attentions of a gay man.

Regardless, Loco and Woo were suddenly as angry about Scooby’s sexual identity as Michelle had been about his gang identity. Why they reacted this way is hard to understand. In Loco’s case I imagine he felt compromised himself. Young people think their reputations echo across the world. This could have been too great a blot. The whole world knew Scooby and he were best friends. The world knew about the sleepovers, knew they’d grown up together and shared an intimate loyalty to one another.

An additional driving issue may have had to do with football and the 92 Family Swans, not so much sudden discomfort about the gray area of male bonding as the idea that any team has to have a unified purpose, and certain kinds of individuality ruin that. Destruction of a weak link isn’t destruction at all. It’s fortifying, honorable, sanctioned.

Loco and Woo stewed through the 26th and most of the 27th before Woo finally said, “We gotta take it to Hood.”

As Hood saw it, too many people had been at the party, too many people knew. And “gay,” because of its aura of submission, meant weak. Hood felt in the abstract—on behalf of the 92 Family Swans—exactly as Loco felt for himself. How would it look? Family Over Everything. The F in FOE didn’t mean family, of course, except in the Mafia sense. Only brutal, gangsta irony would make a sweet-sounding slogan into an acronym like FOE.

 

* * *

 

Scholars have written about scorn in ancient times for the bow as a combat weapon. It was used, but a feeling existed from at least as far back as Homer that there was something ignoble about the arrow’s power to kill at a distance compared to hand-to-hand combat, which measured man against man. (“Archery is no test of a man’s bravery. A man stands fast in his rank and faces without flinch the gashing of the quick spear.” Euripides, Heracles.) The same unease recurs throughout the developmental history of weapons. Six-shooters got the moniker “equalizers” because they made size and strength nonissues. And the problem is with us right now in its most dramatic form ever, when joysticks in Florida control drones on the Afghan-Pakistan border.

This is relevant, because Hood was about to murder at a distance. The testimony from Florida is that killing at a distance isn’t like a video game at all. It feels real. So Hood, this small, serious twenty-two-year-old, was probably going to feel the reality of it too, no matter how he played it. On May 28 he called a meeting.

His gang met him at the Mondawmin Mall. The mall is a huge, cheap bilevel structure with a gleaming all-white interior. You’d never guess it was actually the oldest enclosed mall in Baltimore, dating from 1956. ⁸ It’s located on the rapid transit line halfway between Randallstown and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor and has the usual complement of national chains, plus a check-cashing place, a wig store. A Pakistani-run jewelry shop sells stereotypical bling while outside guys hawk African-style tribal items. But the mall has a dangerous reputation. In some quarters it’s spoken of as the kind of place white people might not want to go. And despite the security guards, I saw people buying dope in the men’s room.

At the center of the mall is a huge skylit atrium. A glitzy spiral staircase swoops down from a second-level balcony over a circular reflecting pool. Shops line the upper level except right at the balcony, which serves as a sort of lounge. Against a sunny wall of plate-glass windows, overstuffed neo-Deco chairs have been arranged around square fake-leather-upholstered tables or footstools. When I was there, I watched what looked like idling gang members flounce en masse onto the lounge chairs. This is likely where the meeting took place. Besides Hood, at least Loco, Woo, Scrappie, Justin Inman, and Marc Miller were present. Others may have escaped mention.

At the meeting, it was made clear that Scooby, based on what was now “known” about him, was going to make the 92 Family Swans look weak or vulnerable. There had already been a few fights with Crips. Scooby himself had been involved in one or two, though they were more like schoolyard tussles than a gang war. Ultimately, the opinion of fellow Bloods may have been just as important.

Hood took all this seriously. It was his nature. Maybe he was really hoping to build a criminal enterprise someday. Maybe he was simply drinking down the experience of his own leadership in breathless gulps. Or running as fast as he could in his thoughts to remain out in front of the rest of them.

Loco was speaking about his closest friend, but he was looking at Hood, a boy quarterback wearing an expression as somber and unreadable as a lizard’s. Hood was saying that they had to do something about this. These boys had been studying rules and rituals from the moment their gang was founded. Probably few of them dared offer more than grunts of assent when Hood gravely invoked some heartless rule. A law. He chose who would take care of it. He told them to get it done quickly.

On the 29th, the next day, a couple of people were warned to stay away from the Parrish place. Murk texted Justin Inman and told him not to go to Thornhurst Court that afternoon, even though Inman had been picked as one of the killers. “It is going to be hot over there. They are going to do that thing.” Murk, who was older, may still have felt a glimmer of choice. For everyone else, choice had vanished.

It was Loco—Steven Hollis—and Woo—Juan Flythe—who went to Thornhust Court at around four thirty in the afternoon. Loco was seen approaching the Parrish place, where he’d spent so much of his childhood. He lingered by the black-painted metal door, set back like all the others in an arched recess. This was the time Scooby usually went to driving school, and he soon came out. He and Loco walked around the corner of the building toward the garbage bin and woods. Maybe Woo was in the woods already or joined them as they entered.

Woo and Loco later told a friend that they confronted Scooby about the picture and that he said he didn’t want to talk about it. They dwelled on the fact that Scooby never denied the picture’s implication. Loco supposedly grumbled, “We did what we had to do.”

What Scooby said to them in the woods isn’t known apart from the screamed half-sentence or two overheard by witnesses. The three boys got about halfway down the path, the shortcut that veers right. Whether they were arguing or sullen, whether Scooby was furious or embarrassed, he couldn’t have been expecting what happened. Woo grabbed his friend and started cutting. Echoing Steve Mullins, the Alabama killer, Woo says he didn’t feel quite present during the attack. Scooby was heard screaming, “Hey! Stop! Why you doing this to me . . . ? I didn’t do nothing!” The pleading went on for a short while. Badly cut, Scooby broke away from Woo and hurtled toward Loco, who shoved his own knife into Scooby’s chest, cutting the side of his heart.

Scooby fell. Loco and Woo now beat and kicked him. Woo says Loco was in a frenzy. He stomped on his best friend’s neck, crushing the boy’s windpipe. Either the cut to the heart or the crushed neck would have been fatal. But Scooby had over fifty cuts on his hands and head and body. It was about 4:50. The killers took their victim’s cell phone, camera, and pocketknife. Woo says Loco also took Scooby’s pants off—as if in ritual humiliation. The pants were never found, though Murk swears he later saw them and the phone at Woo’s house. As a last gesture, either Loco or Woo laid a red bandanna over Scooby’s face.

The killers made cell phone calls to fellow gang members at 4:55 and 4:56, probably before they left the woods. “It’s done.” At 5:02, Scrappie (Jasiah Carroll) texted: “So is he gone or wat?” Murk answered: “Shut da fuk up.”

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, a neighborhood guy named Blaze came up the path from the opposite direction. He stopped. He ran the rest of the way to Gwynn Oaks Landing. He spotted a couple of girls he knew: “You wanna see Scooby’s body? He’s up in the woods!” A 911 call had been put in as soon as the screaming was heard. Not long after Blaze found the body, police arrived.

During those fifteen or twenty minutes, Loco and Woo must have walked the length of the shortcut and come out on Essex Road without running into Blaze. They later said they’d chucked their knives in one of the garbage bins. Loco and Woo kept walking to Windsor Mill Road, turned left, and strolled down the steep hill alongside busy traffic. They were probably bloodied, probably carrying a bloody pair of pants. They walked right past the police station to the parking lot of that Royal Farms store.

Meanwhile, Hood was driving around Baltimore in his gray Dodge Avenger (a sexy limited-edition model named, incredibly, “Stormtrooper”). In the bucket seat next to him sat Curtis McClean. Despite the huge wings tattooed across his back, McClean wasn’t a member of the 92 Family Swans. (“That guy was so big he didn’t have to bother about gangs,” a detective later explained to me.) Hood got a phone call and told McClean, “I gotta pick my boys up.” The agreed-upon spot was the Royal Farms store.

So there were four of them in the sporty Avenger. Presumably, team killing demands team debriefing or team congratulations. Not a happy slap on the butt so much as a grave, “You did what had to be done.”

They drove downtown to the Bentalou-Smallwood neighborhood of southwest Baltimore. Christian Street is a drab-looking stretch of cheap old brick and clapboard town houses, several with fake stone siding. Dead quiet during the day, the street is home to a couple of bars. One, on the corner of Payson, has no sign except a neon Open in a tiny window. Across the intersection is a shabby, gray-painted place called Incognito. Open Seven Days and Package Goods are stenciled under a tar-paper overhang. The four boys went into one of these bars.

They drank. They must have reassured each other in the stiff, terse way of boys and men. You can imagine Hood drunk with fascination about what had happened but careful not to show weak-seeming curiosity.

At some point Loco and Woo left. Perhaps they went to Woo’s place where the pants and phone were supposedly later seen. They were just the instruments of murder, which were now put away. For Hood the evening wasn’t over.

 

* * *

 

If Hood arrived at the bar at five thirty or six, he had a long time to get grimly and pleasantly dizzy about the murder he’d ordered. Several others joined him and McClean. Michael Fitzgerald is the only one who’s been identified. The next time we hear about the group it’s around two thirty a.m. Hood, McClean, and Fitzgerald (plus the one or two unknowns) drove to Baltimore and South Streets. They parked two cars, Hood’s and an old red Saturn of Fitzgerald’s, in a parking garage on the northeast corner of the intersection.

This is the heart of downtown Baltimore. The ’80s Chamber of Commerce building stands across Baltimore Street from the parking garage. City Hall is a block north and east. From here South Street runs a couple of blocks into the Inner Harbor and the berth of the museum ship sloop-of-war USS Constellation.

Catercorner to the parking garage is the handsome American Building, the old home of the long-defunct Baltimore American newspaper. The building has an ornate cast-iron façade painted dark green, which now frames the windows of a twenty-four-hour 7-Eleven. The garish red and green 7-ELEVEN sign makes for a jarring contrast to the faded gilt of the Gothic black-letter Baltimore American above it.

At two thirty, the fluorescent-lit 7-Eleven must have been the brightest place around. The entrance is at the corner of the building, a vestibule with glass doors opening onto both South and Baltimore Streets. Three guys happened to be waiting near the South Street entrance: Jermaine Kelley, Brandon Sanders, and, just across the street, Christopher Webster. They were waiting on Howard and Davon Horton, who were picking up a few things in the store. The kids were dressed a little ghetto—Gucci sunglasses, diamond studs—but they weren’t gang members.

From the garage across the intersection comes a group of black guys, strung out like wolves. Hood, McClean, Fitzgerald, more. One of this group, unidentified except that he was wearing a white baseball cap, walks up to Webster. He lifts the front of his shirt to show he’s carrying a handgun. He takes it out.

Brandon Sanders, who was nearest the 7-Eleven entrance, ducked inside and told Howard and Davon, “Guy got a gun on your cousin, man!”

Howard looked out the window and saw Webster leaning against the granite footing of the Chamber of Commerce building across the street. Some guy in a white hat was talking to him, but it didn’t look like a robbery.

So Howard steps out to find out what’s going on. As he does, he sees his cousin taking off his shoes (to prove he has no money hidden), and he sees the guy in the white cap slip the gun back into his “dip area,” as they call it in Baltimore.

Before he can react, Michael Fitzgerald, one of the guys who’d joined Hood and McClean, grabs Howard’s arms from behind. “Empty your pockets!”

Howard figured this guy had a gun as well, so he fished four or five dollars from his front left pocket. Fitzgerald meanwhile slipped a hand into Howard’s right front pocket and took Davon’s car keys (Howard had been driving his brother’s car), before ordering him, “Push it down the street!”

All this happened so quickly, Jermaine Kelley was still standing there at a complete loss. Fitzgerald swung toward him and grabbed the Cincinnati Reds cap from his head. Curtis McClean approached and ordered Jermaine to take out his diamond earrings. “Gimme your wallet and glasses!” Fitzgerald added. And after Jermaine gave them everything, Fitzgerald shouted, “Get the fuck out of here!”

While this was happening, Davon slipped out of the 7-Eleven and hurried down South Street. Not fast enough. One of the attackers (unknown) demanded his watch. Davon refused.

Someone yelled, “Just shoot him! Just shoot him!” This could have been Hood’s second fiat for murder that day, but nobody knows who did the yelling. In any case, the attacker dutifully shot Davon three times—chest, shoulder, hip. Each bullet went clean through him. (Davon lived, barely.)

The shooter ran down South Street. The rest of them backtracked to the parking garage, where it happened a plainclothes detective was working that night. A police car was also sitting two blocks east on Baltimore Street. It made a U-turn and got to the intersection in seconds. The plainclothes detective caught Fitzgerald by his car. After more police arrived and the garage had been sealed off, officers approached a Dodge Avenger with tinted windows. Both seats were laid out flat. Two people were hiding. On the passenger’s side: McClean. A hollow point bullet fell from his pants when he responded to the order to get out. Lying flat in the driver’s seat: Hood. What was on that motionless, serious boy’s mind as he ended his career as a leader in a shabby robbery like this?

 

* * *

 

Something rare happened in this case. Despite the baby faces involved, despite the nice Randallstown families, this was an authentic gang murder. Loco and Woo were caught easily enough, but neither they nor anyone else would name names because of the gang connection. Detectives Gary Childs and Joseph Caskey (who ran the case from the beginning) simply didn’t believe Loco and Woo’s gay story at first. The detectives were probably too grown-up or too sophisticated to understand or remember the bizarre, boyish ideal of impeccable manliness. Indeed, the gangs frequently mystified them. Childs shook his head when he told me about a boy who admitted shooting somebody simply because “he was mugging me,” Baltimore slang for staring at him.

Woo, with his shaggy dreads, his raggedy beard coming to a point, with a heaviness around his hips that gave his thuggish appearance a trace of cowlike gentleness, eventually told his father everything—the gang, the order to kill. His father had no advice except a halting, automatic, and insufficient, “You gotta do the right thing.”

If he cooperated with prosecutors, Woo would have to worry for the safety of his grandmother Bercille, his father, his entire family. He’d have to serve his time in protective custody. Out of genuine remorse, apparently, he finally did talk. He talked about the birthday party and the meeting at Mondawmin Mall and the order, mentioning a name detectives had never heard and would never have known: Hood, Timothy Rawlings Jr., a kid in jail in the city for some 7-Eleven robbery.

In an uncanny moment before Hood was sentenced to life without parole, he was permitted to review the “pre-sentencing report”—a private document full of victim impact statements and mitigating information about the defendant. Sitting at the defense table, the small, self-possessed boy bent forward studiously and turned the pages very slowly with a steady hand.

As I watched him, the question came to mind, Is he really reading? His lawyers whispered between themselves. The aristocratic, white-haired Judge Robert Dugan waited impassively. A court officer reminded people to keep their cell phones silent. This was mainly directed at the six gang members in the last row on Hood’s side of the room. They’re children, basically, slight of build and posturing in their seats with an impudence that looks as stylized as that in West Side Story. Yet these boys will kill.

Still, Hood turns the pages, keeping the whole courtroom waiting without any sign of self-consciousness. He hasn’t been sentenced yet, but he must know what’s coming. Two teachers, a ponytailed white guy and an African American woman, guide their black students—mostly girls in white sweaters—into the courtroom. The students and their teachers all wear an uplifting button that reads: Live Your Dreams. But as Hood continues turning the pages, reading his own life, the teachers whisper and the students are—a little disruptively—led out again. Hood keeps turning the pages.

His mother Tereia, the corrections officer, will heave herself to her feet and say her son isn’t the monster he’s been painted to be. “But I want to apologize for my son’s alleged actions.” She’ll turn to address the Parrishes directly with lawyer-tutored formality.

Michelle Parrish will also go forward to speak from the prosecution table. She’ll start uncertainly, then berate Hood like any mother. During her furious remarks, the gang members will suddenly be led from the room by Childs and Caskey. The detectives will explain to me later that the kids were making intimidating hand signals.

For now, Hood turns the pages, delaying his sentencing and seemingly in complete mastery of time itself.

 

* * *

 

Michelle Parrish saved her greatest venom for Loco, Steven Hollis, the best friend. His sentencing came several weeks later. The prosecutor phoned for an extra court officer in case gang members showed up again, but Loco’s side of the courtroom was entirely filled by his somber relatives led by his father, a slight man in an orange shirt and a boxy pale-green suit.

The Parrishes, with one set of grandparents, sat behind a couple of reporters on the prosecution side. Though Michelle had sobbed and Steven Sr. had toyed obsessively with his BlackBerry before Woo’s sentencing (Juan Flythe, who’d cooperated) and before Hood’s (Timothy Rawlings Jr.), this morning the Parrishes appeared more relaxed. It was their third time, after all. Everybody was waiting for Judge Dugan and the prisoner.

A minor flutter arose among the Parrish family when Steven Sr. found he’d misplaced his free-parking ticket. As he searched his jacket pockets, laughing softly at his own forgetfulness, one of the grandparents leaned in and joked, “This happens when you get to be the over-the-hill kind.” More whispered chuckles all around.

Michelle’s attention crossed the aisle only once. She put her arms on the back of the bench in front of her. She leaned forward and cocked her head pointedly at the crowd of Hollises on the other side of the room. Through her stylish narrow glasses, she gave them a good long look, which none returned.

When it came her time to speak, Michelle tugged at her yellow sweater and strode forward, confident-seeming. She was wearing slacks for the first time. “I need to make sure my son . . .” And she immediately broke down. She wept. After gathering herself, she spoke faster, and her voice quickly rose almost to a shout. “I can’t believe how somebody’s best friend could kill them! To have someone you claimed to love as a brother, someone you knew was not gay . . . You knew he was not!” Many of the Hollises stifled sobs. “That’s not love. That’s hate. And no amount of sorrys can make it better.” She turned to Judge Dugan: “I do not want him out!” And back to Loco: “I want every time you see me to remember that’s why you’re in there, because of what you did! I will never forgive you! You have ruined my life!”

Steven Hollis Sr. spoke on behalf of his son. He had a halting, preacherly eloquence. He clasped his hands together when he faced his old friends. “Michelle, I am so sorry. Steven was my son. Steven is my son. Don’t let that hatred sit in your heart. If I could take it back I would. I warned him about hanging out with a gang . . .”

Mr. Hollis shifted his weight. In his effort to remain poised, he seemed to lose track of his plea for a moment. “This is his family.” He gestured toward the Hollises. “And this is his family.” Shyly, he extended his cupped hands toward the Parrishes. He recalled Thanksgivings and family gatherings they’d all shared. Soft-spoken, he wondered aloud, “If there was any way to . . .” Terribly diminished after his speech, holding onto a bare shred of formality, he finished, “It’s all such a waste.”

Loco had none of his father’s gift for speaking. When he finally stood and turned, he looked more confused than ever under his frightening frown. He was no longer the 190-pound football player he used to be. In prison he’d been gradually losing weight, ten, thirty, fifty pounds. He was gaunt now. He was being eaten up. I thought of the way a wasp larva devours its host from the inside with instinctive care to keep the meal alive till the last possible moment.

Loco pressed the tips of wonderfully long, slender fingers on the defense table. They bent backward. In a voice as soft as his father’s but gruffer, clumsier, he said, “I just want to make my apologies to Ms. Michelle. I hope that one day you can forgive me . . . Steven is gone, but he’s still my best friend.”

As if this were a Baptist church, the Parrish grandparents couldn’t repress a muted response. “Hm-mm, hm-mm,” they disagreed. With hushed precision they said, “No, he is not.”