The Ashburton home was draped with caution tape. It's how the 50-year-old homeowner decorates each year for Halloween, along with cardboard tombstones and a speaker emanating spooky noises. But just a few doors down was real caution tape, as police investigated a double shooting that killed the second person in the neighborhood in less than 24 hours.
After hearing the gunshots, the woman, who would not give her name, saw the man's lifeless body in the street, dead from a gunshot wound to the face. The "Beware" sign in her front yard suddenly took on a different meaning.
If police - who are burying two of their own this week - hoped that their mourning might bring a respite from the city's violence, those hopes were quickly dashed.
Two people, including a 48-year-old woman, were slain in the city's Broadway East neighborhood within an hour on Monday evening. A 16-year-old boy was fatally shot early Tuesday in Northwest Baltimore, followed by a 63-year-old school bus driver who was getting ready to go to work in West Baltimore.
Hours later, police were back in the leafy Ashburton neighborhood where the unidentified teen was killed, to investigate a drive-by double shooting that claimed the life of one 18-year-old and wounded another.
The city remains slightly off last year's pace for killings, with 180 killed so far in 2010 compared with 184 at this time last year. Three years ago, that number was 246. In 2006, it was 225.
But the city's most persistently violent neighborhoods — the Eastern, Western and Northwestern districts, where police deploy an extra complement of plainclothes detectives — are struggling. Thirty-six people have been murdered this year in the Eastern District, just two fewer than were killed all of last year there.
The Western District, meanwhile, already surpassed last year's total earlier this month.
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