Corey Winfield bases his work with Safe Streets on the premise that if he could find an alternative to violence, anyone can.
Winfield, an outreach worker for the East Side Safe Streets program in McElderry Park, spent 19 years and nine months in prison for a murder he committed at age 17. Three days after he returned home, his younger brother was shot and killed.
Vengeance coursed through his veins. His brother had been shot in the back. Police told his mother that it appeared to be a robbery gone wrong.
Winfield was hearing otherwise. The streets were talking, and the word was that his brother had been lured in by members of the Crips gang, who plied him with alcohol and Ecstasy and shot him as part of a gang ritual. It seemed that Winfield's brother had gotten into a scuffle on the basketball court two years earlier, and gang members told the shooter that it was time to settle the old score.
"In our culture, you know, you can get a gun faster than you can get a cell phone, and that's what I chose to do," Winfield says. "There wasn't no thinking about it, no hesitation about it."
Winfield stalked the alleged shooter like he was his prey. He discreetly shadowed him — or as Winfield calls it, did his "homework" — getting down the shooter's behavioral patterns. He determined that the shooter liked to play pool in the middle of the night and would cut through an alley to get home.
That was where Winfield decided to strike.
As he laid in wait, a police cruiser pulled up. Winfield retreated to his home, which was pitch black inside. His mother was seated on the couch. It was dark, but he remembers that he could make out every wrinkle on her face. She grabbed his hand, touched his cheek. "I know what you're doing," she told him. "Please don't. I can't lose another baby."
"I think I cried probably 100 years' worth of tears that night," Winfield recalled in a recent interview.
The next day at Jumu'ah, the weekly Muslim prayer service that occurs on Fridays, Winfield bumped into Leon Faruq, whom Winfield knew from the prison system, and described what had happened. Faruq explained to him the concept behind what would become Baltimore's Safe Streets program and offered him a choice: Join me and make a difference, or prepare for another prison stay.
Winfield, 40, was one of the first people recruited into that first inception of Safe Streets. Before it became formalized, the workers would meet on the corner of McElderry and Montford streets and walk the neighborhood for hours, chatting up residents, hanging out at the basketball court. Their reputations preceded them; They generated respect — and to a certain extent, fear — in the neighborhood. But now these "O.G.s", or original gangsters, were preaching a message of nonviolence.
Winfield now works as a street supervisor and hospital responder for Safe Streets and tells his story to those who can't see another way to resolve their problems.
"People that know me know that me not doing nothing about that situation with my brother was very deep. That took a lot," Winfield said, saying he once waited six months to plot a knifing in prison.
"I tell them, I let that go. You telling me [your dispute] is more important than my brother's life? Right then and there, I've got you."
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