Here we go again — to Jessie Snead's house at the corner of Reisterstown Road and Hilldale Avenue in Northwest Baltimore. And just in case I don't remember the location, the woman known to some of her children and grandchildren as Mama Bell says, "You'll see the balloons."
Indeed, this time there are six colorful balloons tied to the street sign post in front of Snead's house and candle drippings on the sidewalk.
In Baltimore, we know what this means. It means someone died there, or that they were shot and fell there. Friends and kin of the victim buy the balloons, they light the candles. There are a lot of such memorials in the bloody Baltimore spring of 2015.
The one in front of Snead's house is different. Instead of marking the spot where her grandson was killed last month, it marks the spot where family gathered for the vigil and for the repast after his funeral.
The last time I came to Snead's house, in 2010, it was for something similar — a pre-Thanksgiving supper for the mothers of homicide victims. It was a gathering of a support group called Survivors Against Violence Everywhere, and Jessie Snead was one of its most active members. She still is.
So when she called me about her grandson, she was calling to report the second homicide in her family in 22 years.
Snead's son, Terrance Thompson, was killed in 1993 — one of two men fatally shot in a house on Hilldale in September of that year. Thompson was 26.
Snead's 23-year-old grandson, Eric Diggs Jr., was killed last month, one of 42 homicide victims in May, the deadliest single month in Baltimore since 1990 and the crack epidemic.
Diggs was shot in a neighborhood of brick homes and garden apartments several blocks to the north and east of his grandmother's house. Police found Diggs in the 2500 block of Edgecombe Circle, near Greenspring Avenue, a little after 8 p.m. May 15. They provided no other details.
So it's Friday morning, and I sit with Snead on the front porch of her house, shaded by a large tree rising from her neighbor's yard. Reisterstown Road is busy with cars and trucks and, at one point, a fire engine headed north, siren blaring. I ask Snead about the homicides in her life and why they occurred.
When her son was killed in 1993 — a record year for Baltimore homicides, with 353 — police said there was no evidence that the shooting was related to drugs or to a robbery. Snead has no idea why her son was killed and apparently neither do the police. The case has never been solved.
"A detective called me once three years ago," Snead says, "but I've heard nothing since."
As for Diggs, Snead says, "Whatever his lifestyle was, he kept it to himself."
I ask what he was like, and Snead says, "Swift," meaning frequently on the move, sometimes on a dirt bike. She has no idea why he was shot. Her daughter, she says, is still too distraught to talk with me about her son. They had the vigil in front of Mama Bell's house, and the funeral, and now the balloons on the sign post have started to shrink in the rising Baltimore heat.
I ask Snead about all the killings — why they continue. Drugs? Disrespect? Robberies? Grudges? Gang initiation? Cops holding back, post-Freddie Gray? There have been so many homicides over all the years, so many balloons and candles and grieving mothers.
"I tell them to talk it out, not shoot it out," Snead says, which is advice and not an explanation.
"We have to learn to respect each other," she says, and I can't disagree, but it doesn't answer the question.
"These boys are in their 20s, but it's like they're teenagers," she says, hitting one of my theories about why the guns come out so fast. Too many of them are in the hands of young men in protracted adolescence, with no father or solid father figure to show them the way to honorable manhood.
From the porch, I see a couple of boys, maybe 10 years old, with backpacks; they're dressed in khakis and polos, and they're apparently walking to school for the next-to-last day of classes.
Snead hands me the program from her grandson's funeral. There's a photograph of Diggs' handsome face on one side, his baby picture on the other. I look at the program, then look at the schoolboys on the sidewalk. I watch them until they're out of sight, and I wonder if they'll have a longer life than Diggs did.
I wonder if the schools will serve them. I wonder what they go home to — if there's enough support there, if there are adults who can keep them from harm, nurture them, love them, show them a way out of the cycle that brutalizes and destroys so many young lives in this heartbreaking city.