Jeaneen Marine always carries with her a memento of her first encounter with a handgun.

It is a .40-caliber slug embedded a hair's breadth from her spine. Doctors say it would be too risky to remove it, though she never forgets for a minute that it is there.

"Constant pain," says Ms. Marine, 18. "Like an ache, in my back and my leg."

It has been there since one night in August 1992 when she was standing four doors up from her home on McCabe Avenue in North Baltimore, chatting with a neighbor. Shooting started a half-block away at the corner of Alhambra Avenue. Ms. Marine started to run for home.

She glanced back and saw the dark blue car with a gun sticking out the window, firing.

"I thought, 'Oh, my God, they're going to kill me," she recalls. She got as far as the next-door neighbor's yard before a bullet slammed into her back.

The gunman got away -- but police have the gun in custody. It sits in an envelope filled with hollow-point rounds in the evidence room at Baltimore police headquarters.

It is a Glock .40-caliber semiautomatic pistol, Model 22, Serial No. YD546US, with a 16-round capacity. Gray, plain, mostly plastic, it has a lightweight feel that belies its $600 price tag and a brand-new look that denies its bloody history.

That history includes the shooting of Lisa Ragin in a wild exchange of gunfire on Federal Street in May 1992. And the shooting of Terry Johnson and shattering of neighbors' windows in a dispute over a girlfriend on Valley Street in July. And the shooting of Tujuan Ford in a drug-related argument on Eager Street in September 1992.

As is the case in most nonfatal shootings in Baltimore, no one has been punished. But police ballistics experts have tied each of the four shootings to the same Glock handgun.

The Glock's story, as pieced together from police reports, court records and interviews, shows the anguish and random destruction that a single pistol can produce in a few months as it moves through the criminal underground, sold, lent or "rented" by one thug to another.

It illustrates the growing firepower of the street arsenal, and the resulting stray bullets that cut down innocent people who dare stand on their street or sit on their steps. The number of murders in Baltimore has risen steadily in recent years; the number of nonfatal shootings has climbed much faster. There were nearly four shootings a day in the city in 1991; nearly five a day in 1992; and nearly seven shootings each day last year.

To follow the four Glock shootings through the court system is to see how much more advanced is the hard science of ballistics than the human art of investigation and prosecution, especially in a system swamped with criminal cases.

Even the man charged with illegal possession of the Glock -- who a police officer says blurted out a confession when he was caught -- was found not guilty.

In this sad tale, gun enthusiasts will find plenty of evidence for their argument that gun violence results not from the proliferation of guns but from criminals going unpunished. In the four incidents, gunmen fired at least 64 rounds, including 35 from the Glock. Not a single person was held responsible.

But the cases also show how difficult it can be to convict someone who shoots on a darkened street, and why guns have %% become instruments of terror in many neighborhoods. Guns' ability to maim and kill at a distance makes them peculiarly corrosive of a community's sense of security. There are no drive-by knifings, no stray baseball bats.

"I lock up so many guys for handguns I can't keep them straight," says Officer Alan Savage, who has worked in the Eastern District for a decade and investigated one of the Glock shootings. "It's aim and pray and spray -- just point the gun and pull the trigger. They don't care who they hit."

On Feb. 5, in an extraordinary turn of fate, Jeaneen Marine was shot a second time, once again in somebody else's argument.

This time, a stray bullet at a downtown nightclub shattered her leg above the left ankle. It was the kind of shooting that police and the media in Baltimore treat as minor, against a backdrop of a murder a day.

But for Ms. Marine, the latest stray bullet has meant four operations, two weeks in the hospital, a metal screw to replace shattered bone and a bout of infection. It means that as she climbs the stairs on crutches to her second-story bedroom, she must put all her weight on her right foot, which exacerbates the pain from the first bullet, the one left by the Glock.

"I ask myself every day, why?" she asks. "Why do I have to go through this pain again?"

Trading up

The rise of the semiautomatic pistol over the past decade has been a boon for the gun industry, whose sales flagged in the early 1980s as the U.S. handgun market became saturated.

Marketing the semiautomatic's speed and big ammunition capacity, gun manufacturers persuaded revolver owners to trade much as a nation of blender owners were persuaded to buy bigger, more versatile food processors.

Police, too, wanted to keep up, and many departments chose the Austrian-made Glock. Baltimore police traded their six-shot revolvers for the 9-mm Glock Model 17, which holds 18 rounds.

They face similar firepower on the street. Last year, Baltimore police confiscated only slightly more revolvers from criminals than in 1983. But they collected nearly three times as many semiautomatics, whose signature was evident on the streets.

"We used to have homicides with one or two bullets," says Ronald J. Stafford, head of the Baltimore police laboratory's firearms unit and a firearms examiner for 20 years. "Now it's nothing unusual to have multiple bullets from two or three different guns. Officers at a homicide may pick up 15 cartridge cases, and only 10 will be from that murder."

Using a microscope or the new Drugfire computer system, experts compare the markings -- as distinctive as fingerprints -- on bullets and cartridge cases collected at a shooting scene. If a gun is recovered, they can link it with certainty to one or more shootings, as they did with the Glock Model 22.

After an inquiry from The Sun in January, the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms traced the Glock's first purchase to a shop in North Carolina in March 1992.

Agents determined that it was a "straw-man" purchase, the simple but effective ruse criminals regularly use to acquire guns. An accused New Jersey drug dealer with relatives in North Carolina sent a female acquaintance with no criminal record into the shop in Rockingham, N.C., to make the buy. She bought not just this Glock but four other handguns, which authorities are still tracing.

Agents do not yet know how the Glock reached Baltimore. But at 10 p.m. on May 9, 1992, less than two months after its purchase, it made its debut on Federal Street in East Baltimore.

Lisa Ragin, then 19, was sitting on the steps of her mother's rented rowhouse, watching her 1-year-old son, Kyreem, play with a few other children. Drug dealing is rampant around Federal and Dallas, where cocky dealers even order residents not to sit on their own steps.

Gunfire broke out, and Ms. Ragin ran to scoop up Kyreem and run for cover.

"Just as I got to him, the bullet hit me," she remembers. "It felt like something real heavy was laying on my chest." She handed her baby to her 11-year-old nephew, grabbed at the wall of the house and fell to the sidewalk.

Her recollection has the clarity of a dream: A woman named Brenda calling out, "Lisa's been shot!" A man named Wayne putting his coat over her. A medic cutting her shirt off. The ambulance ride to the Maryland Shock Trauma Center. An anesthesia mask being lowered to her face.

The bullet had entered her upper back and exited from the middle of her chest, narrowly missing lungs and heart. She was, in that limited sense, lucky. She went home after a week and suffers only minor pain as a lingering physical effect of the wound.

Police collected 29 cartridge cases at the scene of the shootout, 15 of them fired by the Glock. They also found 10 unused 9-mm cartridges in a flower pot and a Smith & Wesson .22-caliber handgun hidden beneath the tire of a truck on nearby Caroline Street.

Neighbors say the shootout was a turf dispute between dealers from Federal and Dallas and others who work at Broadway and East Eager. In a paradox not unusual in these wild, nighttime faceoffs by overarmed, undertrained gunmen, the only victim was an innocent bystander.

The Glock made its next known appearance two months later and a half-mile to the southwest, on the 1200 block of Valley St., south of Green Mount Cemetery.

It was 2:20 in the morning when gunfire shattered two second-story windows on the sleeping street, terrifying the 74-year-old woman and the couple in their 40s who live inside.

Twenty-year-old Terry Johnson was shot in the back of the legs. Before being taken by ambulance to Johns Hopkins Hospital, he told police another young man, named Jason Horne, had "disrespected" Mr. Johnson's girlfriend and the two had argued. As Mr. Johnson walked away, he told police initially, Mr. Horne opened fire.

Busy crime lab technicians -- there were two more shootings within a few blocks that night -- collected six cartridge cases that would be linked to the Glock.

Six weeks passed before the Glock appeared on McCabe Avenue, Jeaneen Marine's street miles away in North Baltimore. Drug dealers who work around McCabe, a street of modest rowhouses, have a long-running rivalry with those from the Old York Road area a mile to the south.

The feud regularly erupts in gunfire, often sprayed from cars speeding through the neighborhoods, targeting whoever happens to be outside. Ms. Marine, who says she has nothing to do with the feud, was shot in such an anonymous attack. She knows at least four other people who have been shot on her block in recent years.

"You live on McCabe and you're the enemy," says Ms. Marine's mother, Wilma Harcum, 52. Disabled by heart trouble and cancer, Ms. Harcum says she has tried unsuccessfully since the shooting to persuade the Baltimore Housing Authority, her landlord, to offer the family another house away from the shooting. (Housing Authority spokesman Zack Germroth says that, despite a long waiting list, officials will seriously consider her request.)

"The boys selling drugs on McCabe don't live on McCabe," Ms. Harcum says. "They sell their drugs, and they walk home and leave us to get shot up. . . . Nobody should live like this."

Two weeks after the Glock shot Ms. Marine, it was back in East Baltimore. Just after 2 a.m. on Sept. 9, shooting broke out in the 2200 block of E. Eager St. in what police called a drug-related dispute. Twelve cartridge cases were found on the street, half of them from the Glock.

Nineteen-year-old Tujuan Ford told police he was sitting on some steps when a man in a royal-blue jacket ran from an alley and started shooting at him. One bullet passed through his arm and penetrated his rib cage. Mr. Ford, whose condition was described by police that night as "good," was treated at Johns Hopkins Hospital.

Police get gun

A month later, on Oct. 14, police finally caught up with the gun. Agent Stephen C. Nalewajko Jr., working in plainclothes on Patterson Park Avenue, says he saw a man pull a handgun from his waistband, reach under the front fender of a parked van and place it atop the tire. Then the man tossed an object under the van and began to run.

Agent Nalewajko gave chase, quickly catching the man, Mark Henry Hunter, then 22. According to the officer, Mr. Hunter made two incriminating statements: "The gun's empty" and "I bought the gun from a junkie for $50." He was charged with illegal possession of a handgun.

But in January of last year, when the case came to trial, Mr. Hunter's alleged statements were not allowed into evidence, because Agent Nalewajko had not advised Mr. Hunter of his right to remain silent and to consult a lawyer.

Moreover, Officer Kimberly Myers, who was watching from an unmarked car down the street, testified that she did not see Mr. Hunter hide the gun, though she did see him throw something under the van. It was the Glock's magazine, loaded with 13 hollow-point cartridges.

Defense attorney Gary S. Bernstein, having kept the confession out, hammered on what he said were contradictions in police testimony. District Court Judge Joseph A. Ciotola Sr. found Mr. Hunter not guilty, not even requiring that he put on a defense.

Police and prosecutors fared no better bringing to justice those responsible for the four shootings. With shootings piling up, investigators seem to have made only modest efforts to track down the shooters.

Lisa Ragin says she received one telephone call from a police officer two weeks after she was shot. The officer asked if she knew who shot her. She didn't, but she passed on what she had heard about the two sides in the shootout.

That was the last she heard, even though Ms. Ragin, now living in a different neighborhood and working as a gas station cashier, says she was eager to help find and prosecute her assailant. Until a reporter called recently, Ms. Ragin had no idea the gun had been found, or that Mr. Hunter, whom she remembers from high school, was charged with its possession.

Eastern District police officers say they tried to solve the shootings, searching for witnesses and showing them suspects' photographs. None could, or would, identify the suspects.

"It's the same problem we have in 90 percent of the shooting cases," says Officer Brenda May of the Violent Crimes Task Force, who helped with the investigation. Few good citizens witness the typical middle-of-the-night shootout, she says. If they do, they are often too busy running for cover to get a clear view of the gunman or too frightened to appear in court.

Despite the obstacles, police managed to make arrests in two of the four shootings. Jason M. Horne, 20, was charged after Terry Johnson said that was who had shot him. But in court a month later, Mr. Johnson recanted, saying Mr. Horne had not shot him. Charges were dropped.

Eric Bolling, then 18 and living on East Cold Spring Lane, was arrested and charged with shooting Ms. Marine. But the sole witness, Terrill Brady, who had been standing on McCabe Avenue that night, was himself charged in another shooting. Prosecutors had to choose between Brady as a suspect and Brady as a witness against Mr. Bolling, said State's Attorney Stuart O. Simms. They chose to prosecute him. Brady pleaded guilty and was sentenced to five years.

The shooting charge against Mr. Bolling was not pursued.

The Glock has been off the streets for 18 months, one of more than 3,500 firearms Baltimore police confiscate in crimes each year. But gunslingers have no trouble finding replacements. Handguns are so ubiquitous that some Baltimore nightclubs routinely check patrons with metal detectors.

When Jeaneen Marine, her sister and her niece, arrived at the Ozone Club at Paca and Franklin streets on the night of Saturday, Feb. 5, they went through the weapons check. But they thought it was more cursory than usual.

As Ms. Marine turned from the coat rack in the foyer to enter the club, she heard two shots, felt a stinging pain in her leg and fell to the floor. "I looked and saw blood all over my sock," she says. Lights came on. She saw a boy who had been shot in the arm.

Random victim again

She heard later that the shootout was between "Murphy Homes boys and Edmondson Avenue boys." She has no acquaintances in either group. Police say she was, once again, a random victim. They have made no arrests.

Today, Ms. Marine hobbles around on crutches, feeling the pain from two bullets, two of thousands that have injured Baltimoreans since the Glock hit the streets two years ago.

"It's hurting," she says. "It makes me scared to go anyplace."

In the face of the awful coincidence that saw her daughter become the victim of two random shootings, Ms. Harcum is frantic with frustration and fear. After the second shooting, she says, she called Mayor Kurt L. Schmoke. She could not get through.

"I'm scared to go to the door," Ms. Harcum says. "Every time a car goes down the street, I freeze. Something needs to be done about what's going on."

One Pistol's Path of Destruction

On March 25, 1992, a North Carolina woman bought a Glock Model 22 pistol for a New Jersey drug dealer in a shop in Rockingham, N.C. By May the gun had reached Baltimore, where in five months it shot four people.

automatic pistol with 16-round capacity

1. May 9, 1992: Lisa Ragin shot during shootout between drug gangs. Twenty-nine shots fired, including 15 from Glock

2. July 10, 1992: Terry Johnson shot in dispute over girlfriend. At least six shots fired from Glock

3. August 22, 1992: Jeaneen Marine wounded in drive-by shooting. At least 16 shots fired, including eight from Glock.

4. September 9, 1992: Tujuan Ford shot in a drug-related dispute. At least 13 shots fired, including six from Glock

5. October 14, 1992: Glock recovered: Police charge Mark Henry Hunter with possession; he is found not guilty Inside the Glock 22 Semiautomatic

A -- Spring-loaded magazine, or clip, feeds rounds into chamber

B -- Firing pin strikes round, firing bullet

C -- Explosion drives slide back,expelling empty cartridge case. Slide moves forward loading next round.

Removable magazine or clip contains 15 rounds (chamber can hold a 16th). All 16 rounds can be fired in less than seven seconds

Revolvers can be just as deadly as a semiautomatic pistol. But semiautomatics, generally hold far more rounds and as they grow more popular with Baltimore criminals, shootouts and stray-bullet injuries have proliferated.

In Contrast

In the revolver, the rounds (usually six) are contained in holes in a revolving cylinder. After firing cartridge cases remain in the cylinder.

%%