15-year-old girl falls victim to surge of deadly violence in city

The Baltimore Sun

After a long night of cleaning motel rooms, Ginger Brown unlocked the front door, walked into her Southwest Baltimore rowhouse early yesterday and instantly knew something was wrong. Lights were on throughout the first floor, though it was just after 2 a.m. Her 15-year-old daughter, Christine Richardson, was neither seen nor heard.

Brown went upstairs to the second floor, where she found her only child lying on Brown's bed with stab wounds to the chest and her throat slit, she said. Her daughter's blood stained the mattress. The family dog, Snowball, lay waiting at her side.

In the hours before daybreak, paramedics and crime lab technicians arrived and started gathering evidence, while homicide detectives began their investigation into the death of Richardson - the second, and youngest, girl killed in the city this year.

"I can't go into the home by myself because I'm afraid I might flip out," a distraught Brown, 44, said about 8 a.m. yesterday on the sidewalk in front of her house.

The pace of city homicides has quickened this year, and Baltimore is on track to surpass 300 homicides for the first time this decade. In a city steeped in gun violence among young black men, the way Richardson died - stabbed inside a home - is uncommon and frustratingly difficult for police to prevent, authorities say.

Of the city's 165 homicide victims this year, 11 have been killed in stabbings, including a man who died in February a block from Brown's home, police statistics show.

Richardson's death is also the latest reminder that Baltimore continues to struggle with violence among its juvenile population. So far this year, the deaths of 16 juveniles have been ruled homicides - four more than during the same period last year.

'Culture of violence'

"To some extent, there's a culture of violence that goes way back in Baltimore," said Philip Leaf, director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Prevention of Youth Violence. Leaf said at-risk teenagers in the city's most troubled neighborhoods often fear for their own safety, crave respect and sometimes carry weapons for their own protection.

Lt. Col. Rick Hite, commander of the newly formed youth services division in the city Police Department, has ramped up efforts to try to reach kids who are living on the edge: hanging out on street corners, running with gangs and seeking out respect on the streets.

"Violence is a learned behavior and one we have to recognize," Hite said. "The majority of these homicides are related to this issue of respect."

But in Richardson's case, police officials said they knew of no motive or suspects. There was no apparent sign of forced entry into the house, police said, and some relatives and neighbors said they feared that the teenager was killed by someone she knew. Forensic tests were being conducted to determine if she had been the victim of a sexual assault, police said.

Some neighborhood residents wondered whether two police surveillance cameras on the block - part of a network of more than 300 citywide - recorded anyone entering or leaving the house before the killing. But a police spokesman said the department does not comment on evidence it obtains in a homicide investigation.

Yesterday, friends, neighbors and relatives gathered at the home in the 300 block of S. Fulton Ave. to console Brown. Brown's parents drove four hours from West Virginia to be by her side.

Father is in hospital

Brown's boyfriend, Bill Richardson, who is the girl's father, was usually home at night, but he had recently suffered a pinched nerve and was hospitalized, relatives said. Family members said they broke the news of his daughter's death to him at an area hospital.

Christine Richardson, beloved by a large family that included seven half-brothers and half-sisters, was a smiling fixture in a gritty city neighborhood accustomed to drug dealing and violence.

She helped a next-door neighbor take care of her grandchildren, and she grew up attending neighborhood schools. Her best friend since she was age 3 or 4 lived a few doors away.

"I can't believe it," said Lou Ellamay Williams, 58, the friend's grandmother. "We're sitting here crying."

Outside the rowhouse where the teenager was killed, heart-shaped balloons, stuffed animals and flowers filled the sidewalk.

Inside, toy bears and dogs framed the mirror of a dresser a few feet from the blood-stained mattress where Richardson's body was found. A plaque of the Ten Commandments hung on a wall.

Brown described how she discovered the body. She said her daughter had been wearing Brown's nightgown, as she often did, because it was comfortable.

"I knew she was dead," Brown said. "Her eyes were wide open, and there was blood all over the place."

The teenager's bedroom, its walls painted Barbie pink, was next to her parents' bedroom. "I love you. Dorian -n- Christine forever" was written in black marker on the wall above her bed.

Across the room, trophies lined a desk: "Steuart Hill Elementary School, perfect attendance, 1997-1998," one read. Another, from Franklin Square Elementary School, was second prize in the "Dramatic Reading Contest."

Despite her early academic successes, she quit school in the ninth grade after she was expelled in October from the Vivien T. Thomas Medical Arts Academy, her mother said.

"She got kicked out because she went off and started breaking furniture 'cause people were talking about her grandmother," said Brown, a housekeeper at Tim's Motel on Washington Boulevard in Halethorpe. "She really wasn't learning and everything, and she just wanted to help me around the house."

But Richardson did get into some minor trouble with the law in the spring, her mother said, including when she broke a window of a neighborhood rowhouse to hang out inside during the day.

Laugher and tears

As Brown mourned the loss of her daughter, she was alternately laughing over happy memories and breaking down in tears.

She smiled as she recalled her daughter's favorite actors - Wesley Snipes and Clint Eastwood. "She loved Clint Eastwood, the Western movies," Brown said. And she clutched her daughter's favorite baby doll - dressed in jeans, a yellow shirt and a pink hat - and then placed it with the other toys on the sidewalk.

But within moments, as a friend hugged her on the sidewalk outside her rowhouse, she collapsed into tears.

A viewing has been scheduled for Friday from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m. at the Parker Funeral Home, 3512 Frederick Ave. The funeral has been tentatively planned for Saturday.

William Richardson, 36, thought of his own 10-year-old daughter yesterday as he grieved for his half-sister.

"I want the person or persons who did this to stop and think if this was your sister, mother, girlfriend, what would you do?" he said. "Kids these days are the most precious thing in the world, you can't harm them."

gus.sentementes@baltsun.com nicole.fuller@baltsun.com

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