She fights bloodshed one T-shirt at a time

The Baltimore Sun

There were no relatives in the hospital when the young man died, so Millie Brown and her co-workers in the operating room reached for a wallet in his pants to find some identification. The pants were wet, and so were the wallet and the thick stack of cash inside - blood money from the streets of Baltimore.

Another young, African-American male lay on an operating table at Johns Hopkins Hospital, dead from five, maybe six bullets to the upper body. Many young men come, bleeding or unconscious, by ambulance to one of the greatest hospitals in the world, direct from the streets of East Baltimore - sometimes from only a few blocks away, where the paramedics and homicide detectives find them.

Doctors and nurses try to save them. Sometimes they succeed. Sometimes they fail.

Millie Brown works as an operating room associate in cardiac surgery. She gets a page to the trauma room when she's needed there. It's her job to move patients to and from the OR - and sometimes to the hospital morgue. She's there when the bodies are cleaned and tagged and bagged. She's there when the next of kin arrive.

But that one night, no kin could be found, and Millie remembered the stack of $20 bills in the young victim's wallet, soaked through with blood.

"It must have been this thick," she said, referring to the cash-stuffed wallet and holding her thumb and index finger nearly 4 inches apart.

I had to stop and think about that for a minute - blood-soaked cash, the death of young men, our frustrating city - and in the next breath, I heard Millie Brown say, "It's all so senseless."

Friday afternoon, before Millie started her 2-to-11 shift in the Blalock Building, we sat and talked about all this - and speculated about that shooting victim having so much cash on him - because the killing of young men in Baltimore has moved her to launch a one-woman campaign to stop the violence.

Seen too much already, she says.

Hopkins has given her great opportunities to advance her career - to move in time from food services to environmental services and into the OR, where she has observed amazing efforts to save lives after high-caliber efforts to end them.

She's not a surgeon, not a nurse. But she wants to do something.

That's why she's selling a T-shirt that her teenage son designed. It says: "Save Our Children, Stop The Killing." She has them printed with her own money and some that she's raised. She sells them for $15 and wants to donate the proceeds to an effort to pull at-risk boys back from the brink.

She hasn't quite figured that part out yet. She's just getting started.

"I want to see this T-shirt in neighborhoods everywhere," Millie Brown says with the passion of a woman who has just discovered true purpose. "I want to see people wearing them as they walk down the streets."

Millie, who is divorced, lives in Dundalk with her son, William, 15. Her heart aches for the other women who come to the OR to view the bodies of their teenage boys, victims of gang battles and street beefs, of guns and of knives, of the whole insane culture of macho violence that keeps one part of Baltimore bleeding and dying as the other one thrives and grows.

Millie Brown knows five women whose sons have been shot, one of whom is still clinging to life at the University of Maryland Medical Center across town. Two women she knows, who work in Hopkins housekeeping, have lost children to violence.

Of course, we've seen stop-the-killing efforts before. Been there, got the T-shirt.

But this one comes from a woman who has the twin perspective of mother and health care worker. Millie Brown is right there, at the hospital on the hill, in the middle of the night, under the surgical lights, when young men come in off the street, wounded and gasping for breath. She's been there when they died and when their mothers arrived to embrace the still-warm bodies. She's hugged the moms as they wept.

"Talking about all this, seeing it on the news, in the newspaper, that's one thing," Millie says. "But when you stand right there and you see it, and you actually touch it or have to move a body from one room to the morgue ... when you have to take a mom to see her baby who's been shot with a gun or stabbed with a knife, and he's gone ... when you see a grieving mother crying for her child ... then I want to do something about that.

"I really want to try and make a difference," Millie says. "My goal is to save one mom from coming in here and seeing her son dead from a gunshot."

So she's selling the T-shirts. She wants to get the mothers of victims involved in the effort to stop the killing; she'd like to produce a video of their stories or get them to speak to young men about making better choices in life.

She said it was OK to publish her number in the newspaper today (410-961-1003) in case anyone else in Baltimore wants to join her in saving the boys and saving the city.

dan.rodricks@baltsun.com

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