Detectives on Wednesday night investigated a street shootout in which four men were injured near a pink-and-yellow playground in South Baltimore.
Officers marked the shell casings scattered on the sidewalk while neighbor Edith Nelson watched from her front door.
She was eating snow crab legs, a surprise from her daughter, about 6 p.m. when gunfire sounded down the block.
Then Nelson, 75, lay across her kitchen floor. "I figure bullets can come through windows," she said.
Four men were shot, police said, an 18-year-old in his hand, a 23-year-old in his foot, and a 47-year-old in his foot. The victims were found nearby by police and hospitalized. Another man was shot multiple times and driven to the hospital by someone he knows, police said. None of their injuries were life-threatening.
Officers searched Wednesday evening for the shooters. They tied yellow crime tape outside the playground, the Carroll-Archer Streets Tot Lot.
Twenty years ago, it was just a scratch of dirt with some weeds there in Washington Village-Pigtown. Then Nelson organized the cleanups.
Neighbors raked wood chips. They painted the low wall like a rainbow, the jungle gym pink and yellow. Christmastime, they decorated a shrub tree. And Nelson was named in the plaque on the new playground bench.
Today, the plaque hangs in her bedroom. Four binders of photos — the tot lot through the years — are stacked in her living room.
"This is the first time I've ever seen those yellow lines, those streamers there," she said, watching the crime scene tape blow.
"I try not to linger on the negative," said Nelson, who raised six children and retired from sewing in a factory.
Saturday was the annual spring cleanup at the playground. It will go on, she said.