Hezikah Wilson III didn't have an enemy in the world.
He didn't have friends, either. Aside from running an occasional errand, the 38-year-old autistic man rarely left the house he shared with his diabetic mother in Northeast Baltimore. He made sure she took her medication, and prepared her meals.
He also let the dog out, something he was doing Sunday night when someone shot him in the shoulder and killed him.
On Monday, as police canvassed Hamilton for tips in Wilson's murder, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake told reporters at a news conference at police headquarters that Baltimore over the past decade had the largest drop in crime of any of the nation's 20 largest cities. Shootings have been cut by 40 percent, and the homicide rate is at its lowest point since 1989.
"We say this not to diminish the tough work ahead, but to say what is true and allow the people of Baltimore to acknowledge hard-fought progress," Rawlings-Blake said.
Since gun crime began to tumble in 2008, city leaders have struggled to overcome the perception that crime is as bad as ever, as statistics show it's at 25-year lows.
Hezikah Wilson III is another example of why that perception persists.
"We've never had a member of the family a victim of crime — nothing this heinous, this evil, this violent," said his brother Frankie Wilson, standing on the front porch where Hezikah collapsed.
Frankie Wilson, 33, is a 15-year veteran of the Baltimore Police Department who patrols West Baltimore. Every night he heads out, he knows that the next call that comes over the radio can take him to some of the city's toughest corners to investigate another incident of senseless street violence. He doesn't expect those calls to come to his personal cell phone.
His mother's neighborhood, Hamilton Hills, is quiet, a collection of well-kept detached single-family homes with front lawns — a far cry from the projects of Cherry Hill and East Baltimore where he and his brothers and sisters were raised, where protective parents worked to keep them from the streets, even if it meant having to endure teasing from other children.
"I've seen it," Frankie Wilson said of the street violence, "but it's something I've never [personally] experienced before. You can't express it, or put it into words."
About 6:30 p.m. Sunday, Hezikah, a big Ravens fan who was excited about their win earlier in the day, had trudged down the front steps of the home in the 5600 block of Plymouth Road to let out the family dog, an energetic Maltese named Quincy.
Hezikah was standing inside a small fenced-in lawn, wearing a robe and slippers, when he was shot.
He was the third person killed in the first two days of 2011 in Baltimore.
With city homicide victims nearly as likely to have a criminal record as the people who kill them, police call Hezikah a "truly innocent victim."
Family members streamed into the home Monday afternoon; inside, Wilson's mother was too distraught to take part in interviews with the media. Another of Hezikah's brothers, Archie Wilson Jr., 44, tried to direct his nervous energy into housework, pulling a vacuum cleaner onto the porch. The brothers showed a reporter pictures from Frankie's wedding album, showing Hezikah helping their mother walk down the aisle.
Hezikah's "only agenda was to help out family and focus on taking care of my mother," Archie Wilson said.
"It is, very much, a random kind of act and has no kind of real logical ties to anything," said Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III.
While quiet, the neighborhood has not been immune to violence. Last March, a 22-year-old man, Philip Holmes, was fatally shot one block away in the 2200 block of Roselawn Ave. Still, it's property crime, not violent crime, that is more likely to bring police to the community.
"It's in a fairly remote area of Hamilton, not an area that experiences much violent crime," said Bealefeld. "We did some door-to-door, but I'm urging the Northeast [officers] to get back out there, one to allay [residents'] fears, two to generate some more information on that case."
Officials didn't call Monday's news conference to talk about Hezikah. Armed with posters of blown-up mug shots of repeat offenders, they were gearing up to lobby legislators in Annapolis to tighten penalties for illegal gun possession. The city ended 2010 with 223 homicides, another drop in total shootings, and the belief that three sustained years of progress is no fluke.
With a new state's attorney sworn in Monday, gun laws with more teeth are the next step in driving gun crime down further, they say. Eighty-two percent of all jail time imposed by the city's courts was suspended, and the average amount of time served is four months. Forty-four percent of the suspects in killings in 2010 had a prior gun arrest.
One poster board showed 31-year-old Myron Matthews, charged seven times with gun possession.
"You can't make this stuff up," Bealefeld said, reading Matthews' record of suspended sentences and second chances.
Another displayed the bruised face of Franklin J. Gross Sr., a 29-year-old who shot a police officer in November despite a prior string of arrests and convictions for gun possession.
"When we talk about bad guys with guns, it's not a sound bite," Bealefeld said. "These guys are dangerous, and pose an incredible danger to our city. They're racking up real damage here, and they're affecting innocent people's lives."
Hezikah Wilson is one of those innocent people.
Anyone with information was asked to call homicide detectives at 410-396-2100.
Baltimore Sun reporter Yeganeh June Torbati contributed to this article.