What’s happening?
Seventeen-year-old Jeremiah Brogden was shot on Sep. 2 in the parking lot of Mergenthaler Vocational-Technical High School and died at Johns Hopkins Hospital just hours before his first varsity football game this season, J. Brian Charles reports for the Baltimore Beat. Reports indicate that Brogden engaged in a verbal altercation with the shooter, allegedly a student from another high school, who then fled following the gunfire. Baltimore City School Police apprehended a 17-year-old suspect with a gun blocks away from the shooting.
How does this shooting raise questions about youth safety in Baltimore?
Though Mayor Brandon Scott has touted multiple efforts to improve public safety and gun violence reduction, especially among the city’s youth, those programs have yet to reach total fruition or garner the results promised.
At the end of 2021, the city released a gun violence reduction plan, which has seen some positive results but only in the few neighborhoods where it has been implemented. While gun violence continued in the fall of 2021, the city pointed to its investment in parks and after school programs as an alternative to crime. And in late August, Baltimore City Council hosted a meeting about youth violence and detailed a new program offering peer-to-peer mediation and conflict resolution training for students.
Brogden was shot and killed at his school a week later.
Anything else I should know?
Homicides are on the rise in the city this year, and Brogden’s death marks the 16th child murdered in Baltimore in 2022 and the 12th killed by gunfire, already reaching the total number of children killed in all of 2021.
You can read more here.
Editorial Disclaimer: Reporting for this story was provided by the Annie E. Casey Foundation, and we thank them for their support. However, the findings and conclusions presented in this article does not necessarily reflect the opinions of the Foundation.
