BALTIMORE — Maryland’s governor activated the National Guard on Monday and the city of Baltimore announced a curfew for all residents as a turbulent day that began with the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, the nation’s latest symbol of police brutality, ended with rioting by rock-throwing youths, arson, looting and at least 15 police officers injured.
The violence that shook the city broke out in the late afternoon in the Mondawmin neighborhood of northwest Baltimore, where Mr. Gray’s funeral
had taken place. Angry residents threw bottles, rocks and chunks of
concrete at officers who lined up in riot gear with shields deployed.
Cars were set on fire, store windows were shattered, a CVS drugstore was looted, and the cafe inside a century-old Italian deli was destroyed. Trouble also erupted at the city’s Lexington Market.
By
nighttime, the chaos seemed to be competing with a push for calm.
Looters pulled junk food from convenience stores within a few blocks of
police in riot gear and cars that had been set ablaze. At the same time,
young men in black T-shirts from a local antiviolence group urged their
neighbors to go back inside. A large fire burned in east Baltimore,
consuming a partly built development project of the Southern Baptist
Church that was to include housing for the elderly.
Mayor
Stephanie Rawlings-Blake arrived at the scene of the blaze and said it
was under investigation. “We don’t know if it is related to the riots,”
she said.
Gov.
Larry Hogan declared a state of emergency, and the Maryland State
Police, who took command of the response, said they would ask for 5,000
law enforcement officials from the mid-Atlantic region to help quell the
violence. Some National Guard units were to arrive on Monday night,
with others deploying on Tuesday in armored Humvees.
In
Washington, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, on her first day on the
job, briefed President Obama, who in turn called Governor Hogan. Mr.
Hogan said the president urged him to have law enforcement officers
exercise restraint, and he assured the president they would. “But,” the
governor added, “I assured him we weren’t going to stand by and allow
our city of Baltimore to be taken over by thugs.”
City
officials said schools would be closed on Tuesday for the safety of
children. At City Hall, Ms. Rawlings-Blake, sounding exhausted and
exasperated after days of appealing for calm, announced that a 10 p.m.
to 5 a.m. curfew would be imposed for a week beginning on Tuesday. The
city already has a curfew for juveniles under age 17.
“Too
many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be
destroyed by thugs,” she said. “I’m at a loss for words. It is idiotic
to think that by destroying your city that you’re going to make life
better for anybody.” The police said that at least 27 people had been
arrested.
It
was the second time in six months that a state called out the National
Guard to enforce order in a city shaken by violence after a black man
died in an encounter with police. Missouri deployed the guard in
Ferguson in August after a white police officer killed an unarmed black
teenager, Michael Brown, and then again in November when violence
greeted the news that a grand jury had not indicted the officer who shot
Mr. Brown.
At
a late night news conference, the Baltimore police commissioner,
Anthony W. Batts, noted that Ferguson is a much smaller city than
Baltimore, which covers 80 square miles. “We were pulled so thin,” he
said, adding, “We had opposite ends of the city pulling us at the same
time.”
The
police said early in the day that they had received a “credible threat”
that members of various gangs, including the Black Guerrilla Family,
Bloods and Crips, had “entered into a partnership to ‘take out’ law
enforcement officers.” But officers kept a low profile in the
neighborhood during Mr. Gray’s funeral. The police also said that a
flier circulated on social media called for a period of violence on
Monday afternoon to begin at the Mondawmin Mall and move toward City
Hall downtown.
Warned
by the police of possible violence, the University of Maryland campus
in downtown Baltimore closed early, as did the Mondawmin Mall. The
Orioles postponed their home game against the Chicago White Sox. The
Baltimore police vowed the authorities would take “appropriate measures”
to keep officers and the neighborhood safe.
“You’re
going to see tear gas. You’re going to see pepper balls. We’re going to
use appropriate methods to make sure we can preserve the safety of that
community,” a spokesman, Capt. J. Eric Kowalczyk, said at a news
conference. Fifteen police officers were injured, some with broken
bones, and one was unresponsive, according to the department.
Pastor
Jamal Bryant, who delivered Mr. Gray’s eulogy, came back to the
neighborhood after the burial on Monday afternoon to appeal for calm. He
said he would send teams of men from his church, the Empowerment
Temple, to help keep the peace.
“This
is not what the family asked for, today of all days,” Mr. Bryant said.
“For us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely
inexcusable.” He said he was “asking every young person to go back
home,” adding, “it’s frustration, anger and it’s disrespect for the
family.”
Mr.
Gray’s death on April 19, a week after sustaining a spinal cord injury
while in police custody, has opened a deep wound in this majority-black
city, where Ms. Rawlings-Blake and Mr. Batts — both of whom are black —
have struggled to reform a police department that has a history of
aggressive, sometimes brutal, treatment of black men.
Mr.
Gray was chased and restrained by police on bicycles at the Gilmor
Homes on the morning of April 12; a cellphone video of his arrest showed
him being dragged into a police van, seemingly limp and screaming in
pain. The police have acknowledged that he should have received medical
treatment immediately at the scene of the arrest and have also said that
he rode in the van unbuckled.
After
his arrival at the police station, medics rushed him to the hospital,
where he slipped into a coma and died . His family has said that 80
percent of his spinal cord was severed, and his larynx was crushed. The
death spawned a week of protests that had been largely peaceful until
Saturday night, when demonstrators — who had spent the afternoon
marching through the city — scuffled with officers in riot gear outside
Camden Yards, the baseball park. Authorities attributed the scattered
violence that night to outsiders who, Ms. Rawlings-Blake said, “were
inciting,” with “ ‘go out there and shut this city down’ kind of
messaging.”
But
the violence on Monday was much more devastating and profound, a blow
for a city whose leaders had been hoping Mr. Gray’s funeral would show
the nation its more peaceful side. At the New Shiloh Baptist Church, Mr.
Gray lay in an open white coffin, in a white shirt and tie, with a
pillow bearing a picture of him in a red T-shirt, against a backdrop of a
blue sky and doves, with the message “Peace y’all.”
The
service was more than a celebration of Mr. Gray’s short life; it was a
call for peace and justice — and for residents of Baltimore to help lead
the nationwide movement for better police treatment of black men that
emerged last August after the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown in
Ferguson.
“The
eyes of this country are all on us, because they want to see whether we
have the stuff to make this right,” said William Murphy, the lawyer
representing the Gray family, who is a fixture in legal and political
circles here. “They want to know whether our leadership is up to the
task.”
Much
of that leadership was seated in the pews, including Ms. Rawlings-Blake
and Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, who was
one of the speakers.
Also
among the mourners were Kweisi Mfume, a former congressman and chief of
the N.A.A.C.P.; three aides to President Obama; and several family
members of others killed by the police in various parts of the country,
including Erica Garner, daughter of Eric Garner, a man who died after a
police officer put him in a chokehold last year on Staten Island. She
said she had come “to stand with the family of Freddie Gray. It’s
unfortunate, but I feel we have a connection.” In his eulogy, Mr. Bryant
spoke of the plight of poor, young black men like Mr. Gray, living
“confined to a box” made up of poor education, lack of job opportunities
and racial stereotypes — “the box of thinking all black men are thugs
and athletes and rappers.”
“He
had to have been asking himself, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ ”
Mr. Bryant said. “He had to feel at age 25 like the walls were closing
in on him.”
Mr.
Bryant insisted that Mr. Gray’s death would not “be in vain.” He vowed
that Baltimore residents would “keep demanding justice” but also issued a
pointed rebuke to the congregation, telling members that black people
must take control of their lives and force the government and police to
change.
“This
is not the time for us as a people to be sitting on the corner drinking
malt liquor,” he roared, as his voice rose and the congregation,
clapping, rose to its feet. “This is not the time for us to be playing
the lottery or at the horsing casino, this is not the time for us to be
walking down with our pants hanging down.”
He
said, “Get your black self up and change this city!” and added, “I
don’t know how you can be black in America and be silent. With
everything we’ve been through, ain’t no way in the world you can sit
here and be silent in the face of injustice.”
But
as the day went on, the mood changed. The violence appears to have
begun inside the Mondawmin Mall. Erica Ellis, 23, who works in a Game
Stop store there, said the mall was shut down at 2 p.m., not long after
Mr. Gray’s funeral cortege left for his burial.
She
said she went outside and saw a big line of police officers and
hundreds of young people who started throwing rocks and bricks. But
police did not respond immediately, she said. “The police officers were
trying as hard as they can not to hurt the people’s children,” she said.
At
the corner of North Fulton and West North Avenues, looters could be
seen breaking into stores and walking out with cases of food and water
while hundreds of police officers in riot gear gathered about four
blocks away.
When
a pair of police cruisers tried to enter the area, young men threw
bottles. Several of the men wore surgical masks. Some carried baseball
bats, others carried pipes. While several people held signs that said
“Stop the war,” protesting peacefully, the rising chaos surrounded them:
a broken-down BMW sat empty in the middle of the street, shards of
glass from convenience store windows lay on the pavement and a young man
carrying bolt cutters walked by.
Residents
looked on aghast. Not far from the Gilmor Homes, the public housing
development where Mr. Gray was first arrested, Chris Malloy, who lives
in the area, said he was angry at the police and the looters — all at
once.
“All
they had to do was march, but they did this,” he said, sounding
disgusted, as the CVS store burned nearby. “You can take stuff out of
the store, but why do you have to burn it down?”
Ron Nixon, Richard A. Oppel Jr. and Stephen Babcock contributed reporting.
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