By Julia Boyle
THE ERICKSON TRIBUNE
It’s just another weekday afternoon and like many before, Kristin Taylor drives her student “home.” They weave in and out of row house-lined streets, stopping here and there in an attempt to find someone he knows—a friend, a relative. She doesn’t know. She’s just trying to help.
Tonight, the bubbly young teacher from Booker T. Washington Middle School will cry herself to sleep for him, for fear that he will fall into his family’s footsteps. For fear that he won’t come to class tomorrow.
Trying to understand
Her student, D.C., who we met last month at NorthBay, does not officially belong to a gang. He carries himself as an affiliated, not official, member of the Bloods. The Los Angeles-born gang arrived in Baltimore along with its rival, the Crips, around 2000.
She says the 15-year-old sixth grader missed two years of school because his parents simply didn’t send him. “Yet he reads at a ninth grade level. He is intuitive and sets goals for himself. I can see that he wants out; he just doesn’t have the means of getting there.”
Most of his family members belong to the Bloods. To him, gangs are part of life. “I don’t see no other way,” he says. “I’m not saying it’s good to be in a gang, but if somebody breaks into your house or beats you up, [gang members] can help you get out of that situation.”
Protection or brutality?
He tells an account of opposing gang members beating him almost to death for the new clothes on his back before the Bloods saved him. “They could have killed me,” he says. While he references protection, he also says gangs use extreme violence to “help you out,” resorting to fighting, stabbing, shooting, torturing, and even burning their enemies. He lists five friends who died by torture and whose lifeless bodies were burned by opposing gang members.