He was doing the most ordinary job in a democracy. A contractor for Baltimore’s Board of Elections had come to the drop box at 3801 Erdman Avenue in the middle of a Thursday to collect ballots — the early votes of strangers, gathered up on schedule, the way it’s supposed to work. It was a few minutes past noon. Then the shooting started, close enough that he was standing inside somebody else’s worst day, and there was nothing ordinary about the job anymore.
What happened on the 3900 block of Erdman Avenue, in the Belair-Edison neighborhood of East Baltimore near the Erdman Shopping Center, took seconds. Baltimore police say an officer working a crime suppression detail approached a man in the area around 12:16 PM. The man ran. As he ran, police say, he turned and pointed a weapon at the officer — and the officer fired.
When it was over, the man was down with gunshot wounds and a semiautomatic handgun was recovered at the scene. He was rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Police have not released his name, and as of Thursday evening they had not said whether he fired his weapon during the encounter. The officer was not injured.
So tonight there are two stories running out of one short block. In one, an unnamed man is fighting for his life in a Baltimore hospital, and somewhere there is a family that has either gotten the worst phone call there is or is still waiting for it. In the other, investigators closed the 3800 and 3900 blocks of Erdman Avenue and started the long, careful work that follows every police shooting — the scene work, the statements, the questions the department will be expected to answer in the days ahead, including the ones it couldn’t answer today.
And the ballots made it. Elections Director Clifford Tatum said the contractor who had been retrieving them was not injured, and every ballot in his possession was recovered and is secure. It’s a small detail, but it isn’t a nothing detail. Early voting in Maryland opened this week, and the drop box on Erdman Avenue is where a neighborhood puts a piece of its future in an envelope and trusts the system to carry it the rest of the way. On Thursday, that system had a man standing at the box when gunfire broke out a short distance away — and the votes still got where they were going, because he finished the job he came to do.
What isn’t known yet is nearly everything else. Police have not said what brought the officer to that man in the first place, beyond the suppression detail he was working. They have not named the man who was shot, described his condition beyond critical, or said when more will be released. Those answers will come, or the asking for them will get louder. Either way, we’ll be watching, and when Baltimore police release more, this story will be updated.
If you were in the area of the 3900 block of Erdman Avenue around midday Thursday and saw what happened, Baltimore police detectives would want to hear from you.
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