In the late 1980s, Three Garden Village was a low income apartment complex in the Dundalk Community, occupying the Bear Creek Peninsula of Southeastern Baltimore County. The area was served by the #10 and #20 bus lines which brought the crack epidemic out of black West Baltimore into majority white Dundalk. This apartment complex was a normal garden apartment community, and was in no way as bad as The Village of Tall Trees out in Essex—which was thankfully bulldozed about ten years ago, and where Columbine Joe would, in the late 1990s, literally make his name.

At this time our subject was merely called Robby, with stoner fame and misfortune still in his grungy future. He was a 14-year-old kid that went to school and boxed out of Eddie Saberhoff’s South Baltimore gym under the tutelage of an ancient Italian. The haze of the drug and alcohol scene was two years in his future.

Find the site of this story on the map in the upper right hand corner of the apartment listing via the link below.

“I was fourteen—fifteen, living with my mother, a very streetwise person. I would say it was mid-summer as night fell, at twilight when I heard a ‘blam’ sound. It wasn’t a ‘pop’ or a ‘bang,’ but a ‘blam.’ So I looked out the window.

“We lived on the second story. So I’m looking down out of my window, and I see this black dude limping around the corner from the front of the building. We didn’t have alleys. It was grass lots. We’re on the long back side of the building and this guy is limping with what would be his right shoulder turning the corner. I’m looking down to the left.

“He takes a few step, limping along, obviously just having been shot.”

[Joe pantomime’s a man with downcast head holding his right leg with his right hand and hobbling along.]

“He was in his early twenties, I would say. He didn’t have a face long enough for me to remember what it looked like.”

“Around the corner behind him, turning it tight, sporting a knee length trench coat—wearing a ball cap, definitely a ball cap—came this white guy. I would have to say he was in his early thirties. He was cool, no noise, no anger, no rage, just taking care of business. I intentionally erased the memory of his face from my mind after I saw what I saw. My mother told me that living in a place like this, you only survived if you didn’t see anything, and, most importantly, appeared to be a person who did not see anything.”

[Joe pantomime’s the white man’s actions as being left-handed. When I questioned him as to whether or not he was just doing that because he was left-handed, he stopped, reconstructed the scene, and said that the men had both definitely turned right and that the white man only used his left hand.]

“Yes, come to think of it—wow—totally left-handed, and one-handed. It must have been a sawed off, because he pulled it out from under his trench with his left hand, barrel up, hand on pump, and chambered a round, then slid his hand back along the stock, extended his arm, and blew off the right side of the dude’s head.”

“It was a bloody mess. All I saw was a red plume blowing forward from the neck up, literally taking off half the head and face. The entire left side of the face and head was gone”

“I did not even wait to see the body fall—did not want that dude to see that I saw. Instinctively, I ducked down as my mother came running. She said, ‘Did you hear that?’

“I responded, ‘I saw that!’ and she said, ‘No you didn’t. You didn’t see a thing.’

“In a place like that, that’s the way it’s got to be. You put a finger on someone, and you die—that simple. I learned that lesson young. I wiped my memory of as much detail as I could, did not even want to be able to identify the guy.”

“Actually, I never considered it before now, before walking through it, but the guy was too cool, too calculated, and too smooth, to have been a vested party to whatever was being settled. When that drug dealer shot the dude on the porch next to me at The Village of Tall Trees he brought witnesses, wanted people to see what happened when you didn’t honor your debts. But this guy, this dude—somebody sent him.”

As this spontaneous reconstruction illustrates, when a third party, who has done thousands of interviews, walks you through a scene, you are able to recall a couple of details that will not come up in the course of simply “telling the story.”

This is one of the few types of violence—the lethal shooting—that law enforcement seems interested in accurately assessing. However, closure rates on Baltimore City homicides from the time of Joe’s story until now, have consistently been less than 50%, largely due to the reign of terror, the “no snitching” ethos that our justice system seems highly vulnerable to, and was starkly illustrated in this case.