The block in East Baltimore where Ashley Long was shot and killed in 2017 is desolate, even by the standards of the surrounding neighborhood. On a Saturday afternoon last spring, a cop in a parked police cruiser surveilled vacant brick row houses and an empty lot where abandoned buildings were demolished a few years back.
“Ghost town,” said Alex Long, Ashley’s older brother and a longtime violence interrupter who lives a few blocks away and is at ease almost anywhere else in the city. “You go over there at your own risk.”
In the seven years since Ashley’s death, there have been 15 more shootings and three people killed on the 700 block of North Rose Street, according to the police. That makes it one of the most dangerous spots in Baltimore. Locals know this neighborhood — bordering Madison-East End and McElderry Park — as “down the hill.” It’s only a half mile from the high-tech facilities of the Johns Hopkins University Hospital, but in 2017, the most recent year for which data is available, life expectancy here was 69 — a decade lower than the national average…