On New Year’s Day, Adam Marton, director of interactive design at The Baltimore Sun, published a heartbreaking infographic. It showed that of the record 344 people murdered in Baltimore last year, 93 percent were black, and most of them were young men.
Journalists regularly traffic in such grim statistics, and we can sometimes become a little numb to what they represent: dead human beings and their lives reduced to plot points on this graph or that chart.
But for Marton, the long list of last year’s homicides contained a name that he knew personally: Thelonius Monk. Monk, 28, was gunned down in West Baltimore in August, and his death marked the city’s 212th homicide of 2015.
On Tuesday, Marton wrote a poignant Facebook post about how his and Monk’s lives crossed, “however oddly and briefly,” and how their story demonstrates theawful chasm between white Baltimore and black Baltimore, and between white America and black America.
“Thelonius,” he wrote, “probably never had a chance.”
Thelonius Monk, 28, was one of Baltimore’s 344 homicide victims in 2015. Thelonius stole my car about a decade ago and…
Posted by Adam Marton on Tuesday, January 5, 2016