FEATURE STORIES
Out of the Crossfire -
Saving One Life at a Time continued
But the fast money lifestyle brings with it some real problems.
Baker lived in fear. After the first time he was shot he started having trouble sleeping at night even though he had moved away from the neighborhood at that time. He was “paranoid” that someone was going to notice his car he said. He worried that someone would break into his home. After the first time he got shot, he got a gun. He said that he thought, “Okay, this is how they want to play it. They want to rob you; you got to be able to protect yourself.”
After he moved back to his old neighborhood Baker started to get nervous so he moved out of Bond Hill and to Clifton. “I wanted to get away from my neighborhood. Even guys in the neighborhood—you can’t trust them,” he said. Baker was still working at the time and was gone eight or nine hours a day. He said, “Even guys you grew up with, they’ll take the opportunity to get some money if they figure you got a $100,000 in your house and you aren’t there.” Baker said he was worried about somebody breaking in and trying to kill him.
The drug dealers with their vast incomes breed a second group Baker referred to as the robbery boys. “That’s where all the shooting and stuff is going on,” he said. “Cincinnati is robbery boys and drug dealers. The robbery guys are coming after the drug dealers.”
Baker knows this from personal experience.
A near-miss robbery changed his life. Baker had his 2-1/2- year-old son over to his Clifton apartment one night. His buddies had called earlier to try to get him to go out but he told them that he didn’t feel like it. He and his son were lying on the living room floor watching the Chicago Bulls when his son started crying. “I knew it had to be a blessing from God; he’s never crying. He wanted his grandma,” Baker said. Baker had let his brother borrow his car so he called to get him to take them over to the grandma’s house. His brother didn’t answer, but called Baker back about 10:00 and then came to pick him and Baker’s young son up. They left the house about 10:30.
After dropping off his son, Baker decided to meet his buddies but wanted to go home first to change his clothes. When he pulled into his lot there were about 10 police cars there. He saw one of his own shoes and then a shirt and some other clothes and things strewn about the lot. When he got to his door, his frantic neighbor was telling the police that about 8 guys with ski masks on and “big old shot guns and Uzis” robbed the apartment. She said all she heard was “Kaboom” as they kicked the door in. They grabbed all of Baker’s expensive clothes and shoes.
Baker said, “I didn’t keep a lot of money at the house. I think they might have got about $15,000 or so, but to me that wasn’t a lot of money back then. That was like pocket money.” Baker estimates the robbers took about $50,000 to $75,000 worth of jewelry. “I was just so fortunate and so grateful to God that I wasn’t there,” Baker said. “I had a gun lying on the couch right where I laid it. I would have shot, they would have shot. I would have been dead.”
The robbers turned over the furniture. “They were looking for drugs,” Baker said. The clock that had been on the table was stopped at 10:40. Baker was surprised that the robbery boys came that early. He said, “Anything 2:00 or 3:00 in the morning is drug-related. That’s when the robbery boys come.” Baker figures the robbery boys scouted out his house, saw that his car was gone, and then came back with their buddies. He said that if he wouldn’t have left the apartment he would have been dead because the robbery boys don’t like a confrontation. “When they came in I’d have been there. That’s why I say it was a blessing that my brother called. It was a blessing that my son started crying. I missed these guys by 10 minutes.”
That was the final call for Baker. “My son could have been there,” he said. “You got to quit playing and get yourself together,” he told himself. Early that morning he went and got a big rental truck, packed up everything and moved. He took all of his stuff to storage and moved in with his grandma in Bond Hill. A relative was working at University Hospital so Baker put in an application. They called him a few days later. He said he "never looked back."
Street Credibility
Baker’s time in the streets and his experience with shootings make him invaluable to Crossfire. Williams said that Baker “still has a lot of street credibility and knows a lot of these guys from when he was out there, so he can get through to them sometimes in a way that I can’t and I get a warmer reception when I come through to talk about Out of the Crossfire.”
When Baker was young, there were older guys in the neighborhood who had credibility and who helped keep the younger guys in line. “Some of them might have been guys who just went to work and came home and just liked to sit in the park and drink a beer or something. But if they saw us doing something wrong they would literally just bust you up. They wouldn’t hit you to hurt you, but they would get you on the ground and punch you in your leg or arms. They’d say, ‘You’d better quit doing that,’” Baker said.
Things are different now. The older guys aren’t there anymore Baker said. He thinks that’s because when drugs came in people changed. He said, “You can’t go to a young guy now and punch him; you’re going to be killed. These young guys are, you know from the ages of 13 and on up, they are heartless and they carry guns.”
Baker thinks that one of the problems is that jail doesn’t hold the same threat it used to. “When I was a kid, you heard the word jail and you’d tremble,” he said. Now kids see so many of their buddies go to jail “and they’re in and out of jail,” he said. “You’ve got one mom trying to raise 3, 4, or 5 kids and she’s at work all day. And all of those young guys got time to themselves. And a lot of the ones are in the projects. You got drugs and cocaine all around you. Guns. It’s like you are caught up in your environment. It’s right there and you’re not raised to think it’s bad because you see people going in and out of jail. You see young boys carrying guns. Maybe you see this guy get in an altercation and the first thing he says, ‘I’m gonna shoot you. I’m gonna kill you.’ It becomes natural.
"For them to hear it is not out of the ordinary. If I heard that when I was a kid, I would have been afraid or worried, ‘This dude is gonna kill me over this?’ But now it’s so common, it’s like that’s what you’re supposed to do—they think they’re supposed to do—because they aren’t taught any other way.”
Gaining credibility isn’t easy because “a lot of the older guys who are doing the right thing aren’t really respected as much as an older guy who is doing the wrong thing,” Baker said. “You are more respected for selling drugs and having a lot of money and a lot of women than you are for going to college or getting an education or going to work everyday. That’s just the reality of the inner city.”
Baker volunteers with Out of the Crossfire because he wants to give back and he feels like it’s his calling. He said, “After all I’ve been through, I mean I can tell you the consequences of what you’re doing, the consequences of drugs, the consequences of hanging out in clubs, the consequences of hanging with your home boys and not working and messing around with all these women out here.” At one point Baker had a reputation for fighting and he had a lot of money, “so the thing that I can talk about they can relate to because, I mean, I got stripes,” he said.
The Reality of the Inner City
Williams said that as kids, a lot of the people that get caught up in this cycle of violence, don’t have the basic things they need. “I had a young man tell me, ‘I sell drugs because I don’t want to worry my mom. She doesn’t have enough to make ends meet. So that’s a way I can help myself so she at least doesn’t have to worry about me.’ And that’s not BS. That’s the people’s reality,” Williams said.
Williams tells the story of one of her clients she hadn’t heard from in a while. She finally was able to get a hold of him and said that “he described how he was trying to hold it all together.” His girlfriend had just had a baby. His mother and brother were arrested for domestic fighting. He had bailed his brother out and was trying to bail out his mother. Now the police were after him for some charge. They offered him a plea bargain where he could either do two years of probation with no jail time or six months in jail. He told her he wanted to do the six months in jail.
“I almost cried,” Williams said. He told her, “‘I could even go 18 months and they violate me, or I mess up and that wasted 18 months. At least I can do jail and then it’s over.’ That seemed logical to him. That makes sense to him,” Williams said. Williams asked him to come in to talk about it. She wanted to see if she could get a lawyer who could show him what other options he might have. She told him, “Let us try to help you.” She told him, “I care about you.” Williams said that she had tears in her eyes when she got off the phone. Many times her clients just don’t know what community resources are available to them, she said.
Life Skills
An important part of Out of the Crossfire is a weekly Life Skills meeting they hold at the hospital. Williams collaborates with Jobs Plus, a faith-based organization in Over the Rhine that helps provide job skill development and then job placement. During the Life Skills meetings, Williams said, they focus on the “Plus” or teaching people life skills. “I think of Out of the Crossfire overall as life-coaching,” she said. “In addition to how to get and keep a job, we emphasize things like values, morals, just good guidance for living. We cover topics like courage, and what it means to have integrity, or honesty or obedience, things we might take for granted ourselves because these are things we learned at our mother or dad’s knees, but many of our clients seem to have sometimes no concept. They missed it somewhere. Somebody never taught them or they didn’t have it to give,” Williams said.
Stopping the Violence
Although Williams said that Out of the Crossfire is one way to stop the violence because “it’s meeting people where they are to try to intervene,” both Baker and Williams believe ultimately you’ve got to get the clients while they’re young.
Baker thinks that mentoring children by the time they are in the fifth or sixth grade would help. “Start showing them positive black role models,” he said. Help them see that you don’t have to sell drugs to be successful. He tries to provide a role model himself. Baker goes back to the old neighborhood and tries to show them how he wears nice clothes to work and still drives a nice car. “I still have nice things and you can do it by working,” he says.
Williams thinks that intervention ideally “starts in utero,” making sure the mother has proper nutrition so “at least the baby has a fighting chance when he starts,” she said. Williams’ theory is that these children have what she calls “attachment deficit disorder.” That happens when children don’t get “the proper bonding in that critical stage because, for a lot of different reasons, mom doesn’t have it to give.” Williams explained that if a child isn’t engaged with a significant other then the child doesn’t learn to trust or love. They don’t have the needed skills to learn in school in a sociable way. “It’s like a bird trying to fly with one wing,” Williams said. “They’ve missed so much of that lap-time and that early connection, how are they going to connect with the larger world when they didn’t connect with that single significant other? We need to start as early as possible with intervention.
“We need to address the root causes. These people are not out there committing crimes, shooting and robbing and stuff, because it’s fun,” Williams said. “It’s because so many other avenues have been cut off to them, because our school systems are failing, because of disparities in health care which includes mental health and substance abuse.” She said people think, “I don’t have an education. I’m not qualified to work. I’ve got a criminal background. Nobody’s going to hire me anyway.” Williams said that Maslow’s basic hierarchy of needs says that we are wired to survive. “Basic shelter, food, everybody needs that and they’re going to get it, one way or the other.”
John Baker