“We haven’t seen these homicide since the early ’90s with the crack cocaine epidemic,” said Saleh Awadallah, the assistant prosecutor who runs the Cuyahoga County Major Trial Homicide Unit in Cleveland. Most experts attribute the rise in homicides to Americans arming themselves in wake of the coronavirus pandemic and social justice protests. They’re 37% of gun homicide victims but only 2% of the population, according to federal data analyzed by the Educational Fund to Stop Gun Violence and the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence. The problem is particularly acute among Black men between the ages of 15 and 34. The carnage is continuing, with the Council on Criminal Justice estimating the numbers have increased an additional 16% in the first half of 2021.įifty-three percent of gun violence homicide victims in 2019 were Black men, even though they only make up about 7% of the U.S. Homicides increased in the United States by nearly 30% from 2019 to 2020, to 21,570, according to FBI figures. The numbers aren’t lying: There is a homicide crisis in America, and like most unfavorable trends, it’s hitting Black people the hardest. And all these factors contribute to this country’s pandemic of violence. But Eric’s decline and the decline of my hometown are part of a wider system that deprives Black communities of adequate finances, indulges corrupt police and treats drug addiction as a crime rather than an illness.
Some might say that Eric’s demise started when he decided to take his first hit of crack cocaine in his 20s. The city is on pace for its most homicides in 30 years. Now, he is a statistic on a crime analyst’s spreadsheet: Gun-fatality victim No. But it appears that diagnosis was long overdue and his illness may have been a trigger for many of his previous issues with substance abuse and the law. Earlier this year, a court-ordered psychological evaluation determined he suffered from mental illness. (The medical examiner found that he had cocaine, PCP and painkillers in his system at the time of his death.) He’d spent more than half of his adulthood cycling in and out of Ohio’s prisons. Eric took a few steps, collapsed and died, according to a 911 caller and Cleveland police.Įric hadn’t been living an easy life. Reportedly, Eric turned to say how cowardly it was to shoot him when he wasn’t looking and pulled out his own gun and the two men exchanged shots. “This dude shot him in the back,” a relative told me on a phone call. The corner of East 125th Street and Superior Avenue where Eric Smith was shot and killed on June 26 in Cleveland. This summer, shortly before my annual trip home for the Fourth of July, I learned that Eric had died in a shooting at a notoriously violent street corner less than a half-mile from where we grew up. As we grew up, I attended college, got married, had kids and, as the years went by, would only occasionally see my friends from the old neighborhood. Grandma used to send me to their house to “borrow” a cup of sugar or flour or a few eggs. Deon and Eric, and the rest of the immediate family, lived with their grandparents on Brightwood off and on. Eric was big for his age and had no problem running with us older boys. We used to call Deon “Cat Eyes” because his eyes were hazel, an unusual thing for a Black kid. Deon was a year younger than me and Eric was two years behind his brother. I was just happy that Deon and Eric, two of my best friends, didn’t go anywhere. At the time, I didn’t know what had happened, but our street was suddenly all Black. Then, seemingly all at once, the white folks up and left. My family was the third Black household on Brightwood Avenue, a street with 48 well-built residential homes. They were my neighbors in East Cleveland, Ohio. When I was a kid in the late 1960s, I had a bunch of white friends.
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