B6 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.FRIDAY, MAY 27 , 2022
BY PETER HERMANNA 16-year-old was fatally shot
Thursday morning inside an
apartment building in the Ship-
ley neighborhood of Southeast
Washington, D.C. police said.
Police did not identify the
victim, pending notification of
his relatives.
The shooting occurred about
11:30 a.m. in the 2200 block of
Savannah Terrace SE. A police
spokeswoman said officers re-
sponding to calls for sounds of
gunshots found the youth in a
hallway. He was pronounced
dead at the scene.
The apartments are located
near Suitland Parkway and Ala-
bama Avenue, near the border
with Maryland. Police did not
describe a possible motive.
“It appears the individual wastargeted,” said Cmdr. Leslie Par-
sons, head of the D.C. police
criminal investigation bureau.
Homicides in the District are
up about 8 percent this year. The
teen killed Thursday is the
fourth person under 18 slain
since January. Two 16-year-olds
were fatally shot in February
and in March, and a 16-year-old
was killed in April. A dozen
youths were killed last year, 11 in2020, and 14 in 2019.
Gun violence has helped put
crime at the top of residents’
concerns and political priori-
ties. A Washington Post poll
released in February found that
36 percent of respondents cited
crime, violence or guns as the
city’s top problem. That was
twice as many as in a 2019 Post
poll.
Recently, an independent D.C.agency released a report outlin-
ing a gun violence reduction
strategy for the city, hoping the
recommendations would de-
crease violent crime in the near-
term and begin alleviating the
socioeconomic factors that give
rise to violence in D.C. over time.
Hours after the youth was
shot in Southeast Washington,
D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)
made an appearance in theShaw neighborhood in North-
west to announce arrests of
suspected members of a drug
gang.
Noting that case and the
killing of the youth on the other
side of the city, Bowser said:
“People are tired of gun vio-
lence. We’re tired of mass shoot-
ings, and in a city like ours,
we’re tired of neighborhood vio-
lence.”THE DISTRICT
Teen fatally shot in Southeast, fourth under 18 slain in D.C. since January
BY PETER HERMANNA nearly year-long investiga-
tion focused on the District’s
Shaw neighborhood ended this
week with more than 20 arrests
and the seizures of cocaine, fenta-
nyl and 11 firearms, according to
law enforcement authorities.
Federal prosecutors said 13 of
the people targeted in the North-
west Washington neighborhood
— between the ages of 29 and 54
— were indicted on drug con-
spiracy charges in U.S. District
Court. Ten were arrested
Wednesday, two were in jail on
other charges and one is being
sought.
Police said nine other people
were arrested during operations
on Wednesday and Thursday,
most on gun and drug charges.
Six of the guns were taken off the
streets on Wednesday.
“We’re talking about violent
offenders who no longer will be
targeting this neighborhood with
unnecessary and tragic violence,”
D.C. police Inspector Lashay
Makal, who heads the violent
crime suppression division, said
at a news conference on Thurs-
day in Shaw.Authorities said the crew was
centered at 7 th and O streets NW,
near the Kennedy Recreation
Center, although they alleged
drug sales and violence spread
outward into Truxton Circle and
LeDroit Park.
Police said the investigation
was dubbed “Uptown Express.”
The authorities did not discuss
specific instances of violence.
Court documents filed in U.S.
District Court in D.C. on Thurs-
day also did not provide many
details. Search warrants were
served at more than 20 locations
in D.C. and in Maryland.Crews based at 7th and O
streets have been around for
years, with beefs stretching back
to the deadly crack cocaine era in
the late 1980s and early 1990s
that made the District the na-
tion’s murder capital.
Violence has eased over the
years as the neighborhood gen-
trified, although shootings,
sometimes deadly, have persist-
ed.
Wayne A. Jacobs, the special
agent in charge of the criminal
and cyber division of the FBI’s
Washington Field Office, said
“continued violence and fataloverdoses” from fentanyl and
other drugs put this suspected
crew on law enforcement’s radar.
He said that members showed
“disregard for their community
and for human life.” With the
arrests, Jacobs said, “Our city is a
little bit safer today.”
Authorities said they do not
believe the fentanyl allegedly
sold by this crew is connected to
overdoses from fentanyl batches
that earlier this year killed nine
people in Southwest D.C. and
killed 10 people in Northeast.
But police said they would test
the drugs seized in Shaw andcompare them with drugs in
those other fatal incidents. Fen-
tanyl is a particularly lethal syn-
thetic opioid that is up to 50
times more powerful than hero-
in.
Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D)
joined authorities at the news
conference and described resi-
dents of the area as “rightfully
frustrated and angry by the vio-
lence here.”
She added, “It is time for the
rest of the justice system to en-
sure those who bring harm to our
communities be held account-
able.”THE DISTRICT
22 people arrested in drug sting in Shaw; fentanyl, cocaine and guns seized
BY LAUREN LUMPKINOne of the country’s largest
biomedical research institutions
has pledged $1.5 billion to sup-
port scientists of color in univer-
sity laboratories, an effort heavily
influenced by the work of outgo-
ing University of Maryland Balti-
more County (UMBC) President
Freeman A. Hrabowski III, offi-
cials announced Thursday.
The Howard Hughes Medical
Institute (HHMI) will sponsor up
to 150 early-career scientists —
with a focus on scholars from
underrepresented racial and eth-
nic backgrounds — over the next
decade and cover their salaries, a
research budget, equipment and
other costs, the organization said
in a statement. The support could
total up to $8.6 million for each
scholar, the institute said.
Hrabowski, who is retiring
from UMBC at the end of July,
said he was moved by the insti-
tute’s decision to name the pro-
gram after him.
“This will help us diversify the
workforce, the professoriate, and
that is such a major challenge in
America right now,” he said in an
interview.
Hrabowski rose to national
prominence as he transformed
UMBC, a small public school out-
side Baltimore, into a leading
producer of engineers and scien-
tists of color. The university’s
banner Meyerhoff Scholars Pro-
gram has been the training
ground for Black scientists in-
cluding former U.S. surgeon gen-
eral Jerome Adams and Kizzme-
kia Corbett, the immunologist
who led the team that developed
the Moderna coronavirus vaccine
at the National Institutes of
Health.
Throughout Hrabowski’s 30-
year tenure, university leaders
across the country have pressed
him for the secret to building a
university at which students of
color — traditionally underrepre-
sented in science, math, technol-
ogy and engineering fields —
excel. He has also been criticized,he said, by people who have said
the Meyerhoff program only
works because Hrabowski is
Black.
In reality, he said, it takes a
committed leader who is willing
to invest in professors of color to
replicate UMBC’s success.
Leslie B. Vosshall, HHMI’s vice
president and chief scientific offi-
cer, offered a similar analysis.“The problem is that people are
isolated, they’re under-re-
sourced,” she said. “Unfortunate-
ly, it’s about a systemic problem.”
The Freeman Hrabowski
Scholars Program will attempt to
offer a solution by providing long-
term resources to biomedical re-
searchers, Vosshall said. With the
new funding — two to three times
what a starting assistant profes-sor typically has access to, accord-
ing to Vosshall — the goal is that
these scientists will have more
time to build their labs, work with
students and conduct research.
She also hopes faculty can evade
the “minority tax” — extra duties
typically assigned to professors of
color, such as sitting on diversity
committees or running equity
programs, that could take themaway from their research.
“They’re distracted because
they’re the one person in the
department that can be sort of a
beacon of diversity. A lot of their
time is taken away,” Vosshall said.
She added that Freeman
Hrabowski scholars would be ex-
pected to spend 80 percent of
their time directing their labs and
performing research, a stipula-
tion that “gives them to power to
say no” to other demands for their
time.
While private organizations
such as HHMI can help campuses
become more inclusive, Vosshall
said it is important that univer-
sities follow through on their own
promises to increase diversity
and achieve equity. “We want
them to have some sort of longer-
term plan for how they’re going to
take the principles of our pro-
gram and apply it to everything
that they do,” she said.
Hrawbowski said the rollout of
the program is timely. Exaggerat-
ed by the pandemic, the public’s
trust in science and medicine is
waning. The share of Americans
who said they do not have much
or any confidence in medical sci-
entists grew from 14 to 22 percent
between November 2020 and De-
cember 2021, according to survey
data from the Pew Research Cen-
ter.
“We need the public to trust
science and medicine, and they
will only trust us if we can see
more people from more back-
grounds as experts,” Hrabowski
said. “Often when we talk about
diversity, it comes across as some-
thing we ought to do because it’s
the right thing.... This is about
the future of humankind.”MARYLAND
Institute pledges $1.5 billion to support scientists of color
MARVIN JOSEPH/THE WASHINGTON POST
The scholars program is named after outgoing University of Maryland Baltimore County President Freeman A. Hrabowski III.leaders began documenting how
the institution benefited from
slavery.
The leaders also studied how
the church continued to benefit
from systems that oppressed or
marginalized Black people even
after slavery was abolished.
“That did not sit well with us,”
Sutton said during his introduc-
tory remarks at Thursday’s
awards ceremony. Rather thanthe church “falling behind,” the
bishop said there was a collective
sentiment to “take the lead.”
“Let’s put our money where our
mouth is,” he said.
The Episcopal Diocese of Mary-
land voted at its general conven-
tion in 2019 to study the subject of
reparations, which included a
finding that most, if not all, of its
churches built before 1860 in-
cluded labor or materials craftedBY KATIE METTLERNearly two years after it estab-
lished a fund to make reparations
for systemic racism and slavery,
the Maryland Episcopal Church
awarded $180,000 in grant mon-
ey Thursday to its inaugural class
of organizations doing the work
of “restoring African American
and Black communities.”
The six organizations, awarded
$30,000 each, include nonprofits,
church-affiliated initiatives and
youth centers committed to pro-
viding economic, education,
housing, and environmental and
health-care resources to Black
children and families.
The grant winners included
the Samaritan Community, St.
Luke’s Youth Center (SLYC) and
Next One Up, based in Baltimore
City; Calvert Concept Charitable
Corp., a start-up in Calvert Coun-
ty; I Believe In Me in Frederick;
and Anne Arundel Connecting
Together in Anne Arundel Coun-
ty.
Bishop Eugene Taylor Sutton,
the first Black bishop in the Mary-
land diocese, said the Episcopal
Church’s racial justice and repar-
ative work in the state started
more than 15 years ago, when
by enslaved people.
A year later, the reparations
fund was established at its annual
convention with $1 million in
seed money, which was to be
invested back in Maryland com-
munities hindered by slavery’s
legacy and ongoing systemic rac-
ism. The fund now exceeds $1
million because of additional con-
tributions in the two years since
its founding.
“Many people in the United
States wonder, why reparations? I
did not own slaves, and maybe my
family didn’t own slaves, and I
love everyone,” Sutton said at the
award ceremony. “Today is part of
that answer.”
“The legacy of 350-plus years of
discrimination against persons of
African descent have taken a toll
on this nation. And it has affected
all of us,” the bishop continued.
“None of us may have been guilty,
but all of us have a responsibility.
Today is an indication of the re-
sponsibility we are taking.”
The Diocese of Maryland creat-
ed a Reparations Task Force to
build out the grant program and
choose the first class of awardees.
The process was open to any
organization operating within
the geographical region of theDiocese of Maryland — which
includes the central, western and
southern parts of the state. The
Maryland suburbs of D.C. were
not eligible because they are part
of the Episcopal Diocese of Wash-
ington.
Representatives from Calvert
Concept said the investment from
the diocese felt like an “expres-
sion of confidence” in their start-
up idea to help build generational
wealth for Black families through
home and business ownership.
Shel Simon, deputy CEO of
Next One Up in Baltimore, echoed
that sentiment, thanking the
church for backing the work his
group is doing with young men in
the city.
“When I think of the painful
history of our country and how
often it’s ignored or swept under
the rug, it has to be recognized for
us to move forward as a commu-
nity,” he said.
St. Luke’s Youth Center, a col-
laborative of West Baltimore fam-
ilies, plans to use its grant money
to hire an arts and public educa-
tion coordinator.
“We will be using the funds to
help continue to give voice to the
people who have been silenced
and not given voice,” said Aman-da Talbot, SLYC executive direc-
tor. “That’s really important to us.
Our families and parents have a
lot to say.”
Aje Hill, the founder and exec-
utive director of I Believe in Me,
accepted his organization’s grant
money with a speech about the
importance of believing. He
served eight years in prison for
crimes he committed as a “men-
ace to society,” he said, before
getting out and realizing he had
the power to give back and make
amends in Frederick, where he
grew up.
“I know what it’s like to be
hurting. I know what it’s like to be
sad. I know what it’s like to be
broken,” Hill said. “We aim to
prevent kids from going into that
darkness.”
The grant money, he said, will
go toward building out after-
school programming that pro-
vides mentorship, academic tu-
toring and life skill development.
He said he made the trip to the
ceremony from Frederick because
he wanted to see the faces of the
people who chose his organiza-
tion for the reparative grant.
“It’s the people that believe in
us,” Hill said. “Thank you so much
for believing in us.”MARYLAND
Episcopal Church awards reparations to groups ‘restoring’ Black communities
ALGERINA PERNA/BALTIMORE SUN
Eugene Taylor Sutton is the Maryland diocese’s first Black bishop.