After Baltimore police shot a 70-year-old, residents look for answers

BALTIMORE — A day after a police officer shot a 70-year-old woman they said was wielding a knife, confusion and concern surrounded the West Baltimore neighborhood where she lived and died in relative anonymity.

Residents living on the same 2700 block of Mosher Street described their neighborhood as close-knit, though none who spoke with The Baltimore Sun could say much about the woman, whom police reported visiting multiple times this year. Others said they were troubled and confused by how the woman’s last encounter with police ended.

“No one knows her,” said resident Veronica Suit. “It’s very creepy.”

Baltimore Police said they responded to the Mosher neighborhood Wednesday afternoon after getting a report that a woman might be having a mental health crisis.

Commissioner Richard Worley told reporters that officers tried to take the woman into custody and bring her to a hospital for treatment. The department had received 26 calls sending them to her home “for a multitude of different things” since the beginning of the year, according to a BPD spokesperson.

When police entered the house, they saw the woman holding a knife and ordered her to drop it, Worley said. She ignored the command, the commissioner said, before lunging at the officers.

Police first tried using a Taser to stop her, Worley said, but it didn’t work. When she kept moving toward them, specifically an officer who’d fallen over a chair, another officer shot her, police said.

Authorities did not know how many shots were fired on Wednesday, according to the commissioner. It was the second fatal police shooting in the city in about a week.

“I’m really upset about it,” said Bernice Clemons, who has lived on the block since 1985. “We are living in a terrible world.”

Few details about the woman were available Thursday. The Maryland Attorney General’s Independent Investigations Division, which investigates civilian deaths involving police, will usually release a decedent’s name sometime during their inquiry.

While they went to Mosher Street on Wednesday, as of Thursday afternoon, the IID has not released any information about the case. A spokesperson did not respond to a request for comment by deadline.

Similarly, no information has been made public about the 911 calls regarding the woman this year. Veronica Suit and her mother, Lisa, told The Baltimore Sun they had seen police respond to the woman’s home at least a dozen times before. But it was not clear whether those calls for service centered around her mental health or, if they did, whether treatment was provided.

The Baltimore Police Department did not answer several questions Thursday about their past responses to Mosher Street. They also would not say whether the department’s Crisis Intervention Team, a unit specializing in deescalation and behavioral health, was dispatched to the neighborhood Wednesday or earlier.

Some Mosher residents wondered what had been done to help the woman before Wednesday’s shooting.

Janet Bailey, president of the LaBurt Improvement Community Association, was distributing flyers Thursday letting people know about mental health resources in the area, some only a few blocks away. She said when she learned the woman killed was 70 years old, she cried.

“Did the police just come by themselves, or did they bring help with them?” she asked, knowing they had been in the neighborhood several times before. “And if they didn’t bring help, based on the reports I’ve heard, they knew this person was having (a) behavior crisis.”

Many Maryland police departments have incorporated mental health awareness and training for new recruits, as well as veterans. Some have also formed their own crisis teams. Anne Arundel County’s, for instance, has been called the best “on the planet” by Crisis Intervention Team International.

In 2016, the Department of Justice found that Baltimore Police officers “routinely (used) unreasonable force” against citizens with mental health disabilities, citing frequent failures to deescalate situations and a pattern of arrests over treatment.

The Consent Decree that followed issued several requirements related to crisis intervention. According to a 2024 compliance review, the Baltimore Police have made “commendable progress” in developing programs, policies, and training for their personnel.

That progress, the report states, has “achieved an important shift in Departmental culture” around behavioral health. Officers resolved “the vast majority” of matters without the use of force and “with due care to the rights” of citizens. Meanwhile, police leaders had engaged community providers to divert some calls to mental health teams or counselors, according to the review.

The monitors, however, noted a key difference between having training available and making sure it is completed. When the report was released last year, fewer than 10% of Baltimore Police officers were CIT-certified, less than one-third of the DOJ’s requirements. It’s something the city’s department is still working on, according to its website.

In addition to not knowing whether the city’s Crisis Intervention Team responded to Mosher Street on Wednesday, it is not clear whether the officers at the scene were CIT-certified. The Baltimore City Fraternal Order of Police did not respond to a request for comment.

“They’re not utilizing the resources they have,” Bailey said,” (so) we have to utilize the resources that we have right here within this community.”

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(Baltimore Sun reporters Racquel Bazos and Mathew Schumer contributed to this report.)

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