Inside the blackened shell of a home at 1401 East Preston St. is one of saddest stories a city can tell. It begins with Angela Dawson, a neighborhood crusader and mother of six, taking a stand against drugs.
It ends with Dawson and her five youngest children burning to death in an engulfed bedroom and a young man from down the street in jail. For her work fighting crime and tipping off the police, Dawson, 36, and her family were killed Wednesday morning by a drug pusher who set their home on fire, the authorities said. Dawson’s husband narrowly escaped by jumping out a window. The Dawsons had been threatened many times, and two weeks ago a firebomb was tossed through their window.
Here, in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods of one of America’s most violent cities, people are used to sidewalk memorials marking where their sons and daughters fell. Drugs and guns have emptied many bedrooms. But nobody has ever seen almost an entire household, with five children, ages 8 to 14, wiped out at once.
Shock, grief, anger
Baltimore officials responded quickly, making an arrest, meeting with neighborhood residents and holding an emotional news conference. Meanwhile, a mountain of teddy bears rose up from the cracked concrete outside the Dawsons’ home. A charred smell stung the air. Even the toughest-looking characters in the neighborhood seemed moved, as young men with cornrows and gold teeth stuffed wads of cash into a water jug someone left outside the home and marked: “For the Dawson Family.”
As residents poured into the streets after the fire last week to gape at the smoking hole, shock turned to grief and then grief turned into anger. “Why y’all bothering us when you didn’t do nothing to protect a mama and her babies?” screamed Monique Tater, a neighbor, at the wall of police officers guarding the ruined home. “Where were you before?”
Many neighbors want to know why, if the police knew that the Dawsons were in danger, they had not done more to protect them. City officials say they tried. The police commissioner, Edward Norris, said the police and State’s Attorney Office had offered police protection for the Dawsons and help relocating, but they had refused. “They said they wouldn’t be driven out of the neighborhood by drug dealers,” Norris said. Police also said they had increased patrols of the neighborhood since a firebombing of the Dawson home on Oct. 3, an unsolved crime that was a clear harbinger of the devastating fire Wednesday.
“The outrage should not be frankly at the government,” Norris said. “This is so beyond the pale that it’s about time people got outraged and directed in the right direction, and that’s the people that have poisoned our city and our corners.”
Norris pointed to the swift arrest of Darrell Brooks, 21, who lived only a few houses from the Dawsons. Brooks, who police said had had “many run-ins with the law,” was charged Thursday afternoon with six counts of first-degree murder and six counts of arson. Neighbors said he was friends with a drug dealer whom Dawson testified against earlier this month.
Residents in the neighborhood have vowed not to be intimidated by what happened. But the reality is that a gutted house, with six people dead, has sent a chilling signal. “Who’s going to squeal now?” said Lucretia Coates, the principal of the elementary school that four of the Dawson children attended. “I got four little desks empty in my school. Why wouldn’t that intimidate you?”
In a bed at Bayview Hospital a few miles away, Carnell Dawson Sr., 43, clung to life. Husband and father, he somehow escaped the fire, leaping from a second-story window. More than half of his body was badly burned and he remained unconscious. “I can only imagine the world he will return to,” said Donnel Golden, Angela Dawson’s mother. “If I was him, I wouldn’t even want to wake up.”
By all accounts, Angel Dawson was a great mother. “She used to come to the school and eat lunch with her kids,” said Coates, the principal. Neighbors said Angela Dawson cut a lively figure, strutting down the street in a red bandanna and bright red lipstick, riding bikes, playing ball in the street with her boys.
“On Saturdays they’d always have a barbecue,” said James Williams, who lives three doors down. “You could tell they wanted to feel at home here.”
She spent a lot of time, too, shooing away neighborhood drug dealers. The Dawsons’ house sits on a corner and Dawson made it her personal crusade that no drugs would be dealt there, in front of her children. Often, neighbors would see squad cars roll up, the thugs run away and Dawson chatting with the police on her stoop.
“See, the cops ain’t subtle,” explained Keisha Jones, who lives a few houses down on Preston Street. “You call up, and they say the tips will be anonymous. But then they come and hang out in front of your house and everyone knows it was you who called them.”
Baltimore is renowned for violent crime, much of it connected to drugs. According to the latest numbers, it is the most violent of the country’s 20 largest cities, with 39 homicides and 2,272 violent crimes per 100,000 residents. Both Homicide and The Corner, real-life crime shows, were set here.
The area where the Dawsons lived is called the Badlands. Half of the row houses are boarded up. The streets are sprinkled with broken glass. Many corners are staked out by boys in puffy jackets, checking over their shoulders.
Dawson was not intimidated by this. She would often gather together residents and hold fiery pep talks on her porch. On Oct. 2, she testified against a neighbor, John L. Henry, whom she accused of assault. The next day, a Molotov cocktail was thrown through her front window. The fire chewed up a set of curtains, but she smelled the smoke, ran downstairs and put the fire out.
‘The charmer’
Still, the Dawsons refused to leave.
On Wednesday at 2:30 a.m., the Dawsons’ home exploded in flames. The family dashed upstairs to escape. The intense fire swallowed them all, except Carnell Dawson and the family’s sixth child, Lakeesha, 17. She moved away from home recently and was not there at the time.
Among those killed were twins Kevin and Keith Dawson, 9. “Little Keith, man, he was the charmer,” said Coates. “He would put on that little baby whine and look up at you and ask for something, something he shouldn’t have, and I’d always say, ‘OK, fine, go ahead, little Keith, go ahead.’ “
Also killed were Carnell Dawson Jr., 10, a self-proclaimed expert of backflips; Juan Ortiz, 12, a more serious type; and LaWanda Dawson, 14, who dressed like her mother in bandannas and flannels.
