Baltimore vigil brings together family, friends who lost loved ones to gun violence in 2023
BALTIMORE -- The hundreds of people who were killed in Baltimore in 2023 were remembered at a vigil outside of Baltimore City Hall on Wednesday.
Grieving mothers, grieving grandmothers, and other loved ones with the ghosts of lives lost haunting their hearts gathered together to remember those who had come, gone, and left them behind.
The name of each person killed in Baltimore was read aloud at the vigil. Bryson Hudson was one of them. Hudson was the 16-year-old grandson of Erica Colbert. He was number 169 on the list.
"My heart aches every day," she said. "My grief is so heavy."
Colbert has been going to grief therapy three times a week to grapple with the pain of losing her grandchild, according to WJZ's media partner the Baltimore Banner.
She has enrolled at the University of Baltimore to study criminal justice in the hopes of fighting for change on behalf of Hudson, the Baltimore Banner reported.
The year 2023 began with the murder of 17-year-old D'Asia Garrison and included many young victims.
One of the last homicides of the year took the life of a 17-year-old boy who has yet to be identified by police. Officers found him and a 20-year-old man suffering from gunshot injuries near Reisterstown Road on Dec. 29.
The number of teenagers who were shot in Baltimore within the first four months of 2023 prompted Mayor Brandon Scott to implement a curfew for the city's youth.
Teenagers were killed during school hours, sometimes not far from the schools they attended.
The wide array of violence impacted people of all ages across the city, though.
"Every loss we experienced this year, we feel as a community and as a city," Mayor Brandon Scott said at the vigil
A total of 263 people died from gun violence in Baltimore in 2023. That number is smaller than the one that proceeded it in 2022. That's when 327 people were killed. In fact, Baltimore hasn't seen a figure of fatalities below 300 in several years.
But that is little consolation to people who have lost their loved ones. Cara McMillan lost her 30-year-old son, Allante Alexander, to gun violence in April 2023. He was shot and killed in the 2000 block of West Lexington Street.
She said she attended the vigil "to be around people who are kind of enduring the same thing" and "to offer that support."
The last fatal shooting of 2023 took place along a busy thoroughfare in Northeast Baltimore on New Year's Eve.
That's where a 36-year-old man was gunned down in the 4200 block of Belair Road.