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Mother Goes Viral After Disciplining Baltimore Rioter

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V0YpGn6wo [EDITORIAL NOTE: The video above contains language some may find offensive.” CNN – Please, not even a de...
A few brave peacemakers tried to intervene on Baltimore’s streets

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u5V0YpGn6wo

[EDITORIAL NOTE: The video above contains language some may find offensive.”

CNN – Please, not even a demonstration. Freddie Gray’s family had asked for quiet on Baltimore’s streets the day they laid him to rest. And above all, no violence.

Many people turned a deaf ear to that Monday, but a handful of people embraced the family’s message. They tried to stop young people from flinging rocks at police, breaking windows, looting and setting fires.

The peacemakers — clergy, Gray’s family and brave residents — placed themselves in the rioters’ way.

“I want them all to go back home,” said the Rev. Jamal Bryant.

“It’s disrespect to the family. The family was very clear — we’ve been saying it all along — today there was absolutely no protest, no demonstration,” he said.

The would-be peacemakers, though, were outnumbered by rowdy groups that burned and looted. The rioters overshadowed the message of peaceful protesters on prior days: They had called for justice for Gray, a 25-year-old African-American man who died from spinal injuries after police arrested him this month.

Mourners walk into violence

The early fits of violence came in the afternoon, about the time mourners left Gray’s memorial services blocks away, Bryant said. They bumped right into it.

“For us to come out of the burial and walk into this is absolutely inexcusable,” he said. He did not want to see it spread to downtown Baltimore, where some rioters said it would, and he organized people to stand in the way.

“We have a line of gentlemen from the Nation of Islam to build a human wall, as well as men from the Christian church making that human wall,” he said.

Without police support

As officers in riot gear receded, flames engulfed cars and stores and roared out of apartment buildings into the night sky. A senior living facility under construction by a Baptist church burned to the ground. The blazes stretched the fire departments’ resources, as at least 30 trucks deployed.

Looters streamed into a CVS, bodegas and liquor stores and walked out with what they could carry.

A young man in a blue sweatshirt tried to talk people down by himself.

He walked up to CNN correspondent Miguel Marquez, as a store nearby was being looted. It later went up in flames. The man, who didn’t say his name, was disgusted by what was happening in his neighborhood and disappointed in the police response to rioting.

There was a line of police down the street, not far away. “They could have moved down here to stop it,” he told Marquez.

Against all odds

The Gray family’s lawyers, again, put the family’s wish out to the public that there be no protests that day, let alone violence.

The riot mars the cause and takes the focus off a hope for change that may come out of the investigation into Freddie Gray’s death, said family attorney Mary Koch. “That’s just disintegrated into just looking at Baltimore city and thinking that the city is the city of violence,” she said.

Against all odds, a handful of individuals kept trying to stop it.

A tall, adult man walked up to a young man who was confronting riot police. He slung an arm over his shoulder, turned him back around in the other direction and marched him away from police lines.

But as they strolled past a crowd, a young man behind them hurled a stone at police, putting his whole body into the throw.

Tough love

At least one young man paid the price for his participation, when his mother turned up to spank him home. Before rolling cameras, she slapped him in the head again and again, driving him away from the crowd, as she cursed.

Police Commissioner Anthony Batts later thanked her. “I wish I had more parents that took charge of their kids out there tonight,” he said.

After night fell, giving way to a 10 p.m. curfew for juveniles, Robert Valentine stood alone with his back to a line of police in riot gear. He shooed away young people tempted to approach them.

“Go! Step your –ss away!”

“I’m just a soldier,” said Valentine. He told CNN’s Joe Johns that he was a Vietnam vet.

Young people had no business on the streets, he said. “They need to be in their home units studying and doing something with their lives.”

Crips and Bloods

Even Baltimore members of the Crips and Bloods, two street gangs renowned for drug dealing and extensive violent crime — and for killing each other — came together with others who condemned the rage that swept through their neighborhoods.

“The guys who pulled me aside are self-identifying as Crips and say they don’t approve of whats happening. ‘This is our community,’ ” Baltimore Sun reporter Justin Fenton wrote on his confirmed Twitter account.

Gang members joined community leaders and Gray’s family for a news conference Monday night on the stage at New Shiloh Baptist Church, which had held Gray’s funeral. An announcer thanked them for coming to the church.

The gangs have signed a peace deal and are uniting to push against police lines in protests, according to a report by The Daily Beast. Bryant, the reverend, also mentioned their peace treaty.

Police however, say the gangs’ purpose goes much further. Investigators warned Monday that gangs planned to work together to “take out” law enforcement officers, police said.

Gray family condemnation

At the end of the day, Gray’s family had the last word on the violence: It wasn’t good.

“To see that it turned into all this violence and destruction, I am appalled,” said Richard Shipley, Gray’s stepfather.

“I want y’all to get justice for my son, but don’t do it like this here,” said Gray’s mother, Gloria Darden, who wore a T-shirt with her son’s photo.

“I don’t think that’s for Freddie,” said his twin sister, Fredericka Gray. “I think the violence is wrong.”

After their comments, Gray family lawyer William H. Murphy took the microphone. Violence is not the path to change, he said. Then he got back to the message that had been bitterly marred by the rioting.

Murphy asked for church audience members to raise their hands if they had experienced police brutality or personally knew someone who did.

All but a few hands went up.

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