Charles Village neighbors erupt at vigil for slain Hopkins researcher
Above: Unscripted anger erupted in Charles Village last night, at the vigil for Stephen Pitcairn.
The moment when Mark Unger lost it came when City Council member Mary Pat Clarke was “acknowledging” the various public officials and community leaders who had come to the sidewalk vigil last night for Stephen Pitcairn, the Johns Hopkins researcher slain Sunday near Unger’s home.
Unger wasn’t the man who witnessed the stabbing and held Pitcairn’s hand as he expired. That neighbor was Reggie Higgins, who declined to speak but was “acknowledged” and applauded and accepted the embrace of neighbors, as tears began to flow down his cheeks.
Unger, though, was at the scene of the 23-year-old’s death soon after Higgins got there and that vivid memory made him angry about the slow-paced niceties of the public ritual.
“We are in fear,” he yelled, interrupting Clarke, who asked him, when she was done, to come up and speak.
Unger recounted, for the television cameras and the crowd of about a hundred, the redness of the blood, the sight of “a body laying there with no soul,” his disgust at the” joking and some laughing” among police and paramedics who, he understood, can’t help but resort to “gallows humor.”
Mark Unger: "We are in fear!" (Photo by Fern Shen)
But, still, the vigil – meant as a show of solidarity and organized by Clarke and fellow Charles Village-area Council members Carl Stokes and Belinda Conaway, and attended by the mayor, police chief and many others – was clearly driving him nuts.
“Stop thanking people, and start doing something,” he said, his face red, his voice choked with emotion.
According to police, Pitcairn was walking in the 2600 block of St. Paul St. at about 11 p.m. when a man and woman robbed him of his wallet and cell phone, then stabbed him in the chest with a knife.
Two people have been charged with first-degree murder in connection with his death, John Alexander, 34, and Lavelva Merritt, 24, both of whom are being held without bond.
Both have a long history of drug abuse and violent crimes and both have been repeatedly excused from probation violations and repeat crimes and given credit for time served and spent little time behind bars.
According to police, items belonging to Pitcairn, and a pair of bloody shoes, were found in the couple’s apartment two blocks away on Maryland Avenue.