By Stephen Janis The blood stains across her forehead look like angry finger paintings. A police helicopter circles overhead.
Yards away, a group of Baltimore police officers stand over a homeless man in handcuffs lying face-down on the grass in front of a Brooklyn row home.
Brooklyn Homes resident Kim Nesbit breaks into tears.
“I seen him coming towards me and I rolled up my window and I was going to call the police, and he took his fist and broke the window and the glass went everywhere,” she said, wiping tears from her eyes.
“I was trying to get away, I said don’t touch me, don’t touch me,” she said. “Leave me alone or I’ll call the police.”
“He said, ‘F--- the police, call them.' ”
Throwing her car into reverse, Nesbit managed to escape. Flagging down a school police officer, a half-mile chase by both school police and Baltimore police ended with her alleged tormentor, Isaac (Isaiah) Wheeler, in custody, and Nesbit relieved.
“I’m glad it’s over," she said, leaning on her car. “I’m thankful.”
Wheeler, Nesbit said, is a homeless man who sleeps where he can, using drugs and committing petty crimes against residents of Brooklyn Homes, a public housing complex located on a spit of land south of Cherry Hill. That morning, he had accosted her in the parking lot, she said — though she did not know why.
“He messes with a lot of people,” she said. "He carries around a long knife, and I don't trust him."
But even as she contemplated a thick layer of glass shards that blanketed the floor of her car, the 38-year-old resident of Brooklyn Homes said the incident was not indicative of life at the aging city housing project she has called home for 13 years.
Wheeler, she said, was an outsider.
“It’s not the people in the community; it’s the people that come into the community that make it bad, like him over there,” she said, referring to Wheeler.
Indeed, Nesbit’s perspective on this unassuming public housing project of one- and two-bedroom row homes, that it is in parts under siege but still functional, is evident in the daily rhythm of life throughout the corridors of sagging row homes and ragged lawns.
While residents walk the sidewalks, children scamper between disheveled row homes; signs of disrepair and neglect are evident everywhere.
A daycare center sits abandoned, shuttered five years ago. In back, the rims on the basketball courts dangle over wide swaths of bituminous paving, rusted over and bent like dead trees.
A hastily constructed playground near 10th Street has become home to drug dealers whom residents say come from other parts of the city to sell.
Still, with all the problems, Nesbit said she is not leaving.
‘I love it here; it’s a good community full of good people.”
* * *
A broken door, buttressed by a disinterred broom handle, sits ajar next to the apartment of Lakechia Rodriguez at 4314 Mariban Court. The bare floor is punctuated by welts of uneven, rotting floor covering.
Pictures of her son in his football uniform dot the wall. Football trophies stand firm on a shelf, arranged like a makeshift shrine.
A serious car accident two years ago left Rodriguez with a compound fracture and permanently disabled her, costing her a $13-per-hour job as manager of a McDonald's.
But now she is facing eviction, the result of what she says was an illegal entry into her home by overly aggressive undercover narcotics detectives.
“I don’t deserve this,” laments the mother of two, who has lived in the cramped two-story row home for 14 years.
Her run-in with police began with a misunderstanding, she said.
Stuck on a fold-out sofa in the living room for two years, Rodriguez started selling “icy cups," small cups of flavored ice for 25 cents to neighborhood children last spring.
‘It helped her deal with her depression,” explained her ex-husband, Jason Rodriguez.
Indeed, just two weeks before police burst into her home, Lakechia, suffering from a bout of deep depression, had to be talked out of taking her life.
“She wanted to jump; she was just depressed about her condition,” Jason said.
It was a mild June day, Lakechia was handing an icy cup to a neighbor in the back yard.
“I turned around and I heard kicking and banging at the back door," she recalled.
“I said, 'How can I help you?' " and he said, “Where the s--- at?”
The officer pushed Lakechia into the kitchen, demanding she hand over drugs, she said.
“You don’t tell me where the s--- at, I’m going to lock you up and take your kids,” Lakechia recalls.
“He said, 'You’ll never see them again,' and I said, 'That’s going to be hard because my son is 20.' ”
Then she said, the officer twisted her arm behind her back and pushed her against the wall.
“They were so disrespectful,” she said.
Jason Rodriguez said the officer took him to an upstairs bedroom, then began beating him.
“He kept raining blows on my head; he just kept doing it,” he said.
Police found a small baggy of marijuana and a shotgun in the closet.
“My wife is in constant pain, she uses it medicinally,” he explained. “I’m in pain every day all day,” Lakechia added.
“Neither of us has a criminal record,” he said.
Lakechia recalls that officers later expressed disappointment that Jason had not been tasered.
"They said, 'What man, no tasing?' "
The couple was charged with possession with intent to distribute. But a Baltimore City judge found them not guilty, ruling the search was illegal.
But a not-guilty verdict was only the beginning. Now Lakechia may be forced to leave her home because of the shotgun, which Jason notes is legal to own in Maryland.
“This is a dangerous city. I think people should be able to protect themselves,” he said.
Lakechia is planning to appeal her eviction. Otherwise she could be out on the street in 45 days with little prospect for housing.
“I want to work but I can’t.”
But she’s not the only one facing ouster from Brooklyn Homes. Her 50-year-old neighbor also is facing eviction.
“My son is not on my lease and they say he is on the lease, and he was caught with drugs," said resident Beverly Johnson.
“The case got dismissed and they are saying I will be evicted on Nov. 16.”
Trying to file an appeal of the eviction order has been difficult, Johnson said, as Legal Aid attorneys have not called back.
“What can I do?”
The spate of evictions, Lakechia said, is the result of overly aggressive policing that has made life more difficult for residents.
“They’re just harassing people; it’s awful.”
Still, her 20-year-old son, James Stokes, said the aggressive policing has reduced the violence, even though he has been stopped and frisked on multiple occasions.
“I can say it has improved the crime situation; there are a lot less shootings now,” he said. “It’s worth it; some people who get hurt are actually your friends.
“Me and my cousins, before we moved out, had 12 or 13 obituaries on our wall [of people] who had passed away or got killed.”
“Mostly shootings,” he said. “They were young, young.”
* * *
A grassy hill behind Brooklyn Apartments blends into a small patch of woods.
Donnie Wilburn, the manager of the private apartment complex just down the block from Brooklyn Homes crosses over a guard rail, looks down, and then yells.
“Okay, time to go," he says.
Suddenly at least half a dozen people Wilburn said are drug addicts emerge from the woods.
“This is private property,” he tells a woman.
“They all get high back there.”
Since he took over the private housing complex, the affable and energetic Wilburn has been on a mission to drive drug dealers out of the complex of tidily kept row homes.
Hiring off-duty narcotics detectives to patrol the grounds, Wilburn has a decidedly different opinion of the police.
“The police have been great; they have been very responsive,” he says.
“When I first came we had drug dealers doing deals right outside my office — they didn’t care.”
Routine checks of the grounds would net drugs tied to fishing lines hung in the trees, or stashes in ventilation ducts. But Wilburn, who is from a small town in Virginia, said he was determined to improve life for the residents.
“I wasn’t going to back down,” he said as he ventured into the woods from which the drug addicts had just emerged.
Initially Wilburn said he was calling police up to 30 times a day. But since then, working closely with the police, Wilburn said things have improved, 
as he pointed to a peaceful sidewalk in front of his complex.
“Six months ago it wouldn’t have been like this.”
“He’s the best apartment manager in the world,” proclaimed a resident who did not want to be identified. “He’s made it safe again for me to go outside. He is amazing.”
Wilburn said the people who complain about the police are usually the ones causing the problems.
“From my experience, they don’t respond to nice," he said. “They have to be asked again and again, so it’s not the fault of the police.”
Despite death threats against him, Wilburn said a candid conversation with a drug dealer, the self-proclaimed “King of Brooklyn," convinced him his efforts were paying off.
“He said I was killing his business, that he used to make $1,400 a week and now it’s just a couple of hundred.”
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