Ken Harris was ordering from a fast-food restaurant’s drive-through when I reached him on his cell phone.
It was midafternoon June 2 — and it was the last time I would ever talk with him.
The reason for my call was a young man named Shannon Dudley, 22, a student at Avara Barber School in Dundalk who had been stabbed directly in the heart near a downtown bus stop.
Harris had mentored Dudley, as he had other young men, between 1993 and 1996. Dudley once was a classmate of Harris’ daughter at Leith Walk Elementary School, and it was obvious from speaking with Harris that the three-year mentorship obviously meant a lot to the former councilman.
Harris told me he had saved a Baltimore Afro-American article that featured the two of them.
“He’s a good kid, very quiet,” Harris said. “He’s into entrepreneurship. He used to come to my house for dinner. For these individuals to come by and bring bodily harm to him, I just can’t understand it.”
What really bothered Harris was the senselessness of the attack on Dudley, who was changing buses in downtown Baltimore. The young men who attacked him didn’t need to stab him to get his cell phone, umbrella or baseball cap — the items stolen in the robbery. Dudley would have handed them over.
“This was certainly unnecessary,” Harris said.
The location of the attack, the 100 block of W. Baltimore Street, also concerned Harris — a signal that no area of the city is truly immune from violence.
“I was shocked when I found out it happened right there, downtown,” he said.
Harris, who had only recently left the City Council after his unsuccessful run for its presidency, visited Dudley at the University of Maryland Shock Trauma Center, where the young man was recovering after a surgery.
City police swiftly made two arrests in the case, charging two men with attempted murder.
“I’m pleased the Baltimore Police Department moved quickly,” Harris said. “We have to send a message that this is not going to be tolerated.”
But now Ken Harris is dead — consumed by the very violence he had condemned. He was attacked, like Dudley, in an apparently random crime motivated by greed, a robbery of a jazz club in Northeast Baltimore.
“He has a lot of hopes and dreams,” Harris said of Dudley. “He is a fine young man. We did a lot of great things together. I’m very proud of him.”
A lot of people in Baltimore feel the same way about Harris.
