Keith Covington said he feels responsible for the death of his friend.

Former Baltimore City Councilman Kenneth Harris was shot and killed Sept. 20 during an early morning robbery after he and a female friend came to Covington's New Haven Lounge in Northwood Plaza to borrow a corkscrew.

"Ken came here because he believed this was a safe haven for him, although we had both argued for years it wasn't," Covington said in a telephone interview from his jazz club Sept. 22. "I feel like I let him down."

Some city officials and community leaders are also feeling let down after getting the city to order nighttime security at the shopping center seven days a week. No security guards were posted at the center when Harris and Covington were confronted by three masked men outside the club at 1:45 a.m.

Police department spokesman Troy Harris said he knew of no guards stationed at the shopping center at the time.

A planned unit development, or PUD, for the shopping center stipulates that the center individually or in association with its tenants must provide security at least between 6 p.m. and midnight daily, said Jill Lemke, a city planner.

City Councilwoman Mary Pat Clarke said the PUD dates to 1977 and was updated in 1999.

Under the PUD, security was not required during the early morning hours when Harris was shot. But Covington said the hours required in the PUD aren't long enough.

"Hell, yes," Covington said when asked if security should be mandatory until the club closes at 2 a.m. "We were completely unprotected."

Even during the required hours, there's usually only one guard, Covington said.

Covington had no private security of his own at the New Haven Lounge. He told WBAL-TV in an interview earlier this week, "Security is a matter of finances."

Community irate

Clarke said Sept. 21 that she is angry that there were no guards on duty when Harris was killed.

"Where were they last night?" she asked.

Clarke said that she has been hounding the owners of the center to keep it safe, and that she supports a movement by several northeast communities to redevelop the center,.

Northwood Plaza was once a magnet for north Baltimore residents but has fallen on hard times in recent decades.

Lisa Leventhal, a board member of the Original Northwood Association, a community group, said the owners have not even lived up to the terms of the PUD. Most days there is security from 3 to 9 p.m. -- not midnight, she said.

"This place has been a problem for decades," she said Sept. 22. "This is a very sad piece of property."

City Councilman Robert Curran, who represents the area around the center, said concerns about safety there are exaggerated.

"It's as safe as any part of town, safer than most," he said.

Curran, who lives 600 yards from the shopping center, said he goes there at least six times a week.

"I feel secure there," he said. "The concerns I hear from folks in the community (are) that there are elements from outside the community that cause disruptions."

Curran called the killing a tragic but "isolated incident."

Sylvia Elhai, whom Leventhal said co-owns the property with several family members, could not be reached for comment. In an interview with The Baltimore Sun over the weekend, Elhai said she hired a security company to patrol the center six days a week and complained that police are not doing enough to crack down on crime and drug dealing.

"I think it's positively disgusting that the police are not there enough to take care of this situation," she told The Baltimore Sun.

Two PUDs govern the property, one for the strip center portion that the Elhai family owns and another for the old Hechinger's property -- and before that, a Hecht's department store -- which Morgan State University owns, Clarke said.

The PUD that calls for security is the one applying to the strip the Elhai family owns, Clarke said.

Clarke said Harris' "shocking" death can be a catalyst to bring the plaza back to respectability.

"One of the things that should come out of this (in) tribute to Ken Harris is to (make the center) a safe and viable place," she said.

That was small comfort to Covington.

"I feel drained, devastated," Covington said. It's hard, man."

Borrowing a corkscrew

Harris represented the York Road corridor in the 4th District from 1999 to 2007. He stepped aside to run for City Council president last year, but finished a distant third behind the winner, Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and the runner-up, Michael Sarbanes.

Harris came to the New Haven with an unidentified female friend to borrow a corkscrew, so they could open a bottle of wine, police said. As Harris and Covington left the club, in the 1500 block of Havenwood Road, they were accosted by three masked men-- at least two of whom were armed, police said.

Harris ran to his car and tried to flee, but one assailant fired into the windshield. The bullet struck Harris fatally in the chest, police said

The assailants forced Covington into the bar, robbed it and stole his wallet, then fled out the backff, police said.

Covington fired three shots at the assailants with a handgun, police said, but it wasn't clear if any of the robbers had been hit.

A search of the Hillen neighborhood, into which the assailants fled, with K-9 units turned up a Halloween mask and Covington's wallet, police said.

City Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said the crime appeared to be similar to a robbery at the club in July.

"The motives and methods are very, very similar," he said at a news conference. "It appears likely we're dealing with the same suspects as the July robbery."

Family man

Harris, a married father of two who lived in Bellona-Gittings, was the former director of government and public affairs for Comcast.

In his campaign to lead the council, the 44-year-old Dunbar Senior High School and Morgan State University graduate portrayed himself as a one-time disadvantaged youth who'd overcome the odds of growing up in the crime-ridden Park Heights neighborhood and being raised by a single, teenaged mother.

Harris was Most Valuable Player of the 1981 Dunbar baseball team and earned a degree in business administration at Morgan State.

He was a former Northwood Baseball League coach and former president of the Leith Walk Elementary School PTA.

The Y of Central Maryland's 2002-03 annual report profiled Harris as "a boy who needed some structure in his life and a firm grasp of life's most important values. He found it all at the Y. Now, Ken gives back to the Y as a volunteer because, while the YMCA was keeping him out of trouble years ago, it was also giving him a foundation for the rest of his life."

Critical of police

As a councilman, Harris was a frequent critic of the city's police department. In 2005, he accused police of operating under a point-per-arrest system, which he said smacked of a quota, and publicly criticized the O'Malley administration for blocking an investigation.

Harris also complained about lack of police manpower in the Northern and Northeast districts, especially in Belvedere Square, and he pressured then-Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm to assign more officers to the districts.

As leverage, he introduced a draconian bill in 2006 to redistrict the department much as city and state legislative districts are redistricted every 10 years. But Harris said he wouldn't bring the bill to a vote if Hamm kept his promise to allocate more officers to the districts.

Karen Decamp, then Radnor-Winston Improvement Association president, said at the time, "When citizens call him with concerns, he's very good at lighting a fire under the chair of bureaucracy."

Harris last year agreed to support a publicly financed downtown hotel if the city earmarked $9 million for recreation centers.

Harris held monthly, one-on-one meetings with constituents at the Govans Library, and quarterly public meetings at Loyola College.

'It's just not right'

DeCamp, now president of the York Road Partnership, said she considered Harris a friend and helped him campaign for council president.

DeCamp said she dreaded breaking the news of Harris' death to her children, who knew him.

"It's just not right. Ken was a really good man, and I think that makes it so hard," she said.

Katrina Odom, who knew him through Huber Memorial Church, in Govans, said the church community was mourning the loss, especially the pastor, the Rev. P.M. Smith, a father figure to Harris.

The marquee at the Senator Theatre this week read: "Kenneth N. Harris Sr., 1963-2008."

The City Council passed a resolution by Curran Sept. 22 honoring Harris as a "distinguished son of Baltimore that is gone too soon."

In a group e-mail Sept. 23, Dana Moore, president of the Charles Village Civic Association, said the slaying was "a clarion call for each of us to do our part to turn the tide of violence in our beloved city."

Bill Henry, who succeeded Harris as 4th District councilman, said he is dealing with a district issue that he could have used Harris' advice on. But he said he put off calling Harris until it was too late.

"Sometimes you don't get another chance to ask someone what they think," he said. "This is an awful way to remember that lesson."

Former councilman Kieffer Mitchell said, "We owe it to Ken to find these killers. Kenny didn't leave us, he was taken from us."

Funeral services were set for Sept. 25 at 10 a.m. at Morgan State University's Murphy Fine Arts Building. For full coverage, go to www.baltimoremessenger.com.

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user comments (1)

user stevetowson says...

Sad situation. Prayers sent to family, and friends. The killers will be caught. It will be interesting to find out how many times they went through the city's so called "justice system" before they murdered a good man.

Posted 11:48 AM, 09.25.08

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