York Road community leaders are mourning the death of former Baltimore City Councilman Kenneth Harris Sr., who was shot and killed Sept. 20 outside the New Haven Lounge, a jazz club in Northwood Plaza.

 

Karen DeCamp, president of the York Road Partnership and former president of the Radnor-Winston Improvement Association, said she was struggling to come to terms with the killing and how she would break the news to her children,who knew Harris. 

 

“It’s just not right. Ken was a really good man, and I think that makes it so hard,” said DeCamp, who considered Harris a friend and helped him campaign during his unsuccessful bid for city council president last year.

Bill Henry, who succeeded Harris as 4th District councilman, said later Saturday that he was still in a state of shock.

He said he had been at Sinai Hospital, where one his daughters was being treated for a fever, when he was informed of the killing by Rawlings-Blake’s office.

 

“I know that these things are happening in Baltimore, but this is a case that it happened to someone you knew and knew well,” Henry said. “And it hits you deeper  than the concious part of my brain. I still don’t have the words for it.”

According to city police, Harris and club owner Keith Covington were leaving the lounge in the 1500 block of Havenwood Road at 1:45 a.m. Saturday when they were accosted by three men, at least two of whom were armed. 

 

Harris jumped in his car and tried to flee, but one of the assailants fired at the car. The bullet struck Harris. He lost control of the car, which came to rest on a grassy area near the shopping center’s exit, police said. Harris was taken to Johns Hopkins Hospital, where he was pronounced dead.

 

Covington survived the attack. The assailants forced him back into the bar, robbed it, stole his wallet and fled through the rear, police said. They said Covington fired three shots at them.

 

Police said they don’t know whether any of the robbers were shot.

 

A police search of the surrounding Hillen neighborhood with K-9 units turned up a Halloween mask and Covington's wallet.

 

At a press conference later Saturday morning Police Commissioner Frederick Bealefeld said the crime was similar to a robbery at New Haven Lounge in July.

 

“The motives and methods are very, very similar,” Bealefeld said. “It appears likely we're dealing with the same suspects as the July robbery.”

 

Published reports that Harris had gone to the club to borrow a corkscrew have not been confirmed.

At the press conference, several City Council members and state legislators who represent north Baltimore joined Mayor Sheila Dixon to ask for help in finding the robbers. State senators Joan Carter Conway and Catherine Pugh attended, as did council members Sharon Green Middleton, Belinda Conaway,Rochelle ‘Rikki’ Spector, Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, and former councilman Kieffer Mitchell, who was visibly upset.

 

“We need the community if they have any information to speak up on this,” Dixon said.

 

They also advocated stricter gun control measures.

 

“We have guns on the street and people that don’t value life,” City Council  President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said.

 

Harris was a city councilman representing the York Road corridor from 1999 to 2007. He stepped aside to run for president of the City Council last year, and Bill Henry won in a crowded field of nine to succeed him.

 

Harris ran a distant third in the race for council president, in which Stephanie Rawlings-Blake won. Michael Sarbanes was runner-up. He said he tried to run a grass roots campaign but didn’t have the money to spread his message effectively.

 

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

 

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

 

He was MVP of the 1981 Dunbar baseball team, earned a degree in Business Administration at Morgan State and then worked for Blue Cross/Blue Shield before joining Comcast. He was also a former coach for the Northwood Baseball League and former president of the Leith Walk Elementary School PTA.

 

A Wikipedia profile of Haris said, “Growing up in a rough area, Ken saw firsthand what a crime-ridden community looked like. He put all of his energy into school, learning at an early age that he didn't want to wind up in gangs or worse.”

 

The YMCA 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.”

 

As a council member, Harris was a frequent critic of the Baltimore City Police Department. In 2005 he accused police of operating under a point-per-arrest system that smacked of a quota and publicly criticized the O’Malley administration for blocking an investigation into the matter.

 

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

 

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

 

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

Harris last year struck a deal to earmark $9 million for recreation centers in the city, in exchanage for his support of a publicly-financed downtown hotel.

 

Harris was known locally for holding monthly one-on-one meetings with constituents in the Govans Library, and for holding quarterly public constituent meetings in the Loyola College student center.

Katrina Odom knew Harris through working with the York Road Partnership as well as a congregant at Huber Memorial Church.

 

She remembers being impressed that Harris brought the same level of dedication to the church as he had public service.

 

“He was very dedicated to his work, very dedicated to family and church,” Odom said. “He will definetly be missed.”

 

Odom said that the church community was mourning the loss, especially the pastor, the Rev. P.M. Smith. Harris considered Smith a father figure, Odom said.

 

“I’m glad I got the chance to meet (Harris) and I’m thankful he was able to live a full life,” she said.

 

 

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user comments (1)

user stevetowson says...

Thoughts, and prayers to Mr. Harris' family in this sad, and troubling time. I wonder though, when the killers are actually caught, what their rap sheets will look like, and how mant times they were charged and put back on the street by Jessamy's office due to nolle prosequi cases, plea bargained suspended sentences, and the like. Will things change? Will anything be done to make the city safer? I expect not. There will be speeches feigning outrage, there will be prayers, and vigils, a memorial service and then it will be back to busiiness as usual in the Baltimore court system.

Posted 6:32 PM, 09.21.08

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