Walk through Robert E. Lee Memorial Park any balmy day of the decade, and here is what you will find: Sweethearts strolling about. Families picnicking. Dogs rollicking around, with their tongues flapping in the breeze. Fathers teaching sons how to fish. Kids on dirt bikes. People hiking. Everybody feeling quite safe and secure.

Walk through the Baltimore County park Wednesday afternoon, hours after an 18-year-old woman was shot in the head, and you found almost nobody. Maybe there was a chill in the 90-degree heat, or maybe you just imagined it. There was a man with a big dog, and then two guys with dogs. They looked like they could take care of themselves.

But there wasn’t much more. The biggest population in the park was comprised of TV reporters and their vans. They were all around the place, so that they could stand there maybe 12 hours after the shooting, with nothing else happening, and have an anchor person say, “Live from the scene … .”

What county police are saying is this: Around 5 o’clock Wednesday morning, 18-year-old Ashley Davis, a dancer at the Two O’Clock Club on the The Block, was shot in the neck by another woman, 19-year-old Sirlilar Stokes, who has strong ties to the notorious Bloods gang. Davis managed to walk from the park, just north of Lake Avenue, to the Royal Farms convenience store on Falls Road about half-a-mile away.

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There, Wednesday afternoon, you could still find a cashier named Linda who was working when the young woman staggered in just as dawn was breaking.

“I think she was happy to see anybody moving around at that hour of the morning,” Linda was saying now. “She just walked up and said, ‘Help.’ ”

“Was she bleeding much?”

“Oh, we closed the doors,” said Linda, “ ’cause we didn’t know what was coming behind her.”

“You mean, her attacker.”

“Yeah, whoever. It was first thing in the morning. She was happy just to see life around her. I guess she felt safe. We called police.”

“And what did she do?”

“She just sat out there with her hand on the back of her neck. We had to lock the doors, or otherwise the police would be in here, and corporate would be upset.”

Even though there’s been an arrest, police say they haven’t gotten very far in their understanding of the assault.

“I just remember she had on a shirt,” said the cashier Linda, “and she had her hand over the back of her neck, and she sat out there and waited for the ambulance. It was pretty scary.”

It remains so.

To stroll through Robert E. Lee Park is to enter an oasis. Half-a-mile away is the hustle and bustle at Falls and Lake, but here in the park there’s Lake Roland, and a pretty impressive man-made waterfall when there’s been enough rain.

On one side of the lake, there’s a pump house in the style of an ancient Greek temple, with a date on it: 1861. The thing was built in the earliest days of the Civil War. On the lake’s distant side, there’s a shallow cave. If you let your imagination work a little, you picture soldiers slipping in there for a night’s respite.

You don’t connect this park with the kind of thing that happened Wednesday morning.

“I’m in shock,” said Margaret Stanley. She had her husband, Stanley, by her side, a fishing rod in her hands, and one of the TV news crews photographing her because nobody else was around. “I first came to this park 25 years ago. People come here to fish and picnic. Nobody comes here thinking there’s danger. That poor girl’s lucky to be alive. She was just lucky it wasn’t her time.”

At the entrance to the park, there is a sign: Please Keep Area Beautiful. It remains beautiful today. Hopefully, Ashley Davis will recover. The park’s usual visitors will return, to toss a stick into Lake Roland and watch their dogs swim after it. Out on Falls Road, kids will gather at the nearby snowball stand. Life will return to normal.

But this week’s violence in the park was previously unimaginable, and now it is not. It is one more reminder of our times: No place is truly an oasis anymore.