Michael Olesker, The Examiner
2008-04-14 07:00:00.0
Current rank: Not ranked

BALTIMORE -

Markia Jones approached the death scene cautiously, as though the body of Bryan Antoine Adams still lay on the ground.

But Adams was gone, already replaced by balloons and a teddy bear that lay next to a sturdy tree to memorialize the loss of a life. So Jones wiped a tear from beneath one eye and slowly walked to the spot where the killing happened the day before.

“I’m just here to pay my respects,” she said.

She spoke softly and had the usual tone of disbelief in her voice.

Nobody around here, by Wilde Lake Village Center in Columbia, can believe the Wednesday incident when Adams, 20, was gunned down about 11:30 in the morning on this busy stretch of road among a shopping center, hundreds of houses and Wilde Lake High School. It’s the first homicide of 2008 in Howard County.

“We were classmates,” said Jones.

She hugged her arms to her chest.

“He was a nice guy, and so quiet. He wasn’t one of those troublemakers. He was one of the good guys,” she said.

Three years ago, Adams and Jones graduated together.

Everybody gets out of high school with lungs full of fresh air and enthusiasm, and big plans, and not a single soul knows where life will lead.

Adams and Jones had as much hope as anybody.

Now, three years after graduation, unemployed, Adams was talking about going to college.

But he’d been arrested a few times on minor stuff.

There were no convictions.

Jones, shaking her head slowly, remembered a classmate full of promise.

“I don’t understand how these things happen,” she said.

She’s lived here for seven years.

“Columbia’s such a quiet place. He was such a nice guy. He was gonna do good things. We all talked about doing good things.”

“You working?” she was asked.

“No.” She is 20.

“Family?”

“Two kids,” she said. “Eleven months and 2 months. A boy and a girl.”

She stared at the balloons and the teddy bear next to the tree.

One of the balloons read, “God Bless You.”

A couple of young men stood nearby, and one pointed to a clump maybe 20 yards from the tree.

He said that’s where Adams’ body lay when the police arrived.

“Just you and the kids?” Jones was asked now.

She shook her head.

“We live with my grandmother,” she said, “and my sister. Near here.”

“This shooting scare you?”

“I don’t want my kids to grow up and get into trouble,” she said.

She was glimpsing the future, and it wasn’t the way she’d once imagined it.

The two guys standing nearby said they knew Adams. One, Greg Akageezee, 21, works for Verizon, and the other, called Scoop, 26, said he works for Toby’s Dinner Theater.

“You’re an actor?”

He laughed out loud.

“No,” he said. “I do the dishes.”

He was a year ahead of Adams at Wilde Lake High.

“And I do some landscaping on the side. I’m trying to make the landscaping work,” he said.

The two of them talked about Adams and described him the way Jones had: A quiet guy, a nice guy, not a troublemaker.

Played some basketball on an outdoor court near here.

They said he’d been troubled by the death of a 2-year-old son.

“A lot of things happen for no reason,” Akageezee said.

“But why you want to take somebody’s life? For what?”

“He was a good man,” said Scoop.

“He wanted to go on with something he liked,” said Akageezee.

“That’s hard in Columbia. It’s hard to get jobs, hard to find your own place.”

“In Columbia?” he was asked.

The two young men nodded their heads. It’s hard to imagine such a description.

You look around this killing spot and see greenery of all sorts and handsome houses and people driving past in shiny new cars.

Columbia was Jim Rouse’s dream of making things better. Out here, there would be no blight, there would be no crime. Everybody would work at fulfilling jobs and all would live happily ever after.

Columbia, with one homicide, is not Baltimore City with its hundreds.

Professional gardeners plant flowers here, and police officers ride bicycles down sunlit paths instead of dreary alleys.

Markia Jones will find a place of her own and a safe Columbia for her children.

But reality kicks in here and there. Some dreams die in sunlight, as the world rushes past.

Please send news tips to Michael Olesker at olesker@baltimoreexaminer.com