Living and Dying in Brick City Read Free Page B

placed the chest tube, which looked like a small garden hose, into the chest cavity and hooked it to the vacuum. The reinflatedlung adhered to the inner chest wall, as it should have, giving Legend more time. But blood was pouring into the tube quicker than the vacuum could suction it out.
    In a last-ditch effort to save his life, we cracked open his chest to see if we could close a hole in or near the heart by clamping off damaged blood vessels, but when we reached the heart, we discovered that there was no more blood. All four chambers were empty. There was nothing more we could do.
Damn!
I snapped off my bloody plastic gloves, took a moment to steady myself, and headed for the waiting room. The look on my face must have spoken before I said even a word. Legend’s mother screamed for God and fell to her knees. A clump of hospital workers gathered around to comfort her. That’s when I realized she was a hospital employee herself, part of the Beth Israel family. This kind of news, never easy to deliver, was even tougher now. “I’m sorry,” I said. “We did everything we could.” Legend’s mother was inconsolable. A crowd of about fifty people kept vigil outside the hospital. They stood around the ambulance bay in tight clusters, retelling the story of the gun battle that had taken Legend’s life. I quickly gathered that Legend had been a prominent drug figure on nearby Chancellor Avenue. I knew the turf well. Homicide detectives who came to investigate were familiar with Legend and they filled me in on his long drug-dealing history. I’m not often surprised, but this news shocked me. Nothing about his wholesome appearance had said drug dealer—no flashy jewelry, no gun, no rolls of money were found when we cut off his clothes. And Legend’s dying words were a profession of love for his wife and children. For days, his death was the talk of the hospital. Several of the orderlies, EKG technicians, and nurses knew him or his mother well, and they helped me piece together the legend surrounding Legend.

    L ike so many black boys growing up in Newark, Legend dreamed of making it out, and he knew his ticket would be sports. He was one of those dudes who could do just about all things sports, but he was particularly good at basketball and football. His talents had earned him all-city honors in both sports a couple of times. He received a scholarship to play Division III football at a well-respected university, but to everyone’s surprise, he lasted just one semester before returning to the old neighborhood. There he built the drug-dealing empire that ultimately would consume his life. He had ruled the neighborhood without challenge until his mysterious disappearance about a year earlier, when he was a suspect in a high-stakes murder that had occurred in Newark a week before his sudden departure. Police didn’t have enough evidence to make a case against Legend and his crew. The no-snitch policy is real in the hood, and often a matter of life and death. You grow up hearing “snitches get stitches,” you see evidence of it all the time, and you keep your mouth shut. It’s not ideal and not the least bit courageous, but for folks who’d learned the hard way that those hired “to protect and serve” were no match for the thugs on the streets, it’s just a matter of survival. The case went unsolved.
    “Out of sight, out of mind” is how a relative of Legend’s, who was also one of his lieutenants, explained the reason Legend left town. While Legend passed the time at a family member’s house in the deep South, there was a rush to claim his highly profitable drug arena, prompting a chain of shootings and stabbings. As I listened to this account of the drug war, I pinpointed the time period instantly. It had been the previous fall, when gunshot victims began showing up in the emergency room every day—so often that we’d felt it necessary to heighten our security.
    Legend returned to Newark in early spring 2001