By: Martha Thomas

Photographs by Christopher Myers


A death in the family: At the funeral of 15-year-old Delvon Butts, oldest brother Darnell Turner (with glasses) supports grieving sister Ashley Hooper (center).


Darlene Bass doesn’t know who killed her son, or why. All she knows is that he needed a proper burial.

Delvon Reshad Butts was laid to rest on October 31, more than three weeks after the shots were fired near his home on McHenry Street, less than a month before his 16th birthday.

The chapel at the Joseph H. Brown Jr. Funeral Home seats about 350, and it was nearly full. Several of Delvon’s friends were there, some boys in suits, others in street attire with baggy pants and thick gold jewelry. Delvon’s girlfriend, 18-year-old Laketa, had her own entourage, who helped her stay on her feet as she approached the burnished metal coffin. Delvon’s mother, Darlene Bass, was surrounded by seven of her nine living siblings and their sons, daughters, and grandchildren; she sat in the front row, bone thin and rigid in a blue suit that seemed as ill fitting and unplanned as her state of mourning.

A few feet away: her 15-year-old son, hair braided in neat cornrows that lay against a white satin pillow, his long fingers clasped across his chest. Delvon was dressed in a blue sportcoat and tie, with brand-new jeans concealed by the foot panel of the half-couch coffin.


Buried secrets: A state program helps pay injury and funeral expenses for victims of violence, up to $5,000 per case. Last year, almost $1 million in claims were paid to bury Maryland’s homicide victims. The program allowed Delvon’s mother, Darlene Bass, to arrange for her son’s interment at Mount Zion Cemetery. “He was going to get buried nice,” she says. “Whatever we had to do.”


Darlene had been on her way upstairs when she heard the gunfire. She expected Delvon to walk through the door at any moment. “I touched my angel”—she gestures to the charm at her neck—“and I said, ‘God, don’t let that be my son.’”

Darlene has five children. Her eldest, Darnell, is 33; the youngest is 12-year-old Demonte, who mostly lives with his father. Danielle, 32, is incarcerated, Darlene says. Delvon lived with his mother and his older sister, Ashley Hooper, 25, and her three little boys. Their home is on a treeless street of West Baltimore rowhouses, many of them boarded-up.

“He was a sweet child,” she says. “I would never question God, but I keep asking myself, Why Delvon? He didn’t bother nobody. He didn’t get into trouble.”

Delvon had been expelled from Hamilton Middle School the year before; the student support dean at Hamilton recalls that he was carrying a knife. But Rodna Thompson, Delvon’s teacher in sixth and seventh grade, had the impression that he “really truly wanted to learn.” If Delvon was disrespectful, she says, “he’d come back and apologize. He was a good kid at heart.”

Delvon was shot at about 9:30 on a Monday night. He slumped over the handlebars of his bicycle on Smallwood Avenue, around the corner from his house. Two bullets from a shooter—still unknown—pierced his lower back and his thigh. Another man, 31-year-old Ronald Adams, was also shot twice in the legs as he sat on a nearby stoop waiting for his girlfriend. Adams had been released from jail ten days earlier; he doesn’t think the shots were meant for him—“I’m a loner and I wasn’t messing with anyone,” he says.

Was Delvon the intended target? The police still don’t have a definitive answer. “Most of our victims and suspects have prior violent criminal records,” offers Baltimore City police spokesman Donny Moses. “But on occasion, it does occur where an innocent bystander gets caught up in the crossfire.”

Darlene’s boyfriend, Wayne Humbert, raced into the house, shouting to call 911. Darlene froze. “I didn’t want to go out there and see my son like that,” she says. “I tried to call my sisters but I couldn’t remember the phone numbers. They all got mixed up in my head.”

An ambulance took Delvon to the Shock Trauma Center at the University of Maryland Hospital. Ashley, who works the night shift at the Charlestown Retirement Community in Catonsville, left work to see her younger brother at the hospital. “He was hooked to all these tubes, and they was saying he got shot in his back,” she recalls. Delvon briefly regained consciousness, then slipped into a coma.

Delvon remained on a respirator until October 19, when his lungs collapsed. Doctors attempted surgery, Ashley says, but failed to save him. The doctors told her that if Delvon had lived, he probably would have been paralyzed. When he died, she said, “my heart broke into a million pieces.” Ashley considered Delvon her best friend. “He was a child who had a smile on his face no matter what the situation.”

When Darlene heard of her son’s death, she says, “I just cried and cried.” And then she thought: “What am I going to do? I don’t have insurance on my child.”

The issue of how to bury her murdered son was more than a passing concern amid the larger tragedy of his death: Delvon’s family wanted to send him home properly. “He was going to get buried nice,” Darlene says. “Whatever we had to do.”




Darlene and her siblings know what funerals entail: They have been to plenty. A nephew was shot five years ago while sitting in his car. A sister, Cynthia, died of cancer about five years ago. Their parents have passed—their mother in 1979, her father in 1998. They have buried people from the neighborhood, members of the church community, friends of relatives, people they barely knew.

In black Baltimore, funerals “are as common as watching a basketball game on television,” says Annette March-Grier, vice president of community relations and a bereavement counselor for her family’s 52-year-old March Funeral Homes. African Americans, she says, attend funerals not only to acknowledge a loss, but also to stay in touch with the community. “Often the story draws us. If it’s a tragic loss, there’s a desire to see how people are coping and who is there for them.”

Ronald Barrett, a professor of psychology at Loyola Marymount in Los Angeles who has researched both African American funeral traditions and youth violence in American cities, points to “a well-known fact in the deathcare industry”: black Americans “tend to invest more time, energy, and resources in funerals.” Barrett, who’s working on a forthcoming book on African American mourning rituals, lived in Baltimore when he attended Morgan State University and later was a consultant to the mayor’s office on the issue of youth violence. He notes that when a life is troubled or when someone is lost to violence, a lavish funeral may be even more of a sine qua non. “It’s a way people can reconcile, or put a finishing touch on a complicated life.”

Like random shots on the streets, funeral expenses can hit family members unexpectedly. And some urban funeral homes have reported an alarming trend, says Barrett: Young boys and teenagers imagining, and preparing for, their own services. “It’s disturbing, but it’s not surprising when you have the level of chronic death in a community like West Baltimore—or in Chicago, or Detroit, or New Orleans.” he says. “Any city where kids are overwhelmed by violent tragic loss, you see them contemplating their own funerals.” So-called “pre-need arrangements” are popular in the deathcare industry, but they are “usually something that people do in their golden years,” Barrett says. “In most other places, these kids would be planning for the prom.”

March-Grier is all too familiar with youths who don’t expect to live long. “They’ll say if they died, they’d want it to be like this.” A registered nurse, March-Grier has run support groups in schools for several years. Recently, she helped launch an outreach program called Roberta’s House, which provides bereavement counseling for families of school-age children who have experienced loss. In Baltimore, large extended families are concentrated in neighborhoods that have endured generations of violence; children grow up steeped in death and dying, a kind of epidemic of unchecked grief born of the city’s chronically high homicide rate.

“Every child I speak to has a sense of fear that they might die the same type of death,” March-Grier says. “They wonder who’s going to be next.”


Last rites: Delvon’s cousins and friends (above) and nephew (below) pay their final respects.



Like most victims of homicide, Delvon was autopsied at the medical examiner’s office on Pratt Street before being transported to the Joseph H. Brown Jr. Funeral Home on the corner of Fulton Avenue and Reisterstown Road. There, he was slid into a refrigeration unit while family members—Darlene, her sisters and brother, and their Aunt Sheila—figured out how they would pay for the service. The funeral and burial at Mount Zion Cemetery would cost close to $6,000—less than the industry average of about $7,000, but far more than this family could afford.

The funeral home is owned by sister and brother Charlene Brown Baldwin and Joseph H. Brown III. Their great-grandfather Isaiah was a cabinetmaker on Montgomery Street in South Baltimore, and he owned a horse and livery wagon—thereby fulfilling the two main requirements for the undertaking trade in the late 19th century. His sons, Isaiah Jr. and Roland Brown, continued the funeral business from their home in the Otterbein neighborhood of South Baltimore. Joseph Jr., son of Roland’s sister, Thelma (who had conveniently married a man also named Brown), took over the business in 1973 and moved to West Baltimore Street near Bon Secours Hospital. In 1995, Joseph III and Charlene Baldwin once again moved, to their current space on Fulton Avenue. The 16,000-square-foot facility has two chapels and seven viewing rooms, handling about four hundred funerals a year. Of those, says Brown, only three or four are for white people.

Last March, Brown was planning on breaking ground for a $2.5 million crematorium facility, along with a landscaped courtyard for cremation ceremonies. But the credit crash temporarily froze the funding, and the plan has been scaled down. Nationally, cremations are increasingly common, but the practice has been slow to catch on in the African American community. “When you talk to black folks about cremation,” says Charleton McIlwain, author of Death in Black and White: Death, Ritual, and Family Ecology, “they can’t really put their finger on it. They say, ‘It just doesn’t seem right.’”

Brown thinks that’s going to change. “If someone has a $10,000 life insurance policy, they’re not going to use it on a funeral if they have a $1,500 BGE bill,” he says. The economy “will drive people to cremation—even black people. It’s the direction of the industry.”

Delvon’s family, despite its financial challenges, never considered cremation, so his body remained at the funeral home for nearly two weeks before Brown did the embalming: The policy, Brown says, is “to know where the money is coming from” before beginning work.

Gwen Branch, Darlene’s oldest sister, was surprised by Charlene Brown Baldwin’s cool, businesslike insistence on payment up front. Joseph Brown Jr., who died in 2000, had made the arrangements for Gwen and Darlene’s parents and grandparents. “He used to come to the house,” Branch recalls. She remembers the funeral director’s kids, Charlene and “Joey,” from around their South Baltimore neighborhood.

But Brown has memories of his own. “My father used to say, ‘If I had all the money people owed me, I could retire very well.’”

A funeral home is, after all, a business—in the United States, an $11 billion business annually. And funeral directors must walk a thin line between their role as businesspeople and ad hoc grief counselors. “If I feel sorry for someone and try to work it out,” Brown says, “I’ll end up in court trying to get paid. I become this money-grubbing undertaker, and everyone’s looking at me like I should have buried their mother for free.”

Delvon’s family needed help. Darlene relies on Medicaid; Ashley works for an hourly wage. Neither has a credit card. Ashley had already taken a loan from Charlestown to move from northeast Baltimore to the small house on McHenry, but her employers agreed to extend another $600 advance, which would be deducted from her paycheck, $50 every other week.

Someone at the hospital told the family about the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, part of the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services. Director Robin Woolford says that the board disburses about $6 million to 1,700 claimants each year, half in Baltimore City. Most claims are for injuries sustained in crimes and are only awarded after the board determines the victim was not involved in criminal activity at the time (though money is often given to those with criminal records). Last year the state paid almost $1 million in funeral expenses, with a statutory maximum of $5,000 per case. The claim for Delvon Butts was submitted on October 21, Woolford says, and it was approved a week later. When the the state faxed out a pre-approval letter promising reimbursement, Joe Brown could get to work.



Brown had been itching to get started on Delvon. He takes pride in making sure the departed—or “loved ones,” in the trade—look as good as possible when they are seen for the last time. Homicide victims can be a challenge: There may be stab or bullet wounds; an autopsied corpse is often sewn up with crude stitches that resemble those on a leather baseball. Brown boasts about once sculpting a new clay jaw for a man whose throat cancer had eaten away the bone. Another time, he made sure that a teenager who was found badly decomposed, a month dead after a brutal beating, looked ready to go to her junior prom.

Delvon didn’t require such interventions: His wounds were easily concealed. When the Chromatec Red embalming fluid flows into the arteries, the ashen skin takes on a warm hue, the flesh plumps out. Like a painter who renders a figure with primary colors before laying the skin tones on top, Brown tries to create a form that, while disarmingly still, seems somehow filled with life.

After the embalming, family members could finally set the date and time of the service. A program was printed, with a note to Delvon from Ashley and a poem written by his brothers Darnell and Demonte:

You’ve gone, you’ve left us; why did you go away?
We’ve tried to figure out what we could’ve done that day.

A glossy color insert had photos of Delvon, a big boy wearing baggy white shorts and a T-shirt, posing with his mother and his young nephews. Chanell Banks scanned photos of her cousin to have printed on tote bags and buttons. Ashley had Delvon’s name tattooed across her forearm, and her three little boys wore white T-shirts with their uncle’s likeness and the dates of his birth and death.

Such accessories are common, says March-Grier. “The hottest thing lately is to have a person’s name tattooed,” she says. “Second-graders collect obituaries in binders, children wear T-shirts with photographs of the deceased. It’s a way of showing grief through signs and symbols.” The role of Roberta’s House, which is modeled on a program in Pittsburgh, is to find other, more positive symbols. March-Grier describes an exercise in which mourners smash clay pots, paint the shards, and then re-assemble them. Finally, “they will plant a plant to represent new life,” she says.

One day before the ceremony, 16-year-old Deshira Ricks came to the funeral home to braid her cousin’s hair in neat cornrows. His face had been dabbed with dark pancake makeup; a little blush added color to his cheeks. His fingernails had been cleaned and trimmed. He was ready.



The Reverend Raymond G. Wilson, associate minister for Shiloh Christian Community Church in southwest Baltimore, has known Darlene’s family for more than forty-five years. He was asked to deliver the eulogy for Delvon. Five years ago, he made a similar speech for Delvon’s 19-year-old cousin, also killed by gunshot.   

Wilson guesses that he’s eulogized more than a hundred young men between the ages of 15 and 25. “Very few die of natural causes,” he says dryly. “For a lot of these kids, there’s a sense of inevitability. They don’t expect to live beyond 25.”
Wilson took a couple of courses in psychology at the Maryland Baptist School of Religion in Lynchburg, Virginia, and he likes to use them—not just as a preacher, but in his day job as a traffic investigator for Baltimore City. He ends up encountering a lot of kids on the streets who think he’s a cop because of his city-issued Cavalier. “They knock on the window and ask, ‘Are you the man?’ And I say, ‘If you’re doing something wrong, I could be.’”

Wilson remembers Delvon as “a likeable kid,” but one who didn’t have much structure: “He led a free life.” In his eulogy, the minister took the opportunity to caution others. God, he said, “needed Delvon to open the eyes and ears of somebody God loves … whatever it takes to get your attention.” Wilson’s talk was punctuated by murmurs and frequent shouts of agreement from congregants. “It’s time,” he shouted, “to put your house in order.”

While he’s preaching, Wilson likes to study the faces in the audience. At Delvon’s funeral, “there was one young man with a serious look on his face,” Wilson recalls. “He was sitting three or four rows behind the family, and he kept his attention on me.” That young man, Wilson says, “could be the one I was talking to.” He’s been waiting for the boy to show up at church.

Throughout the service, family members rose to share their memories of Delvon’s too-short life. A cousin recalled his constant smile; others described how he loved to dance in the living room with his young nephews, how he liked video games, how he helped out around the house. For those who attended his funeral, this is how Delvon will be remembered.

After the service, a line of perhaps forty cars snaked across West Baltimore to Mount Zion Cemetery, following two funeral home Cadillacs. It was a warm Halloween day, and the sun shone bright. The long procession ran red lights, tapping horns as the cars negotiated intersections. Along the way, they passed a small boy—maybe 9 or 10 years old—dressed in a Spiderman costume, mask and all, furiously pedaling his bike.

At the cemetery, Delvon’s older brother, uncles, and cousins carried the gleaming blue coffin to a tent set up near the edge of the grass. Rev. Wilson led a final prayer. When it ended, Charlene Brown Baldwin briskly moved things along, reminding all gathered that the service was now complete and offering each guest a flower from the arrangement of powder-blue and white carnations on top of the casket. 



Months after the funeral, Darlene and Ashley sit inside the house on McHenry Street. There are photos of Delvon on the otherwise bare walls; sympathy cards remain on top of the TV cabinet. While Darlene has gained back some weight and looks healthier than she did at the funeral, she says she is still waiting for approval from medical assistance to see a doctor for depression. When she speaks of her lost son, her face becomes strained as tears gather. Sometimes, she just stops talking and stares straight ahead.

Ashley, who prays for her brother every day, puts her hand on her mother’s back to comfort her. “So many guys I grew up with didn’t even make it to 25. Didn’t even make it to 18,” she says. She’s worried about her little boys. The uncle of her youngest son, Tavian, was killed on the streets recently, she says. The little boy is a year old. He has already attended two funerals for his young uncles.

—Martha Thomas is an Urbanite contributing writer. 



On the air: Hear more on this story on the Marc Steiner Show, May 20, on WEAA 88.9 FM.




EMAIL TO EDITOR // SEND TO A FRIEND // PRINT