She lost her son to gun violence. Now she’s part of a movement credited with Baltimore’s crime drop
By Emma Tucker, CNN
Baltimore (CNN) — Cars stop on the street for Rochelle Johnson, a mother of five, when she walks through her Baltimore neighborhood greeting every person she encounters, running up to children and adults alike as she gives countless hugs.
She approaches a man sitting alone outside in the alley behind an abandoned house to check on him: “Do you need anything?” It’s a brief moment that captures Johnson in her element, doing the work she does each day as a violence interrupter.
If anyone could know the faces of every resident in Penn North, Johnson would be the one. But how she got that standing stems from a tragic loss that left her reeling in 2013 when her 19-year-old son was chased and fatally shot on his father’s birthday, just one month before he was due to graduate from high school.
Johnson, 48, wanted “blood for blood” for years after her son’s murder until she had a pivotal conversation with the Penn North site supervisor of Safe Streets, a community-led violence interruption program, who recognized she was a natural leader in her community.
Johnson was hired by Safe Streets in 2020 as a violence interrupter or “credible messenger,” a person who is rooted in the communities they serve with a mission to reduce violence by drawing on their shared life experience with those at risk of violence or in the justice system. City leaders have credited programs like Safe Streets with the historic, roughly 30% drop in homicides in Baltimore this year compared to 2024 and a more than a 50% decline in homicides since 2023, touting a “community violence intervention ecosystem.”
The approach is working, they say, because it focuses on addressing not just the symptoms but the root causes of violence stemming from racism, poverty, unaddressed mental health issues, drug addiction and fractured trust in law enforcement in areas historically beleaguered by gun violence.
Baltimore is one of the few cities with historically high homicide levels driving much of the national trend as cities across the country have seen an overall 17% decline for that crime nationwide from January through June of this year compared to the same period in 2024, according to an analysis of crime data by the independent nonprofit Council on Criminal Justice.
Johnson was in the depths of her grief and rage when she agreed to meet face-to-face with the Penn North site supervisor who kept approaching her to work with them.
“I kept telling them, ‘How can I be good for the job when I’m not you?’” Johnson recalled telling Safe Streets. “I still want people to be killed because somebody took something that was valuable to me, that I felt like I was robbed of.”
But during their conversation she learned the supervisor’s son was killed at a similar age as hers. It was the revelation of their shared trauma that opened Johnson’s eyes to a better way of coping with her son’s murder. She chose to transform her pain into a catalyst for breaking the cycle of bloodshed in her community, which she likens to a disease that trickles down into the generations that follow.
Johnson says she often reflects on “all the people I’ve known and loved” who have died from gun violence in her community, like her cousin who was killed after being shot or some of her friends and their children killed around the same time as her son. “I look back on it sometimes and I just sit and I cry.” Her strength, she says, is derived from them as she helps her community heal and become safer.
And for the people who don’t want to be saved, Johnson says she keeps finding different ways to approach them, just like the Safe Streets supervisor did for her while she was in her darkest moments.
“You gotta meet people sometimes where they are. And for a lot of these people, I’ve been where they are,” she said.
She is ‘the mayor’ of Baltimore’s Penn North
In the early afternoon on a Thursday in October, Johnson sits at the table with her laptop at the Safe Streets Penn North site surrounded by her fellow violence interrupters, all of them wearing the program’s neon orange branded sweatshirts.
She’s about to lead their daily briefing when the site’s director Sheik Michael Johnson-Bey mentions an essential part of their meeting is making sure “everyone is in the right mindset.”
“Conquering the day-to-day circumstances in the community and taking it on headfirst while dealing with our own circumstances is one of the greatest strengths of this team,” he continued.
Johnson starts by asking the group if any homicides or shootings took place in the last 24 hours. She runs down a list of questions, inquiring about the status of any ongoing mediations and incidents or cases that could lead to violence. “Does everyone know their role? What’s going on in our community? Anyone in need of help?” she asks them.
Johnson-Bey and other violence interrupters describe Johnson as the “mayor” of Penn North and the “mother of the community” who knows everyone in the neighborhood where she lives and works. Their words about her immediately came to life as soon as Johnson and her team stepped outside the Safe Streets building and began walking through the community with her team, handing out flyers with resources for food, housing and drug rehab.
Beyond poverty and violence, Johnson says the greatest challenges facing Penn North are drug addiction and mental health. The neighborhood is known to be an open-air drug market and has been the site of recent mass overdoses, most recently in October when at least 11 people overdosed a few months after 27 people were hospitalized after a suspected overdose in July.
Johnson understands people suffering with drug addiction in her community are just trying to survive and “cope with everyday life” as they deal with trauma after trauma. She says she was once one of them, abusing drugs just like her mother did until later becoming sober for years before her death. Johnson says she wants to share her story with others so they don’t think she’s “better than them” because she works with Safe Streets.
“I love to help my people because I need them to know it took a long time for me to get where I’m at,” she said. “It took for my mother to close her eyes for me to get here. I didn’t show her that I could be here with her being here. I made that my stepping stool and I keep stepping.”
Johnson became emotional, wiping away tears, as she sat next to the woman she calls her second mother, Daisy Bush, who said, “I’m proud of her” while recalling how she watched Johnson go from being “out there trying to survive” to making better decisions for her children.
“Down the road she realized, ‘Ms. Daisy, I want better for them,’” Bush said of their conversation at the time. “And then she started getting herself together … She’s doing real good. The queen on the block.”
Johnson credits the conversations she had with Bush when she was at her lowest to help her get on a successful path. “She always tells me, ‘Don’t give up,’” Johnson said. “Just to know that you’re in a community where you got at least one person that supports you, whether you’re doing wrong or right, is overwhelming for some people.”
Credible messenger term coined by a Black Panther
Credible messengers, a term that traces back to Eddie Ellis, a former member of the Black Panther Party, have existed for decades in various forms. Ellis developed the concept while incarcerated in a New York state prison in the 1970s and 1980s for a murder he says he didn’t commit. He recognized people with insider knowledge of the criminal justice system can be powerful mentors, helping to heal trauma and address the root causes of violence.
Safe Streets was founded in 2007 and was later adopted by Baltimore in 2022 under Mayor Brandon Scott’s revived Group Violence Reduction Strategy effort to curb gun violence through an “intentional collaboration between law enforcement, social services, and community members.” Scott has touted Safe Streets for doing “lifesaving work” each day, he said on social media.
City leaders said groups including Safe Streets helped to drive down homicides by 23% last year, building on progress made in 2023 when Baltimore reported the largest single-year drop with less than 300 homicides for the first time in nearly a decade, marked by Freddie Gray’s 2015 death after being in police custody and the protests it spurred.
Safe Streets “can do what the police cannot do,” Johnson says, because they are able to have difficult conversations with people in crisis who fear consequences for seeking help — those would not happen if police were present.
“Any conversation that is being talked about as far as violence or harming someone and it is being talked about around Safe Streets is because they want us to know exactly what is going on so that we can intervene,” she said.
‘If I bring something to Rochelle … she will stand with me’
Johnson remembers interrupting violence before she knew she was doing it, let alone getting paid to do the work. Trauma, she says, starts in the home and can translate into conflicts in the community that go “haywire.”
She recalled a time when she pushed her way between her nephew and son, both towering over her above six feet tall, as a confrontation got so heated that they spoke of killing each other.
As Johnson mediated the conflict, she says the two boys inherently knew she wasn’t scared. She has that same effect in her community, proudly known for being nosy. When her children see her start to get involved in other people’s business, they’ll tell her: “‘Mom, that has nothing to do with you,’” she said. “And I say, ‘Yes it does because it’s happening out here and I work out here.’”
The effectiveness of Safe Streets is rooted in how violence interrupters build a rapport with their community so people know them “with or without” the orange uniforms, Johnson said. “You can’t be just anybody doing this work. You have to be somebody who is a credible person in this community.”
Her sentiment was echoed by Penn North resident Artes Elliot, who said the community “needs” Safe Streets. He and his family have relied on them for resources they had gone without. “With Safe Streets, I know if I bring something to Rochelle, if I have a problem, it’s going to stay with her, and she will help me with it, she will stand with me.”
Elliot says he immediately feels safer when he sees “those orange shirts outside” because he knows there’s little chance any confrontations will escalate into violence or a deadly shooting. “They are the boots on the ground … People trust them.”
Another resident, 70-year-old Bryan Lievers, said he calls Johnson and other team members almost daily to help defuse the conflicts that take place outside his home, which is located next to a vacant house in a hot spot for drug selling.
Lievers says he has been in and out of prison and around drugs for his entire life but now credits Safe Streets with helping him get and stay clean from drugs.
The violence interrupters have such a range of experiences that at least one of them has been in the shoes of any person in crisis they encounter, Lievers said. “They can relate to me. That’s the main thing. If I’m wrong, they’ll tell me.”
She would help her community ‘if it took the life out of’ her
Johnson said she was once like many people in her community who lash out in various ways because they don’t even know they have trauma. That’s why she couldn’t process her own trauma, she says, and it wasn’t until she underwent training for Safe Streets that Johnson realized why.
“People use trauma as a weapon and that’s what puts a person into this bubble, and they don’t want to come out,” she said.
In a job that requires Johnson to face other people’s traumas while carrying her own, she says protecting herself means engaging in a constant balancing act of knowing when to step back when she’s triggered.
“As a woman, sometimes I need a break: mentally, emotionally, physically. … Because it never stops for me,” she says.
Some days, Johnson just “shows up” even when she’s not mentally present, tethered by her deep love and care for her community. At times Johnson was on the verge of quitting, but she was always confronted by her team members who would “talk me back into my mode of the reason why I do this work,” she said, referring to her departed son, Dennis Conway.
When Johnson contemplates what her son would think about the work she’s doing, she smiles knowing he would be “overwhelmed with joy” and says she can feel him watching over her as she continues to put herself in harm’s way by protecting others. She proudly shows a picture of Conway’s 12-year-old daughter whom he never got to meet.
“If it took the life out of me to help these people in my community, I would let it,” Johnson says. “Why? Because I know there’s a better way. I was once one of them.”
The-CNN-Wire
™ & © 2025 Cable News Network, Inc., a Warner Bros. Discovery Company. All rights reserved.
