After Inmate Dies Under Suspicious Police Activity, Baltimore Riots, And Mayor Says They "Gave Room" To Those Seeking To Destroy

During a Saturday briefing, Baltimore Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake said her city government “gave those who wished to destroy space to do that,” seemingly approving of the rioters who smashed the city’s police vehicles in the wake of the death of Freddie Gray.


Gray, a man with a drug rap sheet arrested on a weapons conviction, suffered a spinal cord injury–perhaps due to rough handling by police–and died on April 19. Reports are inconclusive, however, and the police are not talking. Rioters destroyed cop cars in a frenzy, while the police hung back. They attacked a wheelchair-bound woman, and a man wearing a #BlackLivesMatter shirt tried to stab a terrified bystander.