BALTIMORE _ After hearing shots being fired, Karida Collins turned off the lights in her East Baltimore house and peeked through the blinds of her living room.
Outside lay a man face down on the sidewalk. Around him, she said, police officers used flashlights to search for bullet casings.
"They left him just laying there like litter, like trash," said Collins, who lives on the same block of East Preston Street where Darrell Jackson, 34, was fatally shot Aug. 22.
Collins and other neighbors say they are disturbed by the time it took _ at least six minutes, they say _ for first responders to begin medical treatment on Jackson, who later died at an area hospital. Police said he had suffered multiple gunshot wounds.
Two other men, ages 26 and 33, were shot on the same block that night. They went on their own to area hospitals, each with a gunshot wound to the foot, police said.
"They went to look for bullet casings. That's what they were focusing on," said Denise Frank, who lives just a few doors away from Collins. They "didn't check for a pulse."
Police spokeswoman Nicole Monroe said Tuesday that officers might have realized the victim's wounds were too severe for him to be saved.
"Sadly, sometimes when you arrive the injury is so catastrophic ... it is out of the scope of your training and ability to be helpful at that point."
She said officers are trained to help victims. "We have officers that apply tourniquets, do chest compressions and render aid to people in need," she said. She noted that Jackson had wounds to the neck and to the chest _ both places where a tourniquet could not be applied.
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Monroe added that medics are dispatched to shootings at the same time as police, and frequently arrive around the same time, or even before officers get there.
In Jackson's case, officers received the call at 9:23 p.m., and he was pronounced dead 30 minutes later at Johns Hopkins Hospital.
Collins filed a complaint and met with police to voice her concerns about the medical response. Police said last month that they were investigating the incident; the results of internal investigations are not made public. The department has not released body camera footage from the crime scene.
According to official departmental policy, Baltimore police officers should render aid and provide medical assistance after ensuring a scene is safe. Such steps should happen before any official investigation begins.
For arriving officers, "their first concern is to make the scene safe for everyone involved, including themselves," said Frank Straub, director of strategic studies for the Washington-based Police Foundation, a nonprofit that works to improve policing strategies.
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Straub, a former police chief in Spokane, Wash., and former public safety commissioner for White Plains, N.Y., said he wants to see a national protocol for how police are to respond to traumatic injuries. Some, usually smaller, departments, he said, offer extensive trauma care training to officers. Larger departments might be more likely to take a hands-off approach, with officers directed to wait for a medic to arrive, he said.
"To be brutally honest, some officers just refuse to render aid to somebody's who's injured," Straub said, adding, "I don't think that's right."
Monroe acknowledged that a string of recent scandals had shaken some people's faith in the Baltimore Police Department, and many assume the worst about officer behavior.
"People are distrustful of the police, understandably," Monroe said. Still, she said, this was the first instance in her 24 years on the force that she had heard a resident say first responders failed to give appropriate medical care.
"Not rendering aid is not something that is an issue, or something that we've had complaints of officers doing," she said.
More frequently, residents complain that officers take too long to respond to non-emergency calls. With staffing shortages throughout the department, officers must triage calls to ensure that units are able to respond quickly to shootings or other incidents where residents' lives are in danger.
She added that the department is working to improve response times by making it easier and faster to file police reports over the phone. Instead of having desk officers in individual districts, police will field calls from a centralized office in police headquarters. "Hopefully this is something that can help reports and give some relief to patrol," she said. "Most people do like it."
The night of the shooting, Collins wrote a Facebook post that was critical of the police response. The post has since been shared more than 100 times. She copied it and sent it to the mayor's office as well as the police department.
Of her subsequent meeting with police to discuss the matter, she said: "It was fine, I guess. It seemed very by-the-book."
Weeks later, police said they had not made any arrests in the shooting.
Pia Koger, another neighbor, said she knew Jackson well. He was the same age as her son, she said, and the two were close as children. Jackson had moved to the Eastern Shore as a teenager, she said, and came back to East Baltimore only about a year ago, moving into a rowhouse three doors down from her with a girlfriend and four daughters. There was a baby on the way. "His first boy," she said.
Jackson worked hard to support his family, Koger said. She doesn't think Jackson was the shooters' intended target.
"I don't know what happened, but I do believe it wasn't for him," she said.
The incident has reinforced her sense that the Johnston Square neighborhood where she lives is increasingly dangerous. She fears leaving home for the grocery store.
