Jermaine Terrell Johns Sr., a 29-year-old Black man from Baltimore, Maryland, died on January 12, 2014, leaving behind a family who would soon be forced to grieve in public and in private at the same time. In the notice written to remember him, he is described as the son of Wayne Johns and Marsalena Washington, born and raised in Baltimore, educated at Forest Park High School, and cherished enough that those closest to him built a space for others to share memories and condolences.
Outside of the memorial language, his death appears in the stark accounting of city violence that winter: he is listed among Baltimore’s early-January homicides and identified as a shooting victim, with the incident associated with the 3900 block of Edgewood Road. The same date appears again in a separate public roll of Baltimore’s 2014 homicide deaths, placing him in the grim sequence of names that marked the start of that year.
What follows in the public record is notably thin. In the sources that recount his death and place it on the calendar, no suspect is named, no motive is described, and no arrest, charging document, trial, or conviction is reported in connection with the killing. The story that can be told from what is available is therefore one of a life anchored in Baltimore and a death recorded in the city’s homicide lists—an ending that, at least in the accounts accessible here, does not come with the resolution of a publicly identified perpetrator.
