John Jay Christen

John Jay Christen, a 20-year-old Black man from Baltimore, was killed in the early hours of September 15, 2007, in a burst of gunfire that tore through the Top Shelf Lounge on Fredhilton Pass. It was the kind of night when the city feels half-awake—music, dim lights, people packed into a room to forget the week—and then, suddenly, everything turns sharp and frantic.

According to a contemporaneous report compiling that night’s violence, Christen was shot multiple times inside the lo ...