Hutzell: This data could keep more Maryland teenagers from killing each other

When police charged a teenager with shooting his young girlfriend and her brother to death in Gwynn Oak last week, my first reaction to the crime was horror.

Then came anger. Then — maybe you felt this too — a weary resignation that there may be nothing we can do to keep this from happening again.

If anyone in Maryland can prove me wrong, it’s Jen Pauliukonis.

“I think the presence of a firearm is going to escalate lots of different situations into a tragedy,” she said, “and we have to make sure that we’re working on different policies and public health approaches and programs to be able to stop that.”

Pauliukonis is the first executive director of Maryland’s Center for Firearm Violence Prevention and Intervention. On the job now for 18 months, she’s working with public health officials and advocacy groups statewide.

More importantly, she’s collecting information on gun violence in Maryland like no one before.

The goal, spelled out in the law that created the center within the state Department of Health, is to turn that data into a statewide strategy by 2029 for reducing gun violence.

“There’s a few things that are starting to jump out,” she said. “I mean, what is most obvious, and you’ve heard this before, is going to be the just historic reductions in firearm homicides.”

Firearm homicides across Maryland have dropped 54% in the past five years, while non-fatal shootings have fallen 51%.

The decline has been driven by changes in Baltimore, where state and city investments in violence intervention and mental health programs are paying off.

That’s made national headlines. But gun violence is a problem in suburban and rural Maryland, too, and the data shows it’s also declining there.

The gun fatality rate remains highest in Baltimore, at 35.8 per 100,000 residents. The second-highest is 18.9 in Dorchester County on the Eastern Shore, where the population is less than 6% of Baltimore’s.

Pauliukonis is not only collecting data but providing feedback showing that behavioral health therapy programs such as the nonprofit ROCA in Baltimore are working.

“We are seeing some validation in terms of which populations should be targeted and which types of programs that we are hoping to be able to lift up and fund over time,” Pauliukonis said.

The bad news is that suicide numbers are going the other way, up 24% since 2020.

“The biggest high-risk community is actually going to be white males over the age of 75,” Pauliukonis said. “They have a rate about a little more than six times over the overall Maryland rate.”

Anne Arundel and Montgomery counties require gun dealers to carry information on mental health crisis resources. Making it mandatory is a tougher ask in rural areas where gun ownership is more common.

“If you have someone who’s even in a temporary crisis,” Pauliukonis said, “and they have that easy access to that firearm at home, they are going to be more likely to succumb to that impulse, and then there are no real second chances.”

Solutions may include more safe storage programs, adapting extreme risk protection laws, or changing domestic violence laws.

The patterns Pauliukonis is compiling are posted on the state’s Firearm Violence Data Dashboard. Some local governments have similar webpages, but this is a statewide first.

The data comes from public health resources, such as the Vital Statistics Administration, which produces death certificates, and a tracking system that scrapes data on firearm injuries from hospital intake forms.

It also uses the Maryland Violent Death Reporting System to glean hundreds of details. It’s part of a national network run by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“They’re looking at types of firearms that are used,” Pauliukonis said. “They do a really deep and in-depth analysis on the [Office of the Chief Medical Examiner] reports, on death certificates, on law enforcement reports.”

There is information the center can’t incorporate, specifically who is buying guns and where.

The dashboard doesn’t show the 212,445 handgun permits Maryland State Police issued in 2025, a 6% increase over the previous year.

The smallest counties have the highest concentration of permits per capita, and Black women seeking a permit last year outnumbered white women, 10,339 to 9,070.

The center doesn’t have information on illegally owned guns either, and the two data points potentially relate to both homicides and suicides.

Nor can it access reports by the state Attorney General’s Office on fatal shootings by law enforcement officers.

The AG’s Independent Investigations Division puts out an annual report, but its findings won’t be part of the final strategy unless something changes.

There are no data-sharing agreements between the Health Department, state police and the AG.

Even though they all use state information technology, the various systems can’t talk to each other.

“We do have a hope that over time we can expand it, to potentially include data one day from the Maryland State Police, and potentially even data from the court systems,” Pauliukonis said.

Some of what the center is finding isn’t a surprise. The event most likely to precede a homicide is an argument, 23.7% in 2023.

Guns are so pervasive that they have become the first recourse to settle a dispute. That’s why intervention programs appear to be working.

“These programs, in tandem with policies that we have in Maryland, are absolutely essential,” Pauliukonis said. “I think that seeing argument as a top circumstance preceding homicides shows us why those interruption programs are so vital to our state.”

How any of this explains the murders of Giovanna Myrie and her brother, Steve Allen, I don’t know.

Friends told police the Baltimore teenager charged with killing them messaged Myrie through social media for weeks before the shooting. She told her friends he’d threatened her.

Maybe Pauliukonis will find details that explain why the inexplicable so often happens. How does a teenage boy’s life go so wrong?

Some things are beyond understanding.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t try damn hard to find answers.