Bryan McKemy would have been 33 today

The sentencing of the young BGF member who killed Bryan McKemy took three hours Tuesday morning in federal court in Baltimore. There was more to it than I was able to pack into my column today, largely because the presiding senior judge, James K. Bredar, took the opportunity to comment on sentencing practices and express frustration with the constant parade of young men who’ve come before him, charged with violent crime. I found this unusual and noteworthy. While Bredar is known to muse about things, his reflections from the bench on Tuesday seemed something like a coda to his career. “What cuts me to the core is that all the lengthy sentences I’ve imposed in my career didn’t prevent Bryan McKemy from being murdered.”

The facts of this case are tragic all around: 

Bryan McKemy was 27 at the time of his death; today, May 22, would have marked his 33rd birthday. 

Bryan was an innocent bystander, had nothing to do with the Black Guerilla Family or the young men who shot him. Bryan was renovating a house owned by a man who, the feds say, was a drug dealer in a beef with a rival. The rival ordered a hit. Two men, one of them Wayne Prince, shot McKemy and a coworker; the drug dealer, who was inside the house, was never harmed. This is why Bredar called the crime “utterly, completely senseless.”

The defendant, Prince, was 18 at the time. He’s 24 now, having pleaded guilty to gang conspiracy and racketeering charges. Bredar sentenced him to 28 years in federal prison.

In addition to Prince’s thoroughly awful life conditions listed in the column — it starts with fetal alcohol syndrome and goes from there — he was himself the victim of violence, having at some point survived a shooting. 

Before he was sentenced, Prince asked to turn away from the judge and face the McKemy family in the courtroom gallery. Bredar told him to remain facing the bench. He did as told and offered a brief apology: “I truly is sorry.”

Scott McKemy, Bryan’s dad, told the judge — as he told me when I first wrote about this case in 2018 — that he confirmed his son’s identity for city homicide detectives by the large “praying hands” tattoo on his body. McKemy said in court Tuesday that he’s had a smaller version of the same image tattooed to his arm. “The death of a child,” he said, “is like losing your breath and never catching it again.”

Regarding what Bredar said about harsh sentencing not providing adequate deterrence, I say this: Wayne Prince is off the street now, and society is safer while he’s incarcerated. He will be in prison until he reaches middle age. The failure is not in sentencing; the failure is in what we do — or don’t do — with violent young men while they are behind the walls. “Correction” is not really part of our corrections system. From the first day an inmate enters a prison, he or she should be placed on a track to be fully prepared for the day of their release — prepared to be a better man or woman, prepared to live a new life free of the chaos and violence that marked their early years.

Dan Rodricks is a long-time columnist for The Baltimore Sun, and a local radio and television personality who has won several national and regional journalism awards over a reporting, writing and broadcast career spanning five decades. He is the author of three books, including “Father’s Day Creek” (Apprentice House 2019).