Ten years ago this weekend, Ericka Alston Buck heard through the grapevine that a young man she knew through the drug treatment center she ran in West Baltimore, Freddie Gray, had emerged from a police transport van unable to walk.

Two weeks later, after Gray’s funeral, she heard rocks smashing through windows and saw cars in flames outside her workplace, signs of the uprising over his death that would engulf Sandtown-Winchester for days and appear on TV screens worldwide.

As vividly as anything, though, the 54-year-old entrepreneur remembers the money, food, supplies and sweeping promises of help that poured into the community where both she and Gray were raised for the next few weeks, raising hopes that people across America understood their plight and that a healthier Sandtown, as it’s known locally, might emerge from the rubble.

In her view, that never happened.

“There was a time where people felt seen, heard and valued, where things felt as if they were going to change for the better,” says Alston Buck, now the chief operations officer for Treyway Multi-Treatment Services, a substance-abuse treatment program with three locations in Baltimore, including one in her native Sandtown.

“But that was while the cameras were rolling. Once the cameras went away, none of it proved to be sustainable. Nothing new and positive that came out of the Freddie Gray situation has really survived.”

A global spotlight

For all its reputation as a virtual emblem of the poverty, crime, drug use and other ills that afflict too much of the city, historically African American Sandtown — named for the sand that once dropped from horse-drawn wagons as they left a local quarry — occupies just a half square-mile and 72 square blocks of West Baltimore.

The violence that erupted in there after Gray’s funeral a week after his death and two weeks after his arrest led to more than $9 million worth of property damage; hundreds of arrests, and murder, manslaughter and other charges against six police officers. It also shone a global spotlight on racial and socioeconomic inequalities that have plagued U.S. cities for generations, including perceived police brutality against African Americans.

Ask people who live or work in Sandtown today whether they think policing has improved, and answers will vary. Some say officers remain so haunted by the memory of their colleagues’ arrests that they’re still reluctant to act in the field. Others say training and diversity programs have created a more approachable force.

Most believe it’s unfair to condemn all police because a few are clueless or badly trained.

“I believe there’s a lot of good cops out here who put their best foot forward, but they’re scared,” says Darryl Phillips, a retired Harlem Park resident who shops in Sandtown. “They have no backing. So what do you do? You’re between a rock and a hard place.”

There’s near unanimity, though, on two points. Sandtowners can’t believe it has been 10 years since the incendiary events of April 2015, and it’s hard to find anyone who believes they gave rise to lasting change.

A ‘crazy, hectic’ day

On a recent sunny afternoon, Antonio Carter was selling smartphones at a table on a sidewalk in front of the CVS store that famously went up in flames a decade ago.

Carter, 26, was a sophomore at Dunbar High School the “crazy, hectic” day the uprising started. He remembers his principal dismissing everyone early as word of unrest spread.

Two of his cousins were arrested for looting over the next few days, he said, and though his mother forbade him to go near the action, he followed it closely on the news.

He looked from his table toward the intersection of Pennsylvania and North avenues, the epicenter of the uprising in 2015. Foot traffic was heavy, people of all ages loitered, and sirens wailed. Locals know the location as an open-air drug market.

Carter thinks politicians have failed to turn “the Freddie Gray,” as some refer to Gray’s death and its aftermath, into anything constructive.

“I don’t think things have changed much,” he said. “You see crime going on. That doesn’t surpise me, growing up in Baltimore. You have to elect the right people. With the people that we have in office, it’s not going to change.”

‘Too many people to count’ on Percs

Half a block east on North Avenue, Christopher Fowlkes wielded a trimmer over a customer at Phaze II barber shop.

Fowlkes, 58, has cut hair at this spot where Sandtown and Penn North meet for years. He says he “never saw anything like” the unrest that exploded after Gray’s funeral. When he saw a “cop car on fire” outside his window that day, he closed up shop and headed to his home in Baltimore County.

Since 2015, Fowlkes says, the neighborhood has degenerated from a place where you could “sit on a bench and pass the time with friends“ to one where “too many people to count” are using “Percs,” highly potent pink pills that contain fentanyl. Substance abuse experts like Alston Buck say the pills have become the pharmaceutical of choice even for teens in West Baltimore.

Fowlkes says the abundance of people on the drugs or selling them hampers his business.

“I don’t know if it’s the city’s fault or the mentality of the people who are not willing to buy things and fix them up, but I moved here from New York in 2006, and the same abandoned buildings that were there at that time are there right now,” he adds. “How much has changed? The city doesn’t seem to care about the neighborhood, and that’s going to affect people in some kind of way.”

Confirming Baltimore’s ‘Wire’ reputation

A few blocks to the south, in Harlem Park, Phillips, a 57-year-old retired corrections officer, compared the first day of unrest with how things seem today.

He was attending a cooking class in Little Italy on April 27, he said, when word spread that rioting had started near Mondawmin Mall and were spreading south. He hurried home, made sure his licensed firearms were in working order, and locked the house down.

“I wanted to be sure nobody took what my wife and I have worked so hard to earn,” said Phillips, who like the other residents quoted for this story, is African American.

He notes that the events of 2015 only confirmed Baltimore’s image as the city where the violent HBO series “The Wire” was filmed and said the four mayors the city has had since 2015 have done little to encourage residents to do what needs to be done to improve their lives.

“I think a lot of people sit back, twirl their thumbs and don’t get involved in the community. We have a long way to go as a city, but it starts within. If you can’t start with yourself, asking ‘What can I do to make Baltimore better?,’ you’re probably in the wrong place,” he said.

‘Can you finally see us now?’

Tammie Garrett-Edwards and the Rev. Rodney Hudson remember as well as Alston Buck the abundance of supplies in the aftermath, and the feeling of hope, that flooded into Sandtown for weeks after Gray’s passing.

Alston Buck made headlines in Baltimore and around the world 10 years ago for setting up a safe zone on North Carey Street where children could play, read and use computers throughout the unrest. One room became “Pepper’s Place,” a reference to a Gray nickname.

And the landlord who owned the building that housed Alston Buck’s busy workplace, Penn North Recovery, offered a space as a reception site for donations.

“Everything that arrived at that corner was housed in our vacant laundromat,” she says. “You name it, it came. Diapers came. Bottles of water came. Chips and candy came. Clothing donations came. Brand-new sneakers from sneaker companies came. Anything that anybody would have needed was arriving April 28 and beyond.

“We would take it to the laundromat and distribute it to the community; people were talking money and resources,” she adds.

Meanwhile, she recalls, politicians and other city leaders who had barely been to Sandtown showed up, chatted with community members, and expressed their solidarity. Camera crews from around the world set up shop and conducted interviews.

“There was so much hope — so much hope,” she says. “It was like, ‘can you finally see us now?'”

‘Always very respectful’

Garrett-Edwards, a longtime youth group leader at Ames United Methodist Church in Sandtown, has similar memories. “People from all over the world were sending checks, funds, money or goods” to the church, which had been featured on the news, she said. And she was astonished to see members of the archrival Bloods, Crips and Black Guerilla gangs show up to work peacefully together to hand out donated items.

“In our communities, we’re against each other so often, but I was seeing a temporary time of unification. It was wonderful to see,” said Garrett-Edwards, 49, who also helped lead prayer walks through Sandtown as the unrest went on.

Like Garrett-Edwards, Hudson, the 56-year-old pastor of Ames UMC and Metropolitan United Methodist Church in Harlem Park, has more than earned his bona fides in the community. When he first moved to Baltimore in 2008, he was shocked to see the number of young men selling or using drugs or loitering on street corners. A former U.S. Army paratrooper, he decided to blend faith and aggression: He’d sing gospel songs and recite Bible passages through a megaphone to keep the sidewalks clear in front of his church. He has been mugged more than once.

One group included Gray, a young man from nearby Gilmor Homes who Hudson says “sold pharmaceuticals” but was “always very respectful” as he pressured them to move day after day toward a site several blocks away.

When he first heard about Gray’s injuries, Hudson says, “It didn’t make sense that he would go into a police van alive and come out [dying] … I knew it was going to be a big deal.”

A deep wound

As angry people hit the streets, Hudson headed into the action, where he took a position between a crowd of protesters, many holding rocks and shouting profanities, and a column of what he remembers as nervous-looking police officers.

Garrett-Edwards believes Hudson prevented a battle.

“Pastor Hudson was running around through the tear gas like it was nothing. He was born for this,” she says.

As the violence began to subside, Hudson, too, felt optimism swelling in Sandtown.

People from all over the country were sending clothes and food, he recalls, many from their home churches. Even more promising, others “were asking, ‘what can we do to help?’ They were allocating monies to come to Sandtown to work and build the community.

“We were hopeful that there was going to be a change,” says Hudson, already hearing promises of generous funding for rehabilitation projects from a range of sources. “We were hoping that maybe new jobs would come, new opportunities. Were were hopeful that there would be new housing opportunities for people who had no place to live.

“But we all ended up wondering, ‘what happened? What happened to the money?’ As soon as the media died down, things went back to business as usual. The only thing that came in were the Band- Aids. You put a Band-Aid on top of a deep wound that was still bleeding.”

‘Could have been a spark for the revival’

As if to underscore the sense of opportunity lost, three of the six officers charged in Gray’s death were acquitted at trial, and prosecutors dropped all remaining charges against the six in 2016.

“There was a lot of disappointment” in West Baltimore when that happened, Fowlkes, the barber, recalls. “I’m not saying they did anything to [Gray], but we know they didn’t get him any help. He shouldn’t have died.

Opinions vary as to where the millions rumored to have been targeted for Sandtown might have gone.

There are renewal projects taking place around the city, Phillips, the retired corrections officer, says, but in his view, they’re concentrated near preferred institutions such as Johns Hopkins Hospital or the University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Alston Buck laments that the national groups that donated amid the unrest never spoke directly with community members to determine their particular needs.

And for his part, Pastor Hudson says it was bigger organizations located outside Sandtown that “got money to work in the community,” but smaller, grassroots groups that work there and understand its needs received little support.

The events of April 2015 “could have been a spark for the revival of Sandtown, where people said, ‘We’re going to put more emphasis on drawing in businesses, on redeveloping property,'” Hudson says. “It could have been placing an emphasis on job training, on housing, not just giving people food and vegetables, things that can be thrown away.

“I’m not pointing the finger at any administration. I’m just pointing out the obvious. You can just drive down Pennsylvania Avenue and see. It’s better, but it should be further along than what it is.”

Like Alston Buck, who works with recovering clients at her three offices each day, and Garrett-Edwards, still a youth leader and pillar of the community, Hudson is doing his part.

He spent nearly eight years holding community meetings to learn Sandtown’s most important needs and available resources. He spearheaded enough fundraising and worked closely enough with the city to be able to buy eight vacant lots as the future site of Resurrection Sandtown, the community resource center he’s working to build. Further donations have expanded its footprint to 65,000 square feet, and he sees only positives coming — 120 units of housing, workforce development and more.

Hudson is the first to acknowledge there’s a long way to go. People are still living on the street and in substandard housing. People are still having to deal with drug addictions. Police are still trying to win back favor. The fight continues.

“It’s a work in progress. We’re better than what we used to be, but we’re not where we should be. So — small steps,” he says.

Baltimore Sun reporter Shaela Foster contributed to this story. Have a news tip? Contact Jonathan M. Pitts at jonpitts@baltsun.com.