Every Sunday morning, Dennis Slaughter’s cousin sets him up to sell copies of The Baltimore Sun on a concrete median near a traffic light in Southwest Baltimore.

Neither Slaughter nor his cousin, an independent contractor, work for the newspaper; the choice of sales location is theirs. In Slaughter’s case, it’s the four-foot-wide median on the stretch of U.S. 40 known as Edmondson Avenue. It’s a busy boulevard, though a little less so Sunday mornings, with three lanes on each side of the narrow median.

Slaughter says he likes it there, in the middle of traffic, because he makes sales to customers in cars, trucks, SUVs and church vans on both sides of the median. “People are nice,” he says.

He’s 57 years old and gets around with a cane. “I have a bad hip,” he says. He works “side jobs” in home improvement during the week. Come Sunday, he opens a blue folding chair and sits on the median, between Cooks Lane and Nottingham Road in the Hunting Ridge area, stacks of newspapers at his feet.

On a good day, Slaughter will sell 150 copies of The Sun to drivers who pull up and hand him cash. He has regular customers, and some leave a tip.

“I enjoy it,” Slaughter says of his Sunday gig. “I like my customers. I enjoy being here and talking to people.”

The morning of June 18 was sunny, with temperatures starting in the 60s and headed up. It was Father’s Day, and Slaughter’s sales were steady. Then, he says, this happened:

“Two guys on a scooter came past and asked me how much the paper was. I said, ‘A dollar-fifty.’ They said, ‘You got change for a 20?’ I said no, because I’m leery about changing money. One said, ‘Well, I’ll be back to get a paper,’ and when they came back, they came from the backside of me, and the guy that was on the back of the scooter came in, stuck the gun in my ribs.”

Slaughter says the guy with the gun got all his cash to that point, but he’s not sure exactly how much; he figures somewhere between $50 and $75.

The guy with the gun got back on the scooter; he and his fellow loser sped off.

Slaughter called 911.

Baltimore police officers were taking a report when Denise Wardlaw, one of Slaughter’s regular customers, pulled up to the median. She’s gotten to know the newspaper salesman well enough to learn that he’s “somewhat disabled” by that bad hip and probably needs surgery to replace it. Wardlaw was worried when she saw Slaughter and the cops at the median.

“He told me he’d just been robbed,” she says.

She later reported the robbery to a Hunting Ridge email group.

Marsha Wise, a real estate agent and president of the Hunting Ridge Community Assembly, was among the many who read that lousy news.

She decided to call on her neighbors to replace the money Slaughter had lost; they could pay her via Venmo or leave cash in Wise’s mailbox.

And that’s what happened.

For all the awful that happens in Baltimore every day of the week, there’s this story, from a summer Sunday. I’ll let Marsha Wise tell it:

“Throughout the week, I was getting payments and envelopes in my mailbox. I got about $165 through the community and then I just rounded it up with my own money to make it a nice even $200. I went to the bank and got him two $100 bills because the bulk of the money was through Venmo.

“I wrote in the card just, you know, ‘Sorry. We heard what happened to you and hopefully this will help make up for it.” And I drove up there Sunday morning [June 25] to give him the card. I asked him, ‘How much did you lose?’ And he goes, “Between $50 and $75.’ I just smiled because I really had hoped we would make up whatever he lost plus a little more.

“So I went on my way and I pulled up to the traffic light [at Nottingham Road]. And as I sat at the red light, I look back in my rearview and I see him opening the card up, and then I see him pick up his blue bandanna with both hands and just start crying into it. He was sobbing. And I was like, ‘Oh my goodness.’

“So I did a U-turn and went back. I pulled up and put my flashers on. I hopped out of the car, and I was like, ‘It wasn’t supposed to make you cry. That was supposed to make you smile.’

“And I gave him a big hug. And he’s like, ‘You don’t know how much this means to me. No one’s ever done this for me.’”

Last Sunday, Slaughter was at his usual post, selling papers on the narrow median. He says he’s received some gifts of cash from Hunting Ridge neighbors who didn’t get to make an earlier donation. “I appreciate them doing that,” he says.

He seems to take what happened on June 18 in stride. But what happened the following Sunday, with Marsha Wise and the envelope, puts a little crack in his voice. “That,” he says, “was a beautiful day.”