Baltimore smolders after violent night

As Baltimore residents recoiled from the rioting and looting that struck largely in the west of the city Monday, police said officers were deployed overnight alongside weary and harried firefighters to ensure their work was not disrupted by people with “no regard for life.”

As dawn broke, the city was relatively calm compared with the violence that had left 15 officers injured — six seriously — from thrown bottles, rocks and bricks, as well as dozens of businesses, homes and cars damaged or destroyed by looting or arson. It is not known how many protesters were injured.

Police also reported that two people had been shot, each in the leg, in separate incidents overnight. One victim, a woman, was shot on Fulton Avenue near where some of the worst rioting and looting had occurred hours earlier. The other victim, a man, was shot about two miles west of the Mondawmin Mall.

At the Mondawmin Mall, where the rioting began, a few police cars sat in the parking lot Tuesday, but the protesters seemed long gone. Police said a flier that circulated on social media had called for a period of violence Monday afternoon to begin at the mall and to move downtown toward City Hall.

Members of the National Guard began to deploy in the city just after daybreak Tuesday. Wearing tan and earth-green military fatigues and driving sandy-colored Humvees, they took up posts around the city’s Western District police station, the scene of earlier protests. More than a hundred National Guard members with rifles lined the street in front of Baltimore’s inner harbor.

State and city officials said they hoped that measures scheduled to be put into effect Tuesday would reduce the chances of a repeat of Monday’s unrest, where the police acknowledged that, at least early on, they had been outflanked and outnumbered.

The violence that shook the city broke out in the late afternoon in the Mondawmin neighborhood, where Gray’s funeral had taken place. Angry residents threw bottles, rocks and concrete at officers who lined up in riot gear. Cars were set on fire, store windows were shattered, a CVS drugstore was looted, and the cafe inside a century-old Italian deli was destroyed.

By nighttime, the chaos seemed to be competing with a push for calm. Looters pulled junk food from convenience stores within a few blocks of police in riot gear and cars that had been set ablaze. At the same time, young men from a local anti-violence group urged their neighbors to go back inside. A large fire burned in east Baltimore, consuming a partly built development project of the Southern Baptist Church that was to include housing for the elderly.

In Washington, Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch, on her first day on the job, briefed President Barack Obama.

City officials said schools would be closed on Tuesday for the safety of children. At City Hall, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, sounding exhausted and exasperated after days of appealing for calm, announced that a 10 p.m.-5 a.m. curfew would be imposed for a week beginning Tuesday.

“Too many people have spent generations building up this city for it to be destroyed by thugs,” she said. “I’m at a loss for words.” The police said that at least 27 people had been arrested.

Pastor Jamal Bryant, who delivered Gray’s eulogy, came back to the neighborhood after the burial on Monday afternoon to appeal for calm. “This is not what the family asked for, today of all days,” Bryant said.

Gray’s death on April 19, a week after sustaining a spinal cord injury while in police custody, has opened a deep wound in this majority-black city.

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By Richard A. Oppel Jr., Stephen Babcock and Sheryl Gay Stolberg