With a gash on his forehead and a swollen black eye, John Berardi’s view of Baltimore City will never be the same.
“It’s very, ironically, opened my eyes,” Berardi said. “What you’re supposed to enjoy in a city, walking, getting food, they’re all a lot more dangerous than you thought.”
“It’s hard to imagine feeling safe going anywhere around here now,” echoed his fiancée, Chrissy Costill.
After being in and out of the hospital for the last four days, on Wednesday, doctors delivered the devastating news that Berardi’s eyesight was permanently damaged from a brutal attack in his Federal Hill neighborhood, a place the young couple has called home for the last seven years.
“Basically, anything I’m looking directly at is just kind of like a gray square and everything else is pretty cloudy right now,” Berardi said. “Every morning, you wake up, you think you just watched a bad dream, and then you can’t see out of your eye, and it all comes flooding back.”
The incident occurred Saturday night near the corner of Charles Street and East Fort Avenue. All of it was caught on surveillance camera. As Berardi was walking home with a pizza around 11 p.m., a route he’s taken thousands of times, he says a group of young people suddenly approached him.
“They’re demanding, give me that pizza. Like, alright, it’s not worth it. Everyone calm down,” Berardi recalled saying. “Here’s the pizza, and they took it, and I turned around, like, alright, let’s keep moving.”
But as he turns away, one of them follows, senselessly striking Berardi with a metal pole. With one swing, the suspect fractured his nose, tore his iris, and left a hole in his retina.
“I was shocked. Not only to hear that he had gotten assaulted, of course, but to hear that it was just right in this area that had always been so familiar,” Costill said.
Making matters worse, Berardi and his fiancée say they were also shocked it took officers 45 minutes to respond and to learn this might not have been the group’s first offense of the day.
“We were told by police, and also residents who reached out for support, that police were called multiple times for the same group that assaulted him,” Costill said. “We were told that they threw a brick through somebody’s window. They were rummaging through people’s property.”
“They just couldn’t catch up to get them before something like this happened,” Berardi said. “It’s easy for me to be frustrated because, it’s me and I’ve been damaged. But having talked to them more, I think they’re also frustrated that a lot of times these are juveniles that get caught and released. So, they’re doing their job, but then it’s just, you know, it doesn’t matter, because they get right back out, and then they’ve got to go catch them again.”
Baltimore Police spokesperson Lindsey Eldridge disputes the time it took officers to arrive. She claims, “BPD arrived to the scene within 5 minutes of the 911 call.” She also could not confirm if the suspects are believed to be juveniles or if any arrests have been made, only willing to say the investigation is open and ongoing.
For Berardi, he’s now wrestling with the idea of leaving a city he’s loved for many years. It’s a choice he doesn’t want to make, but fears it may be the only way to escape the ongoing violence and escalating juvenile crime problem.
“Whatever the reason, it was fun for them, whatever it was. They can hit you in the face, take away your eyesight, rob you, and then have zero repercussions. That’s just not okay,” Berardi said. “Anyone watching this would probably say, yeah, just leave. Like, what are you doing? You should know better. Like, that story, you live in Baltimore, so just leave. I don’t know, maybe that is what we do. Maybe you really can’t fix this. Maybe not enough people want to fix it. So, there’s no point in trying really hard to do that. So, maybe we do end up leaving, but I’d like to not do that. I’d like to see some change.”
“Whether we leave or not, we would like to see change,” Costill said. “So, these sorts of things don’t continue to happen because it could happen to anyone, at any point, any day.”
Have a news tip? Contact Rebecca Pryor at rpryor@sbgtv.com.