In my mind I keep seeing news photos of blood running down the sidewalk. I got an unexpected voicemail from a friend and old neighbor/housemate the day after saying he had moved and I found it strange, having not yet found out a man had been murdered across the street from our house. Now I can't get in touch with him to ask if this is what drove him out.

Someone died with their skull cut open on a piece of sidewalk I must have walked on a thousand times. The lack of a reason, a motive, any explanation at all at this point, gnaws a hollow in my heart. How does a community begin to accept death when it is this senseless, perpetrated against a random, innocent person merely caught in the wrong place at the wrong time?

I work in a city with a murder rate second only to Detroit. What really rattles me is I'm not writing about Baltimore, I'm writing about a small college town in Amish country where I spent the past three years of my life.

If I went to Park Heights and talked about this one murder, the first in the town since 1982, people would say everyone should be so lucky. That just underscores the tragedy of a city so ravaged by homicides. How do people exist in a world where death is so commonplace and it's so rarely possible to make sense out of life? When I look at children in the schools and streets, I forget that in many neighborhoods by age 10 they have all seen a dead body under a sheet.

I am not sure how I would cope if I still lived in that apartment, if I remembered every time I walked outside that an innocent life had died right beneath my feet. But what about the people who can't escape? What about the people who live their whole life witnessing senseless loss of life in their street, their block, their neighborhood? How do they keep going? How do we blame them for losing sight of hope and optimism, a sense of things working out for the best?