14-year-old boy shot in Highlandtown, police question person of interest

A 14-year-old boy was shot in Highlandtown on Thursday afternoon, and Baltimore police said a person of interest was in custody for questioning as officers worked the 100 block of Noble Street, between Conkling Street and North Highland Avenue.

Police responded around 3:15 p.m. and found the boy suffering from gunshot wounds. His injuries were described as non-life-threatening. The shooting unfolded close to nearby homes, and witnesses said they heard several gunshots before seeing the teenager being helped by medics.

The case landed in a city already rattled by another child shooting just hours earlier. Police said the Highlandtown shooting came about 20 hours after an 11-year-old was shot at a playground in Upton, near Pennsylvania Avenue and Dolphin Street next to Templeton Elementary School. Officers were called to that scene just after 7:40 p.m. Wednesday, May 28, 2026. Police later released surveillance video as they tried to identify people connected to that investigation.

Together, the two shootings underscored how often children are still being pulled into Baltimore’s gun violence, whether on playgrounds or on neighborhood blocks where families expect a more ordinary afternoon. For residents, the fear is not abstract. It reaches school routes, after-school routines and the short walks between home, corner stores and recreation spaces that shape daily life in Highlandtown, Upton and other nearby neighborhoods.

City officials have said Baltimore’s violence-reduction approach relies on the Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement, or MONSE, and on Safe Streets Baltimore, the community-based gun violence intervention program launched in 2007 and modeled after Chicago’s Cure Violence approach. On March 27, Mayor Brandon M. Scott said MONSE would mobilize violence-intervention partners for ground-level outreach through Labor Day weekend as part of the city’s spring and summer youth engagement strategy.

The shootings landed against a backdrop of still-heavy violence totals. In a May 1 statement, Scott said Baltimore had recorded 33 homicides and 89 non-fatal shootings through that morning, even as April 2026 marked the fewest homicides in a single month since at least 1970.

For Highlandtown, the immediate question is whether those outreach efforts are reaching the right blocks fast enough, before another child ends up in the hospital and another neighborhood is left counting the hours between shootings.