Baltimore police arrest two men after dice game pursuit, truck hits patrol cars

A bullet-riddled truck, a ghost gun accusation and a dice-game dispute turned a South Baltimore street into a fast-moving police pursuit that ended with two patrol cars struck and Hugh Morton and Ezekiel Morton under arrest.

Baltimore police said the brothers, ages 29 and 32, drew officers’ attention after two women approached them and accused the men of trying to shoot them, according to court records. As officers moved in, police said the truck fled and struck two patrol cars on Wednesday, April 16, 2026. The vehicle was described as bullet-riddled, a detail that underscored how quickly a street dispute can become a public safety emergency in a dense city neighborhood.

The episode fits a pattern Baltimore has seen before in South Baltimore, where dice games have repeatedly intersected with gun violence and police action. In a separate 2017 case, police seized 12 firearms from two cars after what authorities described as a brief pursuit tied to an illegal dice game. That kind of repeat scenario points to the same hard problem for the city: the moment a gambling dispute turns violent, the risks spread beyond the people in the argument and into the surrounding blocks, where pedestrians, drivers and officers can be caught in the middle.

The enforcement picture is complicated by the city’s own legal constraints. A 2020 WBFF / FOX45 report said a U.S. Department of Justice review found Baltimore police filed 657 gambling-related charges from 2010 to 2015 for gaming or playing cards or dice, while Baltimore’s police consent decree limits gambling enforcement and requires a warning first plus supervisory approval before an arrest. That framework reflects the tension between crackdowns on disorder and the city’s oversight rules, even as residents continue to see the fallout of illegal gambling and gun disputes on their streets.

The Morton arrest also landed in the middle of Baltimore’s broader fight against ghost guns. In August 2025, the City of Baltimore said a jury awarded it $62 million in damages against Hanover Armory LLC in a ghost-gun case. Baltimore officials said police had confiscated more than 460 ghost guns in 2023 and more than 150 by mid-2025. Taken together, the numbers show a city still wrestling with a familiar sequence: illegal guns, volatile street gatherings and the danger that a single dispute can turn a neighborhood block into a crash scene.