When the average American child gets sick, he or she is usually just coming down with another case of the flu, or perhaps an ear infection, or maybe just a bad head cold (since kids get anywhere from six to 10 colds per year — a statistic that won’t surprise parents at all).
But the recent controversy over Freddie Gray’s murder has brought to light another pressing health concern that too many children in Baltimore have faced for too long: lead poisoning resulting from long-term exposure to lead-based paint in the homes, churches, and stores that fill Baltimore’s poorest streets.
The Washington Post and TIME have both noted that lead poisoning may actually play an important role in determining what happened to Freddie Gray, especially after the Post discovered that Gray, from 1992 to 1996, lived in a North Carey St. house which had walls and window sills covered with dry, peeling strips of lead paint.
Back in 2008, Gray and his two sisters actually filed a lawsuit against the owner of the house for allowing the property to be rented out, despite being filled with toxic paint. The lawsuit resulted with an undisclosed settlement, the Post reports, but the medical consequences of lead poisoning may have affected Gray — and thousands of other children and young adults in low-income city neighborhoods — and prohibited him from reaching his true potential.
In short, the existence of lead paint in so many low-income homes could be trapping children in a life of poverty.
The precise effects of lead poisoning are still under debate, but medical experts strongly agree that there are terrible effects, especially for developing children, which is why lead has now been outlawed.
The Post states that research has found lead poisoning to “diminish cognitive function, increase aggression, and ultimately exacerbate the cycle of poverty that is already exceedingly difficult to break.”
Gray himself had a hard time focusing on school and was prone to impulsive mood swings — which is common for nearly every child and teenager in his Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood in West Baltimore; city and school officials have admitted that ADHD diagnoses are abnormally high in those neighborhoods. One of Gray’s sisters has a history of aggression, and Gray’s mother has stated that her own anxiety is most likely a result of the lead poisoning as well.
Whether or not Freddie Gray had experienced lead poisoning won’t explain what happened on the day he was killed in police custody. But it could explain why Gray, and so many of his peers, have been trapped in a cycle of poverty.