By 2001, I had worked the Baltimore cop beat for more than six years, and I was tired. I was about to take a new posting in the Middle East, and had hoped the city would quiet down a bit as I slowly moved away from the beat that had made me want to be a journalist in the first place.

But Baltimore crime doesn't take a vacation (neither did the Middle East, I found out). In April 2001, Carlos Woods would become the last significant victim I'd cover -- my final front page shooting on the beat. Carlos was shot in the head on Chapel Street in East Baltimore while reaching for a juice cup in his doorway. A man with a gun riding in car was shooting at another man running up the street. The man dove into the open doorway where Carlos was sitting, and bullet hit him in the head.

A nearby cop rushed after the gunman and another took care of Carlos. A crowd of angry neighbors gathered in the narrow alley street, and paramedics had to push Carlos through the crowd to a waiting ambulance. Carlos' great uncle told me, "You never know when a bullet is going to fly." A neighbor said, "That boy was right where he was supposed to be -- at his house. You can't get no safer than that."

One would think.

The police commissioner at the time, Edward T. Norris, called it "a horrible tragedy" and noting the victim's age, said, "It doesn't get any worse than that."

Police quickly arrested a man and the next day his public defender asked a judge to set bail. An incredulous District Judge Timothy J. Doory, shot back sarcastically that he would happily consider bail, but that the bail "would be so large and the conditions so onerous that I cannot imagine that the defendant could survive under the circumstances."

The suspect later pleaded guilty to second-degree attempted murder, was sentenced to 11 years in prison (by a different judge) and was released this past August. He had served his mandatory sentence -- defenants usually serve about two-thirds of the time they receive, and he is now on probation through 2011.

I had mentioned Carlos' name in a previous column listing children hit by gunfire, after another child was shot and killed in West Baltimore after having delivered grapefruit to an elderly neighbor. People who read the column mistakenly thought Carlos had died and flooded his great-aunt and caregiver, Nicole Coombs, with calls. She called me and invited me to visit.

I showed up a few days shy of Carlos' 10th birthday.

He can't talk, but he can smile. He's in a wheelchair and attends a special school. He has no memory of what happened to him; his great-aunt took him after his mother, who was 14 when she gave birth, couldn't handle the care and a foster home over-medicated him. He now lives a block from where he was shot (and a block from where the shooter lives).

I'm glad Carlos survived, but also sad -- he's a living reminder to the violence on the streets, almost forgotten amid the long list of the dead and the new victims that pile up every day. His family is strong, and while they feel the sentence the shooter got was unjust, they have moved on. Caring for Carlos is more important than justice.