Baltimore's 13th slaying in 12 days came last night in Northeast Baltimore. Another teenager, another candle to light at the Episcopal Cathedral of the Incarnation on North Charles Street, where they mourn the city's dead youth every Sunday.

The fatal stabbing occurred at The Alameda and East 32nd St. in Coldstream-Homestead Montebello nearly one year to the day that another youth was killed a block away from there. On Jan. 9 of last year, Zachariah Hallback, 18, was shot in a robbery while waiting at a bus stop at The Alameda and East 33rd St.

Here is a look at one of the articles The Baltimore Sun ran on Hallback, by police reporter Gus G. Sentementes and school reporter Sara Neufeld:

Though he had dropped out of high school and was completing his GED, Zachariah Hallback had found a cause to believe in: improving inner-city schools.

The 18-year-old was an advocate with the Baltimore Algebra Project, a student-run tutoring group known for its passionate stance on improving education. He regularly wore on his hat a button displaying the group's slogan, "No Education, No Life."Hallback was shot in a robbery last Wednesday at a bus stop in front of two friends at East 33rd Street and The Alameda in Northeast Baltimore. He had visited a friend who was attending Morgan State University. He died in a hospital Saturday.

"He was funny," Faye Brown, 21, said of her friend during a vigil at the scene of the killing yesterday. "He had a great attitude. He was all about life. All he wanted to do was better himself."

At the vigil, Marvin "Doc" Cheatham, president of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, pleaded with city residents to help police catch Hallback's killer.

"This was a good kid," Cheatham said, "a good kid who was doing good things with the Algebra Project. ... He was killed senselessly. ... If a young good child like this can be killed - not a bad child, not a kid doing something wrong - then it could happen to any one of us."

We don't yet know many details in the latest killing, part of a wave of violence that has swept the city since the beginning of the year. A fellow crime blogger, Jerry 'Buz' Busnuk, a retired Baltimore police commander, sums up the year in his latest blog entry. And Baltimore Police Commissioner Frederick H. Bealefeld III talked about violence in a wide-ranging news conference last week after several slayings in East Baltimore.