A 38-year-old man was killed last night in Pen Lucy, another act of violence linked to a community that had seemed to emerge from the brink of years of bloodshed. The shooing occcurred shortly after 7 p.m. at Old York and Dunbarton roads, on a playground across the street from a garden memorializing the neighborhood's dead.

Robert Nowlin, a longtime community activist in the North Baltimore neighborhood, told me this morning he didn't think the shooting was related to gang violence. "I think it's an isolated incident, although unfortunate," he said.

Police didn't have much information or a name of the victim. Pen Lucy was for years a battleground between the Old York and Cator Avenue Boys and the McCabe Avenue Boys. Police and community leaders have said those two groups have for the most part been eradicated, though their names have surfaced recently in a federal drug indictment and in police charging documents in an arrest in a killing near McCabe Avenue turf.

Yesterday, I posted a piece by a man who was one of the founding members of the warring groups, who gave a chilling account of how they began in the mid-1960s and attributed years of animosity and bloodshed to a dance and a fight over a girl.