In the midst of reporting the 18 shootings that occurred Sunday in Baltimore, a colleague sent me a story I had written in 2000 and all but forgotten:

Baltimore Mayor Martin O'Malley's pledge to reclaim 10 drug-infested areas within six months of taking office has been largely fulfilled, police said yesterday, with crime down and fewer people complaining about dealers and addicts. Homicides and shootings also dropped on streets surrounding the designated drug markets, which police say shows they are not simply shuffling the drug trade from one block to another. "The liberation of Baltimore's neighborhoods has begun," O'Malley said yesterday while standing at North Rose Street and Ashland Avenue, ground zero for a band of frustrated residents who have confronted dealers.

Rose and Ashland is two blocks from Lakewood and Ashland, where a gunman opened fire on a backyard cookout and wounded a dozen people, the start of a wave of violence that ran into early Monday. So much for the liberation.

As my colleagues on the crime beat point out in today's paper in vivid and chilling detail, the story of what happened in the intervening years is familiar but complicated. It starts with warring drug families, who apparently worked well together until one group engineered a home invasion and kidnapped two members of the other group.

That's where law enforcement and the suspected criminals they are supposed to arrest got tangled in a still unexplained web. The cops treated the kidnapping seriously, perhaps more seriously than the abductors had thought, by putting up Amber alerts and flooding the area with police. But suspicions quickly grew when the family of the victims refused to cooperate, and police quickly suspected one rival drug gang had targeted another.

A backroom deal was made which guaranteed the safe return of the kidnapped brothers, who were paraded to a police station in Baltimore County to prove they were indeed unharmed, and then all would be quietly forgotten. No criminal charges. No apparent investigation. What was unsaid then but revealed in court documents published in today's Baltimore Sun -- a $500,000 ransom was paid out.

Even if police decided not to arrest anyone in the kidnappings, they now had a roadmap of two violent drug gangs in the city. The feds took over and court documents show they had made progress, arresting a couple people on gun charges after a shooting outside an Eastside store, finding a gun and even coming up with the names of the suspects who orchestrated the kidnappings.

But nothing was ever done. While law enforcement slept, the two gangs went at it, leaving behind a years worth of killings and shootings that at first appeared to be routine random violence we are all so used to but now shows a calculated drug war that somehow was left alone as body after body fell in East and Southeast Baltimore.

Now we have Baltimore's police commissioner and mayor questioning the pace of the federal probe. But there are even more questions to answer. One of the victims of the cookout shooting was a member of Operation Safe Streets, an innovative program that uses ex-offenders to mediate gang disputes to prevent violence. It was hailed a success for its first year when no murders took place in a violent city neighborhood, and the counselor being at the party is indeed part of his job. But why didn't police know about the party? And now that the counselor is a witness, and a victim, he has an obligation to step forward and tell police what he knows. The program works under a city agency, the health department, and we can't have cops pleading with people to help them while allowing someone under another city agency to keep quiet.

Operation Safe Streets works because the gang leaders who don't trust the cops do trust the workers. If a counselor goes to the cops, the gangs won't cooperate. So we sacrifice information for quiet. But it's not quiet anymore, and serious questions needs to be answered from the program's administrators as to what they knew about the party, the dispute and the gunmen.

Questions also have to be asked about how and why Baltimore County Police allowed kidnappers to go free without pursuing criminal charges? Even if at the time the deal was sound because no one was giving up any information at all, cops can't simply sit back and allow two drug groups to exchange money for prisoners and then say case closed and walk away. The case was indeed closed in the county, where the kidnappings occurred, but far from closed as members retaliated in deadly precision on city streets.

Now we're all left to pick up the pieces.