One year ago this week, Keith Davis Jr. almost became another rallying cry against police brutality when four Baltimore police officers chased him into a garage and fired off 44 rounds at him, striking him three times, including in the face. Had he died, Davis would have become the first person killed by Baltimore police since Freddie Gray, who died in April 2015 of a severed spine after officers loaded him handcuffed, shackled and unrestrained into a police van. Instead, Davis survived, a bullet still visibly lodged in his neck serving as a reminder of how narrowly. Davis’ shooting didn’t spark the massive protests that Gray’s death ignited, but his story illustrates what might have happened to Gray had he survived. “He is the second part of Freddie Gray,” Davis’s fiancée, Kelly Holsey, told The Intercept. “Freddie Gray passed away. Had he lived, he would have been arrested, had charges thrown on him, would have had to fight the court system, would have had to fight the State’s Attorney’s Office. And that’s what Keith is going through now.” Between 2006 and Gray’s death in 2015, 67 people were killed in encounters with Baltimore police, according to the Baltimore Sun. Only two of the police officers involved in those killings were charged with a crime. Following Gray’s death, the Department of Justice opened an investigation into the Baltimore Police Department, focusing on its use of force, including deadly force, and its pattern of discriminatory policing. The police commissioner was fired, the city’s officials engaged in a public exercise of soul searching, and police reform became the talk of the town. In May 2015, standing on the steps of Baltimore’s War Memorial as protests raged in the streets, the city’s state’s attorney, Marilyn Mosby, charged six police officers with Gray’s death. “I have heard your calls for ‘no justice, no peace,’” she said from the podium, addressing Baltimore’s youth, but also, it seemed, the nationwide movement for police accountability that had been rocking the country over the previous year. Months earlier, as she was sworn in as the youngest prosecutor of a major U.S. city, Mosby had spoken of the “diminishing trust” between the city’s citizens and law enforcement. “The time to repair that trust, to come together … is now,” she said. Today, more than a year since Gray’s death, Davis’ story is sobering evidence of the failure to repair that trust. Unlike Gray, Davis survived his encounter with officers, but the handling of his case raises serious questions about the credibility of police and prosecutors. Many in Baltimore wonder if the public’s confidence in the city’s law enforcement institutions is beyond repair. “The mistrust is something we have to deal with on a daily basis,” Todd Oppenheim, a Baltimore public defender who has been critical of the city’s justice system, told The Intercept. Prosecutors chasing convictions at all costs, often with weak cases, have only contributed to the animosity against the city’s justice apparatus, he said, and the greater scrutiny Gray’s death supposedly brought to officer-involved cases in Baltimore has made little difference. 44 Shots Fired On the day Davis was shot, an unlicensed cab driver named Charles Holden nearly slammed his car into a group of police officers who were responding to an accident. A man in the passenger seat leaped out and ran off, as Holden frantically told officers the man had pulled a silver-colored gun and tried to rob him. What happened next varies wildly depending on whom you ask. Police claim that Davis was the man who fled the car. Davis says he just happened to be at that street intersection and they went after the wrong guy. Police chased him into a dimly lit garage, where they say they told him to drop his gun. Davis claims police just started shooting at him. In the garage, police later found a gun — green and multicolor, not silver — sitting on top of a refrigerator behind which Davis had taken cover. Davis, who called his fiancée as the officers started chasing him, said he was just holding a phone. “Baby I’ma die,” Holsey remembered him saying — and then, to the officers, “Why y’all tryin’ to kill me?”

Photo: Courtesy of Kelly Holsey

Had he died, Davis’s case likely would have been quickly closed as another justified police shooting. There might have been a few rallies in his name, maybe a hashtag on social media. Instead, Davis was charged with 16 criminal counts, including attempted robbery, assault, gun possession, and discharge of a firearm. He always maintained he was innocent and refused to take plea deals that were offered to him. Then things got murkier. The discharge of a firearm charge was dropped. Upon investigation, it turned out the gun had been unloaded at the time of the incident and that all shots had been fired by police. In December, months after the shooting and weeks before trial, prosecutors tacked on a new charge: firearm possession with a felony conviction. Because of his prior criminal history, Davis was not permitted to own a gun or be in close proximity to one. After a trial riddled with inconsistent and contradictory testimony, a jury acquitted Davis of all charges except the one that had been added last minute: Somewhat incongruously, Davis was acquitted of carrying or wearing a gun, but convicted of possessing a gun as a prohibited person, and sentenced to the required five-year minimum. But Davis’s ordeal was not over. Days after his trial ended — in a conviction for him, but also a rejection of the prosecution’s broader case — he was charged with first-degree murder, because the gun found on the scene had been linked to a homicide that had occurred earlier that day. Davis is appealing the first conviction and preparing to fight the murder charge — that trial is scheduled to start July 27, his 25th birthday. He and his supporters, who held a rally Tuesday on the anniversary of his shooting, have maintained from day one that the charges brought against him were an attempt to cover up a wrongful police shooting. “What actually happened is they went after the wrong guy. And they are not willing to admit it,” Holsey told me in April, standing outside Baltimore’s jail. “They are coming at him with everything they have because they have made a mistake, and instead of apologizing, they just continue to systematically ruin his life.” “He still believes he didn’t do anything, and the evidence will show it,” she added, as her children and a small group of supporters climbed walls, banged on drums, and wrote “Free Keith Davis Jr.” in spray paint over a giant banner. “I’m a nervous wreck because I understand that they will do anything, lying, conniving, being deceitful.” Across the street, two rows down from the top of the building, Davis started banging on the windows in response to their drums, soon joined by other inmates.

Kelly Holsey, center, with her children and supporters outside Baltimore’s city jail, where Davis was held before being sentenced on April 19, 2016. Photo: Alice Speri for The Intercept