In Whatever Job He Held, His Role Was Champion for D.C. Kids

The last time Tom Blagburn called me, I didn't return the call. I was on deadline and didn't have time to talk, especially to Tom, a dear man and contact of mine who, almost a decade after I stopped covering D.C. police, still phoned urging me to write stories. He pitched a story about this young man just out of jail who was trying to make it, or that program working wonders with kids who needed help getting into college.

I knew from experience that if you didn't have 20 minutes to talk, it was not wise to take Tom Blagburn's calls.

Tom, former director of community policing and youth gang intervention for the D.C. police, was 64 when he died April 28 of pancreatic cancer. He was widely regarded as one of the most fiercely committed civilians on the police force. "Tom was a man who stood up" for what was right, former D.C. police chief Isaac Fulwood told me when I called to inquire about Tom's death.

With his jovial manner and cardigan sweaters, Tom was good-natured, but he was also one of the most insistent, most relentless, most intense champions of the city's young people -- those who were on the right track, those who found themselves caught in the criminal justice system and those who were struggling to find their way back after running afoul of the law.

I knew listening to his message that day that a conversation would net a cascade of ideas and suggestions on ways that a story or two could draw attention to the city's youth.

When Tom called reporters, he always had a good story, even though sometimes we couldn't tell it. After I stopped covering the District and moved to the suburbs several years ago, he'd still call. "If you can't write it, you should make sure somebody else does it," he would tell me.

When he died, I thought back on stories he had urged me to do, ones I had and ones I hadn't. I remember him calling me at my desk one afternoon in the mid-1990s and demanding to show me something. I picked him up at police headquarters and we took a ride over to Barry Farm, a public housing complex in Southeast. I'd written a story about a murder that he thought besmirched the neighborhood, made folks feel bad about living there.

So for 90 minutes, while I was on deadline on another story, Tom escorted me around play areas at Barry Farm. We talked to children and adults. I learned a lesson about being more sensitive to the people who live in neighborhoods where unfortunate things sometimes happen.

Another time, he made me go to a McDonald's restaurant to meet a young woman who had recently graduated from beauty school. Her mother had been a crack addict; her father had been absent. Her grandmother had raised her.

Despite that, she had graduated from high school, gone to beauty school and won an award or contest for being able to do phenomenal designs with human and faux hair. I couldn't do the story, but I recommended it to a colleague. I don't think it ever got written, but Tom, I'm sure, felt better about at least putting the idea out there.

Since his funeral last week, many of Tom's friends have been talking about how he lassoed them into various programs. Former police official Lowell Duckett called him a "coalition builder" known for bringing a variety of resources together to help the city's less fortunate. He acted as a bridge among Christians and Muslims, blacks, whites, Asians and Hispanics, original gangstas and young bloods, law enforcement and ex-offenders.

In practice, his own ideas varied widely. He started a T-shirt business, called YouthWorks 2000, to give young people experience as entrepreneurs, and he also arranged to have psychologists team with police at crime scenes, to talk to children devastated by a homicide. He made me spend a day at YouthWorks once, meeting the young people. He also made me buy a bunch of T-shirts.