By Gina Elleby and Deborah Jeon
When police point guns at children, they don’t just risk physical harm – they inflict lifelong trauma. As federal judge Roderick C. Young recently warned, “any time a gun is presented like that, that changes the whole dynamic of the interaction.”
That’s why what happened to a 15-year-old Frederick County child, identified here by the pseudonym “Callum,” is so devastating. And it’s why we are urging Frederick County Sheriff Charles Jenkins to act now to prevent this from recurring. We invite community members to join us.
During the pre-dawn hours of May 25, Callum was conducting a Memorial Day vigil with his Boy Scout troop in tribute to fallen service members, patrolling a Field of Honor with American flags at St. Ignatius Catholic Church. At about 4 a.m., two Frederick County deputies rushed out of the darkness at Callum, screaming “GET ON THE F***ING GROUND!” Body-worn camera shows one brandishing a handgun while the other pointed a rifle with a flashlight directly at the scout.
Terrified, Callum slowly lowered himself cross legged to the ground, hands raised, remaining as calm and composed as he could to avoid escalating the officers’ fury.
The deputies’ justification for their frightening assault? Callum is Black and young.
Police were searching for four young men suspected of crashing a stolen car described only as “Black and in dark clothing.” No evidence or information indicated any weapon. Just a description that could match countless innocent people, including a Boy Scout in uniform conducting a patriotic vigil.
This incident severely traumatized Callum. Like any parent, his mother, a Frederick physician, is likewise terrified by how close her son came to serious injury or death on such a flimsy basis. Working with the Frederick County Branch of the NAACP and the ACLU of Maryland, the family pursued complaints through the police disciplinary process, with little to show for it. No finding of excessive force, just a minor violation regarding body-worn camera usage.
Sheriff Jenkins maintains his deputies behaved appropriately.
They did not.
“You know, the Sheriff’s responsibility isn’t just to his men. His responsibility is to the community. And my son was put in danger by his men,” said Callum’s mother, “Sadly, this happened on the fifth anniversary of George Floyd’s murder.”
“People need to know that this happened and take it seriously,” Callum added.
The United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit addressed a strikingly similar case in September involving two Black teens approached by a gun-wielding Baltimore officer simply for being outside. When police appealed the jury’s $250,000 verdict, three federal judges expressed incredulity at the contention the jury got it wrong.
Judge Roderick Young emphasized that “when the gun is introduced it causes an element of fear …and that fear that that young person experienced is going to be with him probably for the rest of his life.”
Judge Roger Gregory agreed: “That young person, for the rest of his life, he’ll never forget that.”
Neither will Callum.
The harms are multiplied across all his relationships, threatening his feeling of home and community. “It’s why I left the Troop,” he says. “The memory of what happened just sticks in my head.”
Callum’s mother reinforces the point: “We haven’t been back to that Church. We try not to go past that field. We do our best to stay away.”
Statistics underscore why this matters. According to the Frederick County Sheriff’s own 2023 Annual Administrative Review, Black people make up only 12 percent of Frederick County’s population, yet criminal arrests of Black children accounted for 55 percent of all juvenile arrests that year.
Nationally, a Johns Hopkins University study released in January 2025 found more than 300 children were shot by police between 2015 and 2020 – a shocking 54 percent of them Black children. An Associated Press report counted roughly 3,000 children harmed by police over 11 years—more than half were Black.
Callum knows the importance of these numbers in his bones now, and carries it with him. He knows that police are more likely to presume he is dangerous, and that Black people experience disproportionately high police violence.
In this situation, deputies created danger where none existed, traumatizing an innocent child based on nothing more than his race and the time of day. The sheriff suggests he sees nothing wrong with that, compounding the harm.
We urge the community to join us in calling on Sheriff Jenkins to take commonsense action that acknowledges the harm to Callum and to police-community trust. Issue clear departmental guidance to protect Frederick County children from similar experiences and apologize publicly to Callum and his family for the irreparable harm his deputies inflicted. Pulling guns on children, Boy Scouts or not, is simply unacceptable.
If we have any hope of building trust between police and their communities—especially Black communities—this has to change.