jefferson lines mason city to msp st paul airport terminal 2

The closure became an act of nature, as unavoidable as a power failure in a storm: transit was shut down.

So ill-conceived was the decision that, even after months of pressing by local reporters, no one claimed credit for having issued it - not the mayor’s office, not the transit system, not the schools, not the cops. Rocks and debris were hurled in both directions: Ramallah in Baltimore. It was almost as if authorities were trying to engineer the confrontation that ensued between the growing mass of stranded youths and the outnumbered cops. “They were thrown into the middle of essentially a battle field.” “Students were trapped in the mess, whether they were choosing to participate or not,” one teacher who’d witnessed the scene recounted in a post on Facebook. Students arriving via transit from elsewhere for transfers at the hub were simply being dumped there. They also found that the bus lines through the hub were suspended, as was service at the Mondawmin subway station.

When students got out of Frederick Douglass High and other nearby schools that Monday afternoon, just after Freddie Gray’s memorial service had concluded, and headed for Mondawmin Mall, the transit hub for some 5,000 of them, they found several hundred police waiting, mobilized by social media rumors of an after-school rampage that would start at the mall and head toward downtown, three miles away. The Baltimore riot of April 27, 2015, started with a shutdown of public transportation. In late April and early May 2015, Baltimore experienced days of protests following the death of Freddie Gray.

Jefferson lines mason city to msp st paul airport terminal 2