The Survivors Lexicon
The Survivors is the name for a group of five young Black men from West Baltimore who have been best friends since childhood (c. 2007–2008) and were bound together permanently by a traumatic police violence incident in June 2019.
Overview
Main article: The Survivors
The group consists of: * Marcus Henderson Jr. (“MJ”)—The one whose mental health crisis brought the police response. Bipolar Type 1, FASD, and autism diagnosed in adulthood. Later became a veterinary technician. * Kevin Williams—Had Officer Rodriguez’s gun pointed at him during the 2019 incident. Developed PTSD. Became a licensed clinical professional counselor and trauma therapist. * Darnell Taylor—Pulled Kevin to safety during the incident. Became a Baltimore police officer, graduating top of his class in 2026. * Tre Martin—Served in the United States Marine Corps and was medically retired after surviving a catastrophic training accident. * Jamal Thompson—Graduated from Georgetown University Law Center and pursued civil-rights work focused on police misconduct, mental-health crisis response, and institutional reform.
Origin and Etymology
The name emerged organically from both the community and the friends themselves after the June 2019 incident, when Marcus experienced a mental health crisis at age sixteen and his four friends arrived to help before police. Officer Rodriguez escalated the situation by firing a warning shot and pointing his weapon at Kevin. The viral video of the incident (6.8 million views) made the five young men visible to a nation that already knew this story—knew it from Eric Garner, from Tamir Rice, from every Black boy who met police force when he needed care.
“The Survivors” acknowledged not just their survival of the 2019 incident but something larger: their collective resilience through childhood in West Baltimore, through systemic racism, through the ongoing reality of being young Black men in America. They survived that night. They survived every night before it. The name held both.
Emotional and Cultural Connotations
The Survivors differed from the Ride-or-Dies and the Howard Crew because their bond was forged at the intersection of mental-health crisis and police violence. They remained together as Kevin became a trauma therapist, Darnell became a police officer, Marcus stabilized and built a life, Tre entered the Marine Corps, and Jamal pursued civil-rights work after graduating from Georgetown University Law Center.
Darnell’s choice to become a police officer after watching Rodriguez point a gun at his best friend is perhaps the most loaded fact in the group’s story. The Survivors held that contradiction without breaking—the friend who became the thing that almost killed them, not out of betrayal but out of a conviction that the institution needed people who knew what the barrel of the gun looked like from the other side.