Did Freddie Gray Die of Lead Poisoning?

Not a bullet, but according to this Washington Post article, his behavior and criminality (which ultimately brought him into police custody) may have been the result of chronic lead poisoning from leaded paint acquired as a kid from leaded paint:

family photo of Freddie Gray from
 a court filing for a lawsuit in 2008
 against a former landlord

Freddie Gray’s life a study on the effects of lead paint on poor blacks

Before Freddie Gray was injured in police custody last month, before he died and this city was plunged into rioting, his life was defined by failures in the classroom, run-ins with the law and an inability to focus on anything for very long.

Many of those problems began when he was a child and living in this house, according to a 2008 lead-poisoning lawsuit filed by Gray and his siblings against the property owner. The suit resulted in an undisclosed settlement.

It's not just a vague allegation in this case (as it often is). Freddie Gray and family actually won a lawsuit on this basis. However, could the homeowner have settled rather than fight the actual data?

It is nonetheless hard to know whether Gray’s problems were exclusively borne of lead poisoning or were the result of other socioeconomic factors as well. From birth, his was a life of intractable poverty that would have been challenging to overcome.

Pro forma acknowledgment that the case is questionable, even if Freddie had excess lead levels.

Equally difficult to know is the total number of children lead has poisoned. That’s because the declared threshold for how much lead a body can safely tolerate has shifted dramatically over the years as researchers have come to better understand its dangers. Decades ago, city health officials tested for blood lead levels that were higher than 20 micrograms of lead per deciliter of blood. Now, it is believed that anything higher than 5 micrograms can cripple a child’s cognitive development.

For those unfamiliar with the unit, a "deciliter" is one tenth of a liter (or 100 milliliters), making 20 micrograms/deciliter equal to 200 micrograms per liter (or 200 parts per billion. That's a shit load of lead.

“In 1993, we found that 13,000 kids in Baltimore had been poisoned with lead, but we weren’t collecting at the levels that we are today,” said Ruth Ann Norton, the executive director of the Coalition to End Childhood Lead Poisoning. “If we had, we would have found 30,000 poisoned kids.”

Overall, more than 93,000 children with lead poisoning have been added to the state’s Department of the Environment lead registries over the past two decades, a time frame in which Baltimore and other cities have substantially reduced the number of houses with paint containing lead.

“A child who was poisoned with lead is seven times more likely to drop out of school and six times more likely to end up in the juvenile justice system,” Norton said. She called lead poisoning Baltimore’s “toxic legacy” — a still-unfolding tragedy with which she says the city has yet to come to terms. Those kids who were poisoned decades ago are now adults. And the trauma associated with lead poisoning ­“creates too much of a burden on a community,” she said.

Did the cock crowing cause the sun to rise? Is lead poisoning an actual cause of Freddie's mental and behavior issues, or was it coincident? Are the pathologies of the ghetto a result of lead paint, or are they independent problems.

Unfortunately, perhaps, we cannot run controlled, blind studies where one population is fed lead and another is not, allowing a fair comparison.