May 4, 2015 3 min read

Edward Lorenz, a now-departed meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was perhaps the first person to ever expound on the “butterfly effect” – the idea that a butterfly fluttering its wings in one corner of the world could set off a chain of events leading to a typhoon in another corner hundreds of miles away.

It’s interesting to ponder the butterfly effect in light of the mayhem that was unleashed in Baltimore last week following the death of Freddie Gray, the 25-year-old African-American man who died in police custody April 12.

In his short life, Gray accomplished little of note, and it would have been almost miraculous if he had. Born prematurely to a heroin-addicted mother, his early years were marked by poverty and chaos, and Gray never managed to finish high school. By the time he was thrown in the back of a police van almost a month ago for what proved to be a fateful journey, he had been arrested over 20 times, and had already logged two years behind bars.

The challenges he faced were, beyond any doubt, formidable. If the well-to-do come into the world already on third base, Gray was born at the bottom of the order with two outs and two strikes against him.

But there could have been yet another, much less obvious factor, that set the dominos tumbling and ultimately led to riots in Baltimore – Gray could have been suffering from the effects of lead poisoning.

According to an article last week in The Washington Post, Gray lived in a tumbledown apartment as a child where lead paint was flaking off the walls and windowsills. Other children in Gray’s socioeconomic stratum were nurtured in similar circumstances, because taking up residence in cheap, crumbling apartments built before lead paint was effectively banished from the marketplace in the 1970s was all their families could afford. Studies have shown that excessive exposure to lead can lead to cognitive impairment in children, and spark unproductive behavior that can last well into adulthood, such as increased aggression and an inability to focus and pay attention.

Gray’s family filed a lawsuit against the owner of the apartment building where they lived, and received a settlement. Gray was tested for lead when he was not yet a 2-year-old, and the amount in his blood was found to be almost seven times beyond a level one would consider safe.

If you consider the butterfly effect, the roots of Baltimore’s riots could have been planted when paint was applied to an apartment wall 50 or 60 years ago.

“The fact that Mr. Gray had these high levels of lead in all likelihood affected his ability to think and to self-regulate and profoundly affected his cognitive ability to process information,” Dan Levy, an assistant pediatrics professor at Johns Hopkins University, told the Post.

Some researchers have even suggested that the increased levels of crime that afflicted the United States up through the 1980s resulted from children being exposed to inordinate amounts of lead in the atmosphere from the 1940s up until the early 1970s thanks to leaded gasoline being pumped into vehicles. Though we find it hard to believe that the amount of lead wafting around cities was the sole basis for soaring crime rates – demographics and the explosion of drug use were certainly factors – it can’t be discounted.

Yes, crime and dysfunction have a multitude of causes and no easy solutions. But the case of Freddie Gray shows that one factor could well be crossed off the list with the purchase of a simple paint scraper.