Once more implying that The Wire’s vision of Baltimore as a place where crimes happen wasn’t just a televised flight of fancy, a man was arrested over the weekend on a handgun charge, according to Baltimore Sun crime reporter Justin Fenton. And after confirming that this man was not simply a street performer availing himself for tourist photos, Fenton made yet another discovery indicating that the blurring between The Wire’s fiction and Baltimore’s reality is even greater than first imagined back when Felicia “Snoop” Pearson was busted on a drug charge. As Fenton noted on Twitter, the suspect’s name was Omar Little Jr., which fans will recognize is like the name of that guy on the show.
Reached for comment (as he will be pretty much anytime anything remotely Wire-related happens in the Baltimore universe), creator David Simon said that unlike Pearson’s case, there was no relation between the fictional Omar and this real-life version, claiming that the similarity between their names and respective games is a “coincidence, completely,” which is officially the most succinct David Simon statement ever. But clearly there’s a question here of whether it’s possible to be named Omar Little in Baltimore and not feel some sort of obligation to live up to it. You know, just like how The Wire forced the whole city to start having drug problems and homicides. [via The Daily What]