BALTIMORE — The death of Freddie Gray, a Baltimore man critically injured while in police custody, has sparked demonstrations across the city that touch on the fears many from his neighborhood say they feel about their everyday interactions with police.

“He was a typical Sandtown kid,” said Sean Price, who grew up in Baltimore’s Sandtown neighborhood where Gray lived. “He wasn’t perfect but neither is anybody. This isn’t anything new. Freddie Gray is just a microcosm of what happens every day in Sandtown, in Baltimore.”

The Sandtown neighborhood in West Baltimore surrounds blocks of red-brick public housing called the Gilmor Homes. Trees are sparse amid abandoned lots overgrown with grass and crumbling, burned-out row homes, their doors and windows boarded up.

Gray was arrested April 12 after police “made eye contact” with him and another man in an area known for drug activity, police said, and both men started running. Gray was handcuffed and put in a transport van.

Exactly what happened in the van and how he was injured are still unknown. But he died a week later in a hospital of what police described as “a significant spinal injury.”

In an interview with Baltimore station WJZ-TV on Wednesday, Police Commissioner Anthony Batts said a second man who was in the police van at the same time as Gray has said the driver of the van didn’t drive erratically.

“He didn’t see any harm done to Freddie at all,” Batts said. “What he has said is that he heard Freddie thrashing about.”

Danielle Hall, a friend of Gray’s, said the relationship between law enforcement and the neighborhood is so contentious that many believe it’s safer to run from police than stand still.