He's a man whose mind teems with images of the meaningless, tragic waste of young lives; images of the bodies he's scraped off these streets. They are lives lived dangerously and taken casually; the lives of frenetic, impatient young men whose futures sail away with a bullet through a bloody exit wound.

Finally, these lives - which were so often led in a cruel haze of drugs, alcohol, gangs and desperation - leave nothing behind but an inert mass of flesh for Coroner Nawojczyk and his staff to zip up in a body bag and deliver to the state Crime Lab for autopsy.

Nawojczyk -- a rumpled, affable man of 41 who does his grim business in scruffy cowboy boots and bluejeans, while alternating between a Sherlock Holmesian pipe and well-savored cigars -- will step aside as Pulaski County coroner when his term ends in January 1995.

He hasn't given up on slowing the exponential growth of public carnage, but he feels he must move on.

He's seen all the body bags he can handle for right now.

"It's gotten to the point that it is affecting me personally," Nawojczyk says of his job. Normally a loquacious sort, he slows to a crawl and chooses his works with a sad lethargy.

"More and more, I'm finding it hard to look at the people I encounter as just 'victims' and 'perpetrators,' he explains. "I look at a crime scene and, instead, what I see is two lives that are ruined -- the life of the person who is killed, and the life of the person who did the killing. I look out beyond the crime at hand and I see thousands of young kids who desperately need some direction and meaning in their lives, and I'm frustrated by the way our society is responding to this tragedy."

So Nawojczyk has spend much of his free time for the past several years bearing an urgent witness; taking his message of gang violence, urban decay, and the breakdown of families and communities to those who might not fully hear it otherwise.

Equipped with both still and video cameras, he combs the gang-haunted 'hoods of Little Rock and North Little Rock, befriending hundreds of troubled youths -- black and white -- and documenting their despair. He's distilled the fruits of this labor into a three hour audiovisual and lecture extravaganza that he takes to all sorts of gatherings of public officials, school administrators and church groups and, on a recent day, to a convention of regional public housing officials.

MAN ON A MISSION

Now, in case Nawojczyk -- who began his career as Garland County Coroner and was also director of the state Crime Lab during Bill Clinton's first administration -- is beginning to sound like just another bleeding heart, well, think again. He's an enthusiastic booster of local police agencies, and favors "zero tolerance" enforcement to hit hard against criminals with guns and kids who bring weapons to school. His lectures include a bitter denunciation of so-called "gangsta rap" music and its glorification of murderous mayhem.

Yet he also believes that, as far as today's inner-city problems are concerned, traditional ideological divisions are almost irrelevant. And he views such alluringly simple penal palliatives as "three strikes and you're out" as prodigiously shallow.

"There's an old African proverb that says, 'It takes a whole village to raise a child." We have to bring everyone on the board to become part of the solution. People from way to the right of Rush Limbaugh and people from way to the left of Ted Kennedy are going to have to come together somewhere in the middle. We can't leave anyone out, and we don't want to leave anyone behind."

Today Nawojczyk says old prejudices and the intransigence of the political system may finally be ripe for conquest, because the public demands it.

"Look around you -- we live in a world of cryptic fear," he says. "Fear alone isn't constructive, but people are beginning to learn that they can't run away from these problems; that they're everywhere. It's not just a black thing or a central Little Rock thing. It's affecting everybody. That's something people need to realize."

Indeed. A reporter mentioned spending his early childhood days in the Beaver Cleaverized womb of the Park Hill and Lakewood neighborhoods of North Little Rock, circa 1950's and 60's. Nawojczyk then drives to a park next to a Lakewood Property Owners' Association swimming lake, the scene of many sepia-toned memories, and points out the gang graffiti that now adorns the area.

Isolation -- suburban cocooning, white flight, all those tiny little apartheids of geography and of the spirit -- aren't working for anyone, he said. Murder is now the nation's leading cause of death among teen-age males.

The Centers for Disease Control has classified this phenomenon as an "epidemic." And during the decade in which he has served as coroner and deputy coroner, Nawojczyk has watched the county's homicide rate go from 38 in 1983 to 111 last year.

In short, it sickens him.

At first blush, of course, Nawojczyk's personal case of sensory overload may sound like the stuff of bad jokes, i.e.: Just how awful is violent crime in Little Rock? Why, it's so bad, even the coroner can't stomach it anymore.

But Nawojczyk is a man with a mission.

Call it preventive coronering if you will. He puts it thusly: "Everything I do in the investigation of death is to benefit the living."

That's why he's turning his experiences -- his meticulously compiled heaps of amateur sociology and late 20th century urban history -- into a living testament. His lexicon is a melange of death and hope, and he'll offer this witness to anyone with the patience to listen.

THE KILLING FIELDS

Driving down a street on the outskirts of North Little Rock's Silver City Courts housing project, Nawojczyk points to a decrepit dwelling where a recent homicide occurred, one of the many landmarks he notes as he roams through the killing fields.

Then he lets a melancholy half-smile cross his face, and says, "You know, it's terrible that I can drive all around the county and mark my path by listing every killing that happened on the streets I pass. But that's what it's come to."

He winces when people refer to him as a "gang expert," and explains, "The experts on gangs are the gang bangers themselves. You have to go talk to them and get the story firsthand if you want to know what's going on. So that's what I try to do. I'm not an expert, I'm just someone who hopes I'm shining a little light on the reality of what's happening in our community."

His record of this "reality" is often decidedly unpleasant. Nawojczyk displays the autopsy photograph of one of two teen-agers who were shot dead in a foiled liquor store robbery last year.

It was a celebrated case: A clerk at the store vanquished the young duo in a flash of urban combat and was hailed by some as a hero.

Nawojczyk knew the kid whose corpse looks up from the picture, frozen forever in two dimensions. This kid and his accomplice, ages 14 and 15, were among the youngest and newest members of their gang. According to the buzz on the street, a gang leader had coerced them into robbing the store so he would have walking-around money. And in the gang, the cost of refusing such a suggestion can be death or worse. Another gang banger, age 13, was told the only way out of the gang was to kill his own mother.

"It doesn't lessen the crime, and it doesn't justify it by any means," Nawojczyk says. "But it's an example of what's going on in our city. These kids turn to the gangs for the types of things they're not getting at home: Recognition, belonging, discipline, love and respect. ... I can understand that. I was an Air Force brat who moved around a lot, and my parents got divorced when I was 12. If the present gang structure had been in place then, I might have gone right into a gang. But luckily, I had the Boy Scouts and sports to provide those things for me."

There are many more cases that haunt Nawojczyk as he drives to the scene of each crime; to the spots of blacktop that bear silent witness. There is the 10-year-old boy who had most of his left upper arm blown off in a walk-by shooting in east Little Rock and the 18-month-old boy whose lower body was shattered in the same hail of bullets.

He has a picture of the 10-year-old -- a heart-stopping, stomach-turning photo. Most of the flesh has disappeared, leaving behind more air than boy where his shoulder ought to be. It look as though a shark bit him, leaving behind its gnarled calling card.

And then there was T-Bone, a 19-year-old banger who Nawojczyk sought out after seeing his name repeated again and again in the gang graffiti around town. T-Bone was morose, surly and mad, but something about him got to Nawojczyk.

"I finally found him right here," Nawojczyk said, as he drove by the spot. "I said, 'T-Bone, why do you want to live like this?' and he kept saying, `Man, I just wanna be free! I just gotta be free!' Once, he even said, `I wanna be like you. I wanna have a house and a job and a nice car.' But then he went back to `I just wanna be free.'"

The phrase puzzled Nawojczyk, who does, after all, come from another sociocultural world. But he finally concluded that "free" simply translated into getting out of the pervasive poverty of the "hood," the incessant imploding of opportunity, the water-torture diminution of the human spirit.

T-Bone is dead. Shot in the back on Cumberland Street.

VICTIMS ON THE HORIZON

But even as Nawojczyk picks up the broken bodies, he glimpses the next victims on the horizon. Among his collection of Arkansas' unfunniest videos is a tape that helps explain why. For every attack, there is retaliation, in a vocabulary that mistakenly regards "respect" and "fear" as synonyms.

The smirking face of an angry, sullen 19-year-old black man burns with rage as the amateur video runs. The face is that of a Little Rock gang member, sitting outside a tired old house, drinking malt liquor at 10 a.m. with his "homies."

The occasion, it seems, is that of a crude wake. They are toasting the memory of a fallen comrade-in-arms, who was "smoked" -- killed by gunfire -- by members of a rival gang. The young man on the video is vowing revenge. He's going to "smoke" the rival bangers who "smoked" his homey.

Nawojczyk, who can be heard talking to the young man on the tape's audio track, shuts off the VCR with a sigh and a rueful shake of his head. The he walks over to a slide projector and flips on the power.

It is another autopsy photograph; the fallen homey of the angry young man from the tape. Metal tubes are protruding from his mouth and skull, mementos of a forensic pathologist's grisly duties.

Nawojczyk has reached out to dozens of these young men and boys over the last 10 years, only to watch them turn up days, weeks or months later on one of the cold, shiny slabs that are the unforgiving emblems of his trade.

"I'm the first to say that I don't have the solution. I don't pretend that I do," he says. "But I do know that it's going to take all of us working together, without political posturing and backbiting, to find the solution. That's the first step."

Obviously, what the community has done until now hasn't worked, he said. Little Rock's per capital homicide rate surpassed those of New York and Los Angeles. This phenomenon -- the city that produced a president suddenly becoming a crime capital -- has brought a steady stream of national and international reports and TV crews to Nawojczyk's office, where they find autographed pictures of Clinton with inscriptions of praise for the coroner's "long support and friendship."

Indeed, it was while he was escorting a crew from Home Box Office through the city a few months ago that Nawojczyk suddenly found himself caught in a cross fire from rival gangs. For the first time in his life, he felt the white heat of bullets whizzing past his ear. It drove home the message even more cogently than before.

"Until you've experienced it yourself -- until you've been there and felt it -- you don't really know what it's like," he said, reluctant to talk further about the incident. "It's just another illustration of the fact that none of us are immune."

Not even the smallest among us.

Nawojczyk tells of an 8-year-old boy he met recently riding around on his bicycle in front of a crack house, with a cellular phone in his hand. When the coroner asked the tyke what he was up to, the kid unabashedly explained that he was paid $50 a day, for four hours work, and all he had to do was keep a lookout and punch in a code on the cell phone if he saw the cops coming.

That would beep his bosses' pagers inside the house, so they could scatter before the police arrived.

"Then I asked him what he did with the money," Nawojczyk recalls. "And the kid, for the first time, looked a little sheepish and said, 'Well, I keep $5 for myself." So then I said, "'What do you do with the rest?' And the kid answered, 'I give it to my mom so she can pay rent, and buy food, and pay the light bill.'"

Nawojczyk is encouraged, though, by positive signs he sees in the community. He downplays his own efforts, and is growing more reticent about giving interviews. He says he'd just as soon direct the attention to men such as the Rev. Hezekiah Stewart whose work with families and mentoring programs at the Watershed Agency are models for what Nawojczyk hopes the future will hold.

"There are a lot of people out there doing a lot of very good work," he says. "But we're always going to need more."