By: Michael Anft

Zachary Sowers left his rowhouse near Patterson Park late on a ninety-degree afternoon on the first day of June 2007, looking forward to some drinks with friends. He met his buddy Bobby Byrd and others at the Bay Cafe in Canton, the neighborhood where he, his wife Anna, his brother-in-law, and a group of fellow twentysomethings who grew up elsewhere made a habit of enjoying city life.

Zach, seen by his crowd as an easygoing guy with an observer’s quippy sense of humor, wore a black collared shirt, jeans, and tan flip-flops on his wispy 150-pound frame, which was topped with a short crop of dirty-blond hair. For the moment, Sowers was a free man about town.

Anna had left Baltimore for a weekend off—a rarity for a woman who raced between working as a project manager for Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions during the week and studying for her MBA at Hopkins’ Carey School of Business on weekends. For her mini-break, she would barhop and shop for jewelry and purses with several girlfriends in Chicago. The city held special memories for Anna: During a visit two years earlier, Zach took her for a walk along the shores of Lake Michigan and clumsily proposed.

With the weekend to himself, Zach had arranged to hang out with Byrd for each of the two nights. Zach worked as a financial analyst for Johns Hopkins, but by night he, like Byrd, had a passion for deejaying, spinning trance-tinged progressive house music at clubs in Canton, Fells Point, or his native Frederick. The plan was to drink and socialize Friday night; on Saturday, they were going to a party downtown or in Washington, D.C.

After several rounds Friday, Zach left Byrd and their crowd at the Bay Cafe around eight o’clock to head home to walk the Sowers’ pug, Mia. Zach and Anna had bought their rowhouse in the block behind the former Patterson Theater for $182,000 four years earlier. It was just north of Eastern Avenue—an area often perceived as beyond the ring of safety that encircles the nightlife of Canton’s square. “We wanted something south of Eastern, but when we went to look at the house, it was just beautiful,” says Anna.

She and Zach had already had some brushes with less savory aspects of city life: Both had cars broken into while previously renting a Canton rowhouse on Fait Avenue—south of Eastern. When they looked into the crime statistics for the area east of Patterson Park, they found they weren’t much worse than those in Canton. The gunshot murder of a teenage girl on the street around the corner in the summer of 2004 shook Anna, but she never felt seriously threatened. “Canton was developing,” she says. “I couldn’t see the area getting any worse.”

Around nine o’clock that night, Zach locked the front door and headed out to meet Will Cheng, Anna’s younger brother, at Claddagh Pub on the Canton Square, ten blocks from his house. Like the rehabilitated rowhomes in the blocks surrounding it, the strip is a magnet for the city’s young professionals. Sowers and Cheng, then a 22-year-old technical support analyst at the Johns Hopkins campus in Montgomery County, fit the bill. The two caught up over a pint of Yuengling, then walked a block east to J.D.’s Smokehouse and Grill. They went to the upstairs bar, where Zach turned Will on to a new coffee liqueur-infused shooter called a Shit and a Shower.

Meanwhile, Anna was sending Zach text messages from Chicago: Scottie Pippen, the former NBA star, was at the same club as she and her friends; she’d be taking an architectural tour on a boat in the Chicago River during the weekend. At some point, he stopped answering her.

Cheng lost sight of Zach after he had navigated his way through a crowd to the bathroom sometime around eleven. Cheng continued to call Zach’s cell phone. “I had it in my mind that we were going to walk home together,” Cheng says. “I must have tried him about a dozen times, but he got lost in the crowd and I never saw him again.”


If what happened to zach sowers as he walked the ten blocks home alone on that Friday night wasn’t so horrific and real, it would qualify as an urban cliché, a cautionary tale from the gentrification file. Four young men—Trayvon Ramos and Eric Price, 16; Arthur Jeter Jr., 17; and Wilburt Martin, 19—came upon Zach near his house, robbed him, and beat him to near-death. The victim was white; his assailants, black. The Sowers were newcomers who chose to move into an up-and-coming city neighborhood. The teenagers were residents of the other Baltimore, the one blocks away but worlds apart from the rehabs and roof decks that limn the city’s newly affluent quarters.

In the front-page newspaper stories, online commentary, and talk radio tirades that the case has generated over the last year, the tragedy for the Sowerses came to represent far more than just another crime in a city that is full of them. Never mind that the case is an anomaly, a relatively rare instance of black-on-white crime. Last year, 282 people died of homicide in Baltimore. Only thirteen were white. In the first three months of this year, only one white person in the city died of homicide: Zach Sowers, who perished on March 25 after ten months in a coma.

And never mind that the attack on him had nothing to do with the drug-trade-related violence that defines the city’s reputation. Just as the 1989 Central Park Jogger case that was wrongly blamed on “wilding” teenagers seemed to symbolize the urban anxieties of its era in New York City, so the Sowers beating has become a prism through which people view race, class, justice, and the clash between the Baltimore That Has and the Baltimore That Hasn’t.

In the months after the incident, Anna Sowers sought her own answers for understanding this clash, speaking out about turning Zach’s struggle for life—and ultimately, his death—into stronger laws, “so criminals no longer run this city.” She and many others expressed outrage about the lenience of the sentence: Jeter, Martin, and Price received thirty year sentences, with all but eight years suspended; Ramos got life with all but forty years suspended, and with a possibility of parole in twenty.

The debate the Sowers case has stoked is often ferociously binary. On one side are those who say that the crime was committed by amoral young men who should be treated as adults by the criminal justice system; on the other are those who say that poverty and social dysfunction will inevitably breed more desperate teenagers who tend to become violent.

Still others, viewing the Sowers case as just one of many, shrug and ask a more vexing, if utterly familiar, question:

What are we going to do about these kids?


Three of Zach Sowers’ assailants lived in a neighborhood on the eastern edge of Highlandtown, eight or so blocks from his front door. Once an enclave of Italians and other old-line white ethnics, the blocks around Claremont and Conkling have been transformed within the last few generations. The salaried rank-and-filers who made the area home for much of the 20th century are gone, and real estate agents and speculators haven’t caught the fever here. There is often “activity” on street corners, some of it watched by blue light-flashing police cameras.

Almost directly across the street from the United Democratic Club, former bastion of legendary East Baltimore councilman Dominic “Mimi” DiPietro, sits a home with old windows and a weathered front door decorated with red heart stickers. The hearts match the one Latricia Reed has tattooed on her neck.

Reed, 35, lives there with two of her children and well-kept tanks of fish and turtles. Her oldest attends college, while her youngest goes to high school and is, she says, a good student. Because she lives in fear of retribution, Reed doesn’t want her children or their genders or schools identified. Their brother, Eric Price, now 17, is in a state penitentiary in Hagerstown doing time for his role in the attack on Zachary Sowers. As Trayvon Ramos stomped and beat Sowers and two other young men waited in a car nearby, Eric served as lookout, police and prosecutors say.

Eric had started hanging with Ramos, who was then awaiting trial on a carjacking charge in Cecil County, sometime last May, about one month before the attack. “He hardly ever even left the house before that year,” says Reed, sitting on a threadbare living room sofa.

Although his mother says he had no juvenile convictions on his record, Eric Price’s childhood could hardly be called carefree. He was the kind of kid who was subject to a variety of interventions and services, but not quite enough. Facets of his story rhyme all too often with the fatalistic poetry of other inner-city lives.

Eric’s father, an ex-convict, was never on the scene—“a deadbeat dad,” says Reed. Healthy and happy during the first years of his life, Eric began to wet his bed during elementary school, worrying his mother when he’d fall asleep in a tub full of water he’d drawn to clean himself up. Like 14 percent of Baltimoreans, Eric suffers from asthma. (The national rate is 7 percent.) He was given counseling at Kennedy Krieger Institute for playing with matches at age 10, and prescribed drugs he would later refuse to take for attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Sometime during his years at Highlandtown Elementary, he was treated for elevated levels of lead in his blood, the legacy of a past address in Oliver, where one in every eight kids suffers from the effects of too much lead, more than twice the average citywide. Doctors also diagnosed him with a language learning disorder common in children who have ingested or inhaled too much lead dust.

Eric sometimes acted out in school, especially after he was forced to repeat third grade. He was troubled that his younger sibling had caught up with him academically, then performed better than he did. He reacted strongly to teasing, sometimes ending up in fights. At age 11, he told a male teacher he would “fuck [him] up,” which led to a city school system psychiatric evaluation. He told a school psychologist he saw people who weren’t there and heard voices that made him want to hurt others. “Eric feels disliked, and he fears he will lose his friends altogether,” a school psychologist noted. “Yet, on the other hand, he feels so victimized that he longs to be left alone rather than continue to be treated with a lack of respect.”

Reed says she got her son treated for a variety of conditions, including psychiatric ones. Although Eric would sometimes have minor problems later at Canton Middle School, where he received special education services, counseling seemed to help: He performed decently overall, according to his mother and school records.

Things began to change when he moved on to Patterson High. He began flunking several classes at a time. More distressingly, he started leaving the house around midnight and staying out until dawn. He would spend both days and nights in a house three blocks north with several other teens, “smoking weed and hanging out with girls,” Reed says. He got picked up by police for breaking the city’s curfew law and for trespassing. At home, he threatened to hit his mother. Less than a year before the Sowers attack, Reed had her son tested for emotional and mental illness at Villa Maria, a psychiatric services organization downtown run by Associated Catholic Charities, which recommended counseling for ADHD and learning and mood disorders.

Besides her, Reed says, the one thing that kept Eric from giving up on school entirely was sports. He set a goal of making the football team there as a halfback and receiver, even though he was a mere 5’5” tall and weighed 140 pounds. “He’s fast,” Reed says. He made the junior varsity as a sophomore, but soon after the season, an administrative snafu left him off the team. “That absolutely killed him. His dream was to go to college and play football,” she says.

Things got worse. Three Patterson boys beat him and robbed him of his cell phone and $25 in March of last year, around the time school officials and his mother tried to stop a run of truancy that kept him out of school about half the time. When the largest of the three boys returned to Patterson, Eric took a week off.

As Eric’s life began to spiral once again, his mother kept trying to regain control, but she had little help. Her mother and sister, both of whom had often watched her children as she worked jobs as a server at the Maryland Club and Hippodrome Theatre, had died in recent years. She contacted Patterson and asked that a counselor keep a close eye on Eric. She also asked for contacts of organizations or programs that could help keep her son off the streets after school, or offer him some guidance. Her options were limited. Several programs in the neighborhood, such as the Police Athletic League center and a Boys & Girls Club, had closed down. Other options, such as the Choice program—a well-regarded case management, mentoring, and monitoring plan based at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County that serves two hundred troubled city kids—wasn’t available, because Eric was not yet under the eye of the juvenile justice system.

“There’s no programs, nothing for kids to get into, except for trouble,” Reed says.


Eric Price’s final descent into criminality followed a familiar path: He fell in with the wrong crowd. He had just gotten to know Ramos in the spring of 2007, but he had been tight with Arthur “Ace” Jeter Jr., a kid from Pratt Street two blocks north, for years. Jeter is a former special education student—in court, his lawyer said he never learned to read—with a juvenile criminal record for assault.

“Eric looked at Ace like he was some kind of god, like some kind of male role model,” Reed says. “Whatever he said went.” The two began to travel in a pack with Ramos and Wilburt “Man” Martin, who lived two blocks east of Eric on Claremont.

On the night of the Sowers attack, the four left Jeter’s girlfriend’s dingy brown Dundalk apartment building in her Dodge Stratus. “We went out to rob somebody,” Eric later told police. They parked in the block north of the Sowers home, behind Highlandtown Middle School. “We was looking for somebody at the last minute.”

As Eric remembered, Ramos saw Zach Sowers walking up Robinson and said, “Like him right there.”

“That’s when we was like, all right,” Eric said. “We stopped the car and hopped out and we went to really rob him.”

Ramos and Eric got out and walked south on Robinson Street, while Jeter and Martin waited. When Zach reached his front steps, Ramos asked him for a cigarette. Ramos, who outweighed Zach by ninety pounds, used his heft to knock Sowers out with a punch, Eric said. Ramos, dressed in jeans, a long-sleeved white T-shirt, and black shoes, then used the fender of a Nissan Sentra parked outside the Sowers home as leverage, leaning on it with his right hand as he repeatedly slammed his foot against the back of Zach’s head, which lay between the car and the curb.

When police arrived, they thought that the man lying face-down in the gutter, a flip-flop flung a few feet south of him, might have been drunk. A flashlight search discovered his head was bloodied—the first sign of the long struggle Sowers’ brain and body would eventually lose.

After brutalizing Sowers and stealing his watch, cell phone, and wallet, the four drove back to Dundalk, using his credit card to buy cigars, food, and gasoline, and rent two action movies—including Smokin’ Aces, a gunpowder- and blood-stained tale of a hotly pursued mob snitch—before cooling their heels at the apartment.

The quartet followed the Sowers beating with a weeklong crime spree. Eric, acting in concert with Ramos, held a gun to the head of Martin’s next-door neighbor and stole her purse with $300 inside. Three days after that, around the corner on Fagley Street, Jeter and Martin pistol-whipped a tattoo artist whom Martin had ostensibly hired, stealing $200, a cell phone, and tattoo equipment.

By the end of the week, detectives in Baltimore County had tracked down the car seen in gas station videotapes, locating it outside the Dundalk apartment. A search warrant served in the building led to the discovery of Zach Sowers’ watch and wallet, along with a backpack of tattoo equipment. City police brought each of the defendants in for questioning. “Some were remorseful, but others had no emotion at all,” says city robbery detective Phil Lassahn, one of several investigators who cracked the Sowers case. “And I found that strange.” Ramos laughed upon hearing Martin’s first name and denied any involvement in the beating or knowledge of the other suspects.

Earlier, in an interview room, Lassahn showed the other three pictures of Zach Sowers’ bloodied, swollen head. They confessed to being there, adding that Ramos, whom they called “Blue,” had done the beating, which Eric labeled a “scraping.” Eric was the first to finger Ramos. “He just got a problem,” he told Lassahn. “He’s violent.”


For years, a multitude of charities, city and state agencies, university researchers, foundations, and facets of the justice system have studied conditions in neighborhoods like the ones in which Eric Price and his three accomplices grew up. Ostensible solutions to violence among the young have been tried, tested, and dumped because of lack of funding or written off as ineffective as arrests and acts of violence have piled up. For those whose job it is to search for solutions—to reach the Erics and Trayvons and save those whom they might injure or kill—there is a massive sample to work with.

Last year, more than eight thousand juveniles were detained or arrested in Baltimore City, most often for assault or drug charges. More than 90 percent were black and eight in ten were male. In a given year, dozens are charged with crimes as adults, usually for more serious offenses. As with Eric Price, the roles of victim and perpetrator can almost seem interchangeable at times—a victim later victimizes others. Baltimore children are eight times more likely to die from homicide as are kids nationwide, with black kids six times more likely to be murdered here than white children, according to a study released in February by the city health department. From 2002 to March of this year, 172 city teens 18 or younger were victims of homicide, and hundreds of others had been shot.

Violence can come to the fore all too quickly in the young and poor.

“Ethnographic studies show that many urban young men believe you have to be willing to be violent to be a man,” says Daniel Webster, associate director for research at the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence at Johns Hopkins’ Bloomberg School of Public Health. Those trends reach down into the world of juveniles—and often beyond the city’s drug economy. In a surprising number of instances, kids go at each other for petty things—misheard conversations, somebody eyeing someone else’s girlfriend, a battle on the basketball court.

At the Center for the Prevention of Youth Violence, academics practice a multi-faceted approach that involves helping public agencies develop policies geared toward reaching kids and young adults who are more likely to become violent, or to be in harm’s way. Webster and others are evaluating the effectiveness of Operation Safe Kids, a city-run program designed to help identify high-risk youth who have committed offenses common among homicide victims and offenders, including ones involving guns, drug dealing, and violence. The evaluation will determine whether the five-year-old program reduces the numbers and types of offenses committed by its 100 teenagers, and whether it could become a model for a larger program here or elsewhere.

Such programs are part of a relatively new wave of strategies to defuse youth violence—ones that reflect a fatigue many researchers have when dealing with the politics of the issue. “So much of what is done currently, whether it is on the law enforcement/criminal justice side of things or the prevention side of things, are politically expedient ‘strategies’ that don’t work,” says Webster. “We need smart, evidence-based criminal justice policies and smart, evidence-based early prevention and rehabilitation.”

Webster and others hope that a study now being performed jointly by the city, state, and Hopkins’ School of Public Health might offer more insight into who might become violent and why—and how agencies can intervene before a young person becomes either a source or a victim of violence. Informally called the “youth trajectories project,” the study taps a state law that allows the health department to collect information from the police, the school system, and state social services and juvenile services departments on kids who might be at risk of ending up on either end of violent situations.

Several indicators, such as early truancy and abuse and neglect in the home, have already been used to predict behavior. A preliminary (and not yet confirmed) analysis shows that two in three victims of violence in Baltimore have had criminal histories, says Caroline Fichtenberg, chief epidemiologist with the city health department and a research scientist at the School of Public Health. Fichtenberg’s task is to collect data on five hundred homicide and shooting victims who were attacked from 2002 to 2007, as well as 140 perpetrators, then compare the data with that of the general youth population. Upon being presented with the results, health officials could look for red flags common among victims and violent youths, then develop a way to find and target at-risk kids and create a “toolkit” of services for them.

“If we can find potentially violent kids earlier, like after one instance, we can point them toward a wider array of services,” including a combination of educational help and mental health and substance abuse counseling, says Fichtenberg. “If the city knows who is at highest risk early enough in their lives, there is a much higher likelihood that services and programs might be effective.”

The results of that project, due to be published this summer, could help find kids like Eric Price—a teen with a history of behavioral problems, lead poisoning, truancy, and victimization, but who still ended up under the radar.


Anna knew something was wrong after not hearing from Zach for over sixteen hours. She rushed home on the Saturday after the attack. By Sunday, cops and friends had put two and two together. The unidentified man found beaten into silence was a “John Doe” case at Johns Hopkins Hospital. At first, Anna walked right by his hospital room after glancing in—she couldn’t recognize him.

As police rounded up the quartet of suspects, Anna couldn’t believe that these four youths could be angry enough to do this to her husband. “They reminded me of some of the kids on The Wire,” she says.

She also pledged that the assailants would somehow come to pay for what they did.

The public role of the wife seeking justice was at first thrust upon her, as people sent along prayers and wishes to the website —www.zachsowers.com— that friends had set up. Friends also sold T-shirts decorated with the image of a thin man spinning records, an homage to Zach as well as a way to help pay for his staggering medical bills. Anna, her friends, and bar and restaurant owners in Canton and elsewhere held “neighbors’ night out” events to raise money and the awareness of crime.

But as the months dragged on and Zach’s condition went through several cycles of worsening and stabilizing, Anna became “activized.” The photogenic, 28-year-old Asian-American woman morphed from victim to crusader, out to turn the crime that silenced her husband into a call for change. While she says she supports finding public-health interventions that help stop people before they hurt someone, the focus of her efforts is on the sentencing side: When juveniles commit violent crimes, they need to be subject to laws with teeth, and punishments that fit the horrifying nature of the crime, like the one four teens inflicted upon her husband. “I want criminals to think twice before they kick the shit out of someone,” she says.

Anna and her aides-de-camp wrote letters to newspapers and sought out public officials for meetings, some of which became tense and pointed. She has asked Mayor Sheila Dixon to push for new legislation and Patricia Jessamy, the city state’s attorney, to strengthen her approach toward prosecution—without much success in both cases, she says.

Prosecutors say they had solid reasons for pursuing the plea deal that left three of the four Sowers assailants eligible for parole in four years. Among other wounds, Sowers incurred something doctors call “diffuse axonal injury” in his brain, the result of microscopic damage to nerves. Magnetic resonance images revealed no blotches of deadened neural activity in the brain to point to, no medical “smoking gun” that would sway a jury. What’s more, the neighbor who reported the crime couldn’t pick Ramos out of a police lineup, and police lifted only one Ramos fingerprint from the roof of the Sentra. Prosecutors say that an attempted murder charge against Ramos could have petered out in a jury room.

But the deal deprived Anna Sowers of the full jury trial she dearly hoped for. “I wanted to make sure my voice was heard,” she says. “At the very least I wanted a judge and jury to hear what they’d done to him.” Instead, Anna could only make a victim impact statement in court last December during a sentencing hearing, after the plea deal was accepted. Screaming at the four defendants through tears, she called them “monsters.” One of the parents walked out, to Anna’s consternation. “I wasn’t nice,” she says defiantly.

Four months after the sentencing, the full implications of the plea deal became clear: Even though Zach Sowers died from his injuries, none of his assailants can be tried for murder.

Public outrage over the sentences—coupled with rising 2007 homicide rates and a city gripped with fresh unease over crime and safety — fueled interest in the case. On www.zachsowers.com, Anna has received messages of support from across the country. Talk show hosts and columnists thumping agendas on swift justice and stronger sentences frequently referenced the Sowers case, often asking Anna for thoughts on the court system. A lawyer in Towson took up a civil suit against the four attackers, unsolicited and pro bono.

Anna’s campaign included working to convince the state legislature and Governor Martin O’Malley’s office to enact a “Zach’s Law.” As yet undefined, the law could involve anything from making juvenile criminal records public to enabling prosecutors to hold parents accountable for their children’s crimes. Or it could become part of laws designed to guarantee the impartiality of jurors in places like Baltimore, where a fear of payback and a distrust of police can taint cases. Or it could allow prosecutors to slap murder charges on  defendants who put their victims into comas.

Researchers who study youth violence are skeptical that making stronger laws against juveniles who maim or murder tougher, or treating them as adults in the court system, would be effective at deterring juvenile crime. Indeed, harsher sentencing may only serve to create ex-offenders who, when they eventually return to the community after incarceration, are even more dangerous. “There have been numerous studies of policies to transfer juvenile offenders into adult systems,” says Webster. “Unequivocally, this has had harmful effects on the juveniles transferred. They are targeted for sexual and other violence in the prisons, get little help or rehabilitation, and re-offend at higher rates than otherwise similar youth who have not been transferred [to the adult justice system].”

Beyond their call for get-tough legislation, Anna and her allies have also sought other ways of addressing crime in Baltimore, courting local African American leaders—a group they dubbed the “Black Twenty-Five”—in hopes of encouraging them to speak up against violence and the “stop-snitching” mentality that has silenced witnesses and hamstrung the courts. Among others, Kweisi Mfume, the former congressman and NAACP president, has expressed sympathy for her and her positions, Anna says. But people aren’t exactly jumping on the Black Twenty-Five bandwagon. The reasons have a lot to do with the breach in race and class that defines this city—and the conflicting views on whether we should try to reach kids before they go wrong, or spend more energy and money locking them up earlier and for longer.

Several black leaders contacted by Sowers and her confidants have bristled at suggestions that the African American community doesn’t already have a regular conversation about violence. The vast bulk of the city’s victims are black, they point out. “I’ve been going to vigils for thirty years,” says Melvin “Doc” Cheatham, president of the NAACP’s Baltimore chapter. Cheatham sat with Sowers during several court hearings to offer support. “Some years, there are seventy to eighty [vigils]. People who get involved with this issue anew do it because something happened to them, but there’s nothing new about it all. I understand her passion about this and I’m glad she’s getting some attention paid to the issue, but you can’t put African Americans on a guilt trip about this and expect them to join you.”

Others continue to talk with Anna Sowers to see if there is a common cause—some concrete steps—they can take up together. Heber Brown, a Baptist minister and first vice president of the Interdenominational Ministerial Alliance, a powerful group of metropolitan religious leaders, suggested that she and her collaborators “traffic a bit in black Baltimore,” he says. “I got a sense they didn’t have a lot of contact with people in the street.”

He also suggested they work with the family of Isaiah Simmons, a black 17-year-old who was killed while being held at a juvenile facility in Carroll County. But once Anna found out that Simmons had once been arrested for armed robbery, she refused to get involved with Simmons’ family. “That’s what happened to Zach,” she says.

Although he understands her reluctance, Brown saw the meeting as a way for Sowers to bridge the gap. “There is a bit of a disconnect there,” he says. “I appreciate her strength, but if all it took for crime to stop was to take twenty-five black leaders and have them say, ‘Stop it!,’ it would have happened ages ago.”


In the state penitentiary in Hagerstown, Eric Price is in lockdown twenty-three hours a day for his own protection, his mother says. Sometime between his first statement to police in June and another in November, Eric said, Ramos and others singled him out for naming names. He was a snitch, in other words, and was paying the price for violating the code.

Back home in East Baltimore, Latricia Reed worries about the safety of her other children. In addition to the people who would punish her family because of her son’s willingness to testify against a co-defendant, Reed is afraid of those who have vilified them because of her son’s crime. Since Zach Sowers’ death in March, the phone rings. Sometimes, people leave threatening messages.

She had been a good parent, she says. She lost her jobs while gathering documents that she hoped would keep Eric from prison. “My other kids did well without a father, so it ain’t that. I tried to lock him in the house for his own good. The influences the kids got out here now, the peer pressure they’re under is incredible. Everybody wants to be bigger than what they are,” she says before shaking her head. “I don’t know what it is.”

A few blocks away, Anna Sowers will work to finish up her MBA at the Carey School this summer. Several friends moved away shortly after the incident, including Bobby Byrd, who fled south to the suburbs. Her brother left Canton to return to Frederick. “I hated living there,” Will Cheng says. “I just needed to leave so bad.” He’d like to persuade his sister to get out of town, but for now Anna lives in the same house she shared with Zach, taking classes in krav maga, an Israeli form of self-defense, and raising funds for the Zach Sowers Brain Trauma Research Fund, which was recently formed at Johns Hopkins. She has already begun to distance herself a bit from some of the thornier aspects of her advocacy, including the concept of the Black Twenty-Five. “There are others who will keep it going,” she says.

Zach, who was due to get his MS in information technology from Carey this summer, had made plans with Anna for after graduation—plans she will honor as faithfully as the act of wearing Zach’s wedding ring on a string around her neck. Baltimore was never going to be a part of their future. “We were looking to live in other cities, like San Francisco,” Anna says. After taking her degree, she’ll search for work while applying to law schools—a notion that appealed to her only after dealing with a justice system that has been so ineffective. Perhaps, she reasons, she can improve it from the inside.

“I’ve decided to see where fate will take me,” she says. She thinks about the freeness of her college years, thinks she can be happy again. “I look forward to going someplace where no one knows who Anna Sowers is, where I can start over.”

—Michael Anft is a senior writer at Johns Hopkins Magazine and a frequent contributor to Urbanite.


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