Yesterday, I spoke to Mary near about the 9th anniversary of her son, Ronnie’s untimely demise. Ronnie had, in the years we both lived on White Avenue, saved a female neighbor being stabbed by her husband and convinced one small set to take their crime three blocks up the road. During the Fed/Gang/NGO Op of 2015, as over 100 fires burned across town, Ronnie stepped out in front of an NGO riot squad armed with bats, a single phone, a gas can and grille lighters, with his handgun, and informed them that they would have to cross from Belair to Harford Road, a half mile up the road at Glenmore. He simply recalled saying, “Go around.”

Ronnie played guitar in area cover bands and had along running custody battle with the mother of his children. Mary, his mother, had moved south to Virginia, leaving Ronnie with the small row home. When he called his mother to inform her that he was going to court to contest false accusations of child abuse, she warned him, “Don’t go down there. It’s a setup. She knows you never even so much as spank those children. It’s a way to get you locked up. Social Services will get the kids, so they will be in the system for a year, no matter what.”

Ronnie was a stubborn man who could not tolerate false accusations. He stated his determination to go to court rather than join his family in Virginia. His mother said, “Son, do not go down there. Come to Virginia. We have a nice place for you. I’m telling you, it’s a set up. If you go town there, you won’t come back.”

Mary told me yesterday, “He went to court on Monday and by Wednesday he was dead.”

“When I found out they took him into Central Booking—you know that place is more dangerous than a penitentiary, its where everybody gets killed—I called and asked that he be put on suicide watch. No way could he stand being held as long as they hold you in Baltimore on false charges. It would eat him up.

“Then, in a couple days, I get the call that’s he’s gone, that he hung himself, somehow, from the bed that was on the floor. Now, there was a picture his girlfriend took, of a prison guard and an inmate, his cellmate and the guard that supposedly found him. The coroner lists cause of death as heart failure. You recall when I asked you, how does a man in his mid 40s that’s fairly fit die of heart failure, and you said by getting beaten to death and fighting back?

“Well, we—me, his girl and his children—go to see him and we are not permitted to approach the body. We have to look at Ronnie through a window. He is laid out in a robe, looking like Jesus. At least he seemed at peace. But, both of his eyes were blackened and you couldn’t see his hands or anything else. His hair and beard had grown since I left.

“You know—we’re a loud crew, the kids too—Ronnie always had a big mouth; which, truth be told, did get him in some trouble over the years. We caused such a scene at that place, the kids and I, over wanting to see his body, that his girl slipped into the room in the chaos where he was laid out and took photos. We had a lot of photos after that. His hands were all bruised as if he had been beating somebody. Ronnie always was a fighter. But the hands were really bruised up and recent. And, most of all, was this arrowhead impression in his forehead. That arrowhead matched a piece of jеwelry that could be seen in other pictures, of that other prisoner.

“Inmates are NOT supposed to have any jеwelry of any kind. But this guy is some special case, and he happens to be there with the guard, the both of them having found Ronnie hung. We’re supposed to believe that this man hung himself with “what, we don’t know,” from a bed on the floor, and with no bruising to the throat? They beat the shit out of him, plain and simple.

“No lawyer would take the case for free. We had nothin’, just poor white folks, and you know where that gets you. You know, Ronnie said from as soon as he could talk, ‘I’m not supposed to be here… I don’t belong in this world.’

“There was always something about him that did not fit in that caused him a deep pain. We argued, argued loudly. He wasn’t perfect. But he was a good man. He helped people. He loved his children and he believed in right and wrong. And what was the worst part about the whole thing, is that it was his belief in justice, his simple idea that if you did nothing wrong, that if you were falsely accused, you would be proved right. Of course, we know that this sick world doesn’t work that way—that the fix is in, as they say.”

“Thank you so much for listening to me, and thanks for the books. Things get pretty boring down here in this podunk town. As rough as Baltimore was, at least it didn’t put you to sleep.”

When I was a young clerk, working at the local grocery store beneath the quarry face where Ronnie had played as a boy, I used to see Mary, come to shop often. An early morning shopper, she preferred “to be the second customer through the door, not the first, not that desperate starving bitch.” Sometimes she was with a woman I took to be her mother, sometimes with a baby in a carriage, sometimes with a little boy. I suppose that boy was Ronnie. I never asked. The last time I saw Ronnie was a year before his passing when he expressed an interest in training.

Rest In Peace, Ronnie.