BALTIMORE — Shortly before sunset on Aug. 23, 2007, Tony Wolfe, an officer with the Baltimore Police Department, saw two black men walk into an alley near Presbury and North Mount streets, in the city’s impoverished west side. There, according to the statement of probable cause that his partner filed three hours later, Wolfe saw the men exchange a fistful of bills for a “small object.”
One of those men was a teenager named Freddie Gray. He’d turned 18 a week earlier. He was about to face felony charges that could send him to prison for longer than he’d been alive.
After witnessing the exchange, Wolfe called his partners, Officers Gregory Fisher and John Audwyn, who arrived minutes later in a marked car. In what would become a refrain in his life, Gray ran away, with police chasing after him. As they sped southward on Mount Street, Fisher would later claim, he saw Gray throw the “small object” under a gold van.
When the officers arrested Gray moments later, they found nothing illegal on him. The object under the van, however, turned out to be a bag containing two small glass vials full of low-quality cocaine — enough, the officers would argue, to charge Gray with possession with intent to distribute.
It was Gray’s first arrest as an adult. Perhaps for that reason — or perhaps because the only witnesses in the case were police officers, a situation that former prosecutors, former police officers, and current defense attorneys told BuzzFeed News often results in Baltimore juries acquitting defendants — the state’s attorney dropped all charges.
Still, that first arrest would prove significant. It inaugurated a series of episodes that culminated at the very same corner where everything began, in a final encounter with police on April 12, 2015, when the BPD arrested Gray for “fleeing unprovoked.” A week later, Gray died of a catastrophic spine injury incurred during the short car ride to the city’s central booking facilities, in what the city’s top prosecutor called “a depraved heart murder.” Six BPD officers would eventually be charged.
Days after his death, mass demonstrations demanding justice for Gray triggered unrest in the city. Taking advantage of the confusion, rioters looted several stores in West Baltimore and set fire to more than 100 cars. Armed with assault rifles, the National Guard formed a perimeter around City Hall.
Baltimore burned after Gray’s death because his demise was emblematic. He was one of many unarmed black men and women to die at the hands of police — not just in Baltimore, but across the United States. In more than one way, however, Gray’s life was even more representative than his death.
According to the U.S. census, the poverty rate in Sandtown-Winchester, the West Baltimore neighborhood where Gray grew up and where most of his arrests took place, is roughly double the national average. At 51.6%, according to the Justice Policy Institute, its unemployment rate is twice that of Greece’s, a country widely acknowledged to be a paradigm of economic collapse. The Baltimore Health Department puts the neighborhood’s life expectancy at roughly 69 years — about the same as North Korea’s. And according to the Justice Policy Institute, residents of Sandtown-Winchester are incarcerated at rate 13 times higher than the national average.
Beginning with a childhood marked by crippling poverty and a poisonous environment, Gray faced difficulties familiar to many black residents of America’s most disadvantaged neighborhoods. The story of those difficulties is preserved in the archives of the Baltimore court system. It is a story that, according to several defense attorneys, two former police officers, and one former prosecutor, could belong to any number of young black men from West Baltimore.
(Unless otherwise stated, all the facts in this article come from the court records for 16 criminal cases and one civil lawsuit. Gray was a defendant in 23 cases throughout his adult life, but several of those files were consolidated. His juvenile record is sealed. Billy Murphy, the attorney for Gray’s surviving family members, declined to make his clients available for an interview and did not comment on an extensive summary of this story. BuzzFeed News reached out for comment to every person mentioned in this story.)
Court records show that Gray was arrested over and over again, for everything from possessing drugs to playing dice in a public housing development where he didn’t live. Over and over again, records show his family and friends accrued debts with bail agents to keep him out of jail. Over and over again, overworked prosecutors dropped all charges. On the few occasions when he was actually convicted, he was given relatively light sentences — mostly a reflection of the exhausted pragmatism of Baltimore’s overcrowded courts.
“What you saw in Gray’s cases is systemic,” Marc Schindler, the executive director of the nonprofit Justice Policy Institute, told BuzzFeed News. “This is the front line of the failed drug war of the United States. This is the day-to-day — people getting chewed up and spit out by a failed public policy.”
By the time of his final arrest, Gray had learned that a rational response to an arriving police car was to run away.
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Gray’s second arrest as an adult came only six days after the first, on the afternoon of Aug. 29, 2007. It was nearly identical to the previous one: A BPD detective was watching the intersection of Presbury Street and North Fulton Avenue when he saw “a male, dark complexion, with a short afro hairstyle, wearing a white T-shirt, blue jean pants, and tennis shoes, later identified as Freddie Gray.”
In his statement of probable cause, Officer Michael Lind wrote he saw Gray pick up a plastic bag from beside the stoop of a row house on North Fulton Avenue, then walk to the corner and bend down near a Buick Regal. When Gray briefly left the scene, Lind and his partners checked the car and found a bag with 39 small glass vials full of a white powder. Lab testing would later determine the vials contained nearly 50 grams of cocaine base.
When Gray returned to the car, the officers moved to arrest him. Again, Gray ran away, but didn’t get very far. The next day, the state’s attorney charged him with possession with intent to distribute an illegal substance and with simple possession of cocaine — charges that could lead to 24 years in prison and $50,000 in fines.
This time, the state’s attorney decided to go forward with the case — perhaps because of the amount of cocaine involved, or perhaps because it was Gray’s second alleged offense in days. His bail was set at $75,000, an impossible sum for his family, who could not afford to pay the 10% fee typically charged by Maryland bond agents to secure a person's release. Gray was kept behind bars pending his trial, which was scheduled for Jan. 7, 2008.
It was on that date, after four months in jail, that Baltimore Circuit Judge Robert Kershaw gave Gray what was perhaps the most generous deal a Baltimore court would ever offer him.
In exchange for a guilty plea, Kershaw sentenced Gray to three years in prison — but he suspended it all save for the time Gray had already served. He released Gray on three years of probation, with instructions to stay out of trouble, finish high school, and get a job. He even asked Gray’s attorney, public defender Matthew Jennejahn, to file a motion reflecting the court’s intentions to clear the young man’s record.
“If the defendant demonstrates that he has completed high school, is employed, and otherwise compliant with the terms of his probation,” Jennejahn wrote in the motion, “the court will consider striking the guilty finding and entering a probation before judgment.”
To this day, the guilty finding remains on the record.
Judge Kershaw’s decision was supposed to give Gray the chance to stay out of the criminal justice system. But a review of a civil lawsuit filed by Gray and his siblings shows some of the reasons why the young defendant had a difficult time fulfilling the terms of his probation.
The suit, filed in 2008 in Baltimore Circuit Court, alleged that Gray, his twin sister, Fredericka, and their older sister, Carolina, suffered “irreversible brain damage” as a result of years of lead-paint poisoning during their childhood. The siblings demanded millions of dollars in damages and lost wages, arguing that the negligence of the landlords, who had failed to remodel the houses in which they grew up, had ruined their chances at living productive and healthy lives.
Their allegations echoed many others made in black neighborhoods in Baltimore and across the United States. Even as the percentage of American children with dangerous lead levels continues to fall, black infants still suffer from lead poisoning at a rate 60% higher than white children, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The complaint unleashed a legal battle that lasted several years and produced three thick volumes of legal filings, in which the attorneys for both parties dissected the early years of the Gray children in search of the origin of the difficulties the siblings faced.
The plaintiffs argued that the elevated levels of lead found in the siblings’ blood were to blame for the bulk of their issues. There was some scientific evidence for their claim: Medical records included in the court file show that when Freddie was 22 months old, his blood contained 37 micrograms of lead per deciliter of fluid — nearly eight times the level at which a child’s brain begins to deteriorate. The landlords responded by stating that the troubled lives of the Gray children were the product of “risk factors” such as “parental intelligence and education, socioeconomic status, number of siblings in a single-parent household, lack of prenatal care, and childhood illness.”
In the course of those arguments, the attorneys for the landlords deposed Gray’s mother, Gloria Darden. She said she was dyslexic and that neither she nor her parents had graduated from high school — in fact, she said, she didn’t know how to read “at all.” She admitted to using heroin every day since age 23, stopping only when she “got older.” She told the attorneys about the premature birth of her twins, and said that Freddie and Fredericka had to stay at the hospital for two months to gain weight.
Darden went on to describe the crippling poverty in which she raised her children, relying on a disability check to pay rent for a crumbling house with holes in the walls, where every surface was continually dusted with flakes of toxic white paint. There was no lease, she said — just a verbal agreement with a nameless, older man.
“Ain’t never seen him, just one time when I moved into the house,” Darden said of her landlord. “What you call them? Slum landlord, they the kind.”
The attorneys also deposed the Gray children, as well as several experts. In those documents, the siblings and the doctors who examined them described a litany of psychiatric and psychological problems — problems that the plaintiffs insisted were the signs of lead poisoning, and which the defendants held were simply the effects of a life of poverty and stress.
Carolina, the depositions states, was diagnosed with ADHD and pica, or the compulsion to eat inedible things, such as dirt or one’s nails. Fredericka, who also had ADHD, struggled with anger issues, was expelled from high school, and had to repeat the seventh and tenth grades. Freddie dropped out of school in the ninth grade and suffered from a variety of behavioral problems.
Marianne Schuelein, a pediatrician who was called as an expert witness by the landlord’s attorneys, was asked about a December 2002 incident in which the Gray children were allegedly left alone at home while their mother went to rehab and their stepfather was incarcerated.
“At one point, a Child Protective Services report was filed,” Schuelein said in a deposition. “They were living in a house without electricity or food.”
Despite the disagreements as to the cause, both parties in the lawsuit seemed to agree that the Gray siblings faced great obstacles. In a document filed in November 2009 by the attorneys for one of the landlords, Neil Hoffman, a clinical psychologist from the Kennedy-Krieger Institute, stated that Freddie’s academic performance was equivalent to that of someone in the third or fourth grade. In a deposition, Hoffman said he believed it was possible Gray could one day graduate from high school, but only if he had help.
Whether Gray could have ever received that help at Carver Vocational High School, where Judge Kershaw wanted him to enroll, remains an open question. Although the school has a four-year graduation rate of 85%, its average students score in the bottom 6% of nationwide SAT results. Carver also has a history of violent incidents and is highly segregated by race and class — 98% of its students are black, and 83% qualify for free lunches.
In March 2010, the landlords agreed to settle the case with the Gray siblings. The amount they received was not disclosed. In some of his later criminal cases, however, Gray stated that although he had never been employed, he paid his mother and sister between $300 and $600 in rent every month. In a questionnaire filled out to determine whether he was eligible for a public defender in January 2015, Gray said his entire monthly income was $608 from a “settlement check.”
That would have put his yearly income at about $7,200 — 40% less than the sum that the federal government considers the threshold for poverty.
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Records for several cases indicate that Gray’s return to school was brief — he made it only to the 10th grade. Instead, he began what appears to have been the most turbulent period of his life. Records from the Baltimore Division of Probation and Parole show that he was arrested at least 10 times during his first year on probation — a situation that cost him his freedom.
On Feb. 11, 2008, a little over a month after his release on parole from his second arrest, Gray was arrested and charged with simple possession of marijuana and cocaine. The day after, he was released on $7,500 bail, posted by a private bond agent in exchange for a $750 fee. His probation agent wrote to Judge Kershaw to inform him of the arrest, but the judge declined to take any action, saying he would wait and see if Gray was found guilty.
A month later, Gray was arrested again. The BPD said they found three vials containing 1.02 grams of heroin on him — enough for anywhere between two and fifty doses, depending on the potency of the drug and the tolerance of the user — and charged with possession with intent to distribute. He was released on $15,000 bail. The following month, Gray was arrested again, this time with 24 gelcaps containing 8 grams of heroin. This time, he was released on $200,000 bond.
At every step of the way, family and friends from the neighborhood paid his bond agents’ fees, often agreeing to onerous payment plans. (A BuzzFeed News review of Gray’s bond agreements found that over the course of his adult life, his family and friends paid at least $29,000 to private bail agents. According to City Data, the median yearly income for a household in Sandtown-Winchester in 2013 was $27,000.)
This cycle of arrest and release came to an end on July 16, 2008. Around 9 in the morning that day, Officer Brandon Avery saw a large crowd of people in an area of Pennsylvania Avenue that he described as “a large open-air drug market” — knowledge that he attributed to his training as a police officer. When Avery approached, he claimed in his statement of probable cause, he saw Gray “walking away from the crowd at a fast pace.”
Avery detained Gray. The officer didn’t find any contraband on him, but after going back to the “exact area” where he’d seen Gray standing earlier, Avery found two plastic bags — one containing 29 gelcaps with 9.66 grams of heroin, the other with 32 gelcaps with 31.84 grams of cocaine. In his statement of probable cause, Avery said that although he had been with the force for only 15 months, he had participated in over 500 drug arrests. (Assuming he worked five days a week, those numbers average to roughly two arrests per day.)
On the basis of Avery’s statement, the court commissioner ordered Gray held without bail. Prosecutors charged him with two counts of possession with intent to distribute and two counts of simple possession — enough accusations to send him to prison for 48 years if convicted. The prosecutor then went further, using Gray’s prior conviction to file a motion seeking to double the maximum allowed penalty to 96 years, and at minimum, 10.
On Feb. 6, 2009, a little over a year after Judge Kershaw offered to clear his record, Gray was sentenced to two years in prison for violating his parole. On April 23 of that year, Judge Gale Rasin sentenced him to four years for the July case, beginning retroactively on the day of Gray’s arrest, and to be served concurrently with his sentence for violation of probation.
A spokesperson from the Baltimore Division of Correction told BuzzFeed News that Gray was released on parole on 2011, having served roughly half of his sentence. It would be the longest continuous amount of time he would spend behind bars.
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