Eleven black women who were mothers and sisters, grandmothers and daughters. Eleven black women who left their families and never returned. Eleven black women whose deaths have mortified this already troubled neighborhood called Mount Pleasant.
As of Friday afternoon only four of those 11 black women had been identified. Sowell has been charged with five counts of aggravated homicide. There are missing person reports on at least 14 women in the area. Anxious families and friends wait daily, hourly, for the next name to be announced.
"We're just holding our breath every time the phone rings," Mary Mason told Sphere.
Her sister, Michelle Mason, is among the missing.
Michelle, 45, had a drug problem when she was younger, her sister said. She was convicted on numerous drug charges years ago but hasn't been arrested since 2001, records show. On Oct. 8, 2008, Mason left her mother's house in nearby Garfield Heights, walking back to her own home in Mount Pleasant. To get there, she would have passed Sowell's home at 12205 Imperial Ave. Her family hasn't heard from her since. They reported her missing and are not pleased with the response they received from police.
"Let a black girl with a prior drug history come up missing and she's a throwaway,'' Mary Mason said. "We were told there were a thousand Michelles in this city. They didn't have the manpower."
The police said they conducted dozens of follow-up searches for Michelle Mason and the others, that missing persons with transient pasts are difficult to track. And ministers such as the Rev. Rodney Maiden, senior pastor at Providence Baptist Church in Mount Pleasant, urged residents not to place blame. "We all need to work together -- the social services, the politicians, the law enforcement officers, the religious community -- to give this place a sense of safety again," he said after leading a prayer vigil on Thursday.
But Cleveland City Councilman Zack Reed, who represents the Mount Pleasant area, said more could have been done. "At the end of the day, the system didn't work in this case,'' he said.
And it's clear that there is a lot of anger and grief in this neighborhood that has known more than its share of despair.
Mount Pleasant was once a solid, middle-class area in the southeast corner of Cleveland. Football legend Jim Brown lived there when he joined the NFL. Writers and actors and teachers and business leaders and politicians grew up there.
Then, slowly, suburban flight, crime, drugs, predatory lenders and poverty took their toll. Families moved out. Renters moved in. About two-thirds of the households with children are headed by single women. Fewer than half of the residents own their own homes.
In 2007, a 15-year-old boy living in an abandoned home tried to rob a neighborhood man. The man, who had a concealed-carry permit, shot the boy dead. Gun-rights activists made it a national cause célèbre, ignoring the conditions that led to the death of young Arthur Buford. A few months later, Democratic presidential candidate John Edwards shared his time in the spotlight with Mount Pleasant, highlighting its foreclosure problems during a walking tour of the community. The neighborhood now has more than 1,000 abandoned homes, 10 percent or more of its housing stock.
That same summer, it appears, a woman on Imperial Avenue called the city complaining about a stench coming from the corner of Imperial and East 123rd Street. Neighbors naturally pointed at Ray's Sausage Co., a building next door to the three-story house where Anthony Sowell lived. Never mind that Ray's had been producing premium sausage products at the site, up to 500,000 pounds per year, for more than a half-century without a complaint.
Raymond Cash Jr. and his sister Renee own the sausage business started by their father, Raymond Sr. No animals are slaughtered there; their meats are shipped, fresh and frozen, from elsewhere. Still, they said they spent $10,000 on new grease traps and plumbing to try to get rid of the smell. Nothing worked.
A city inspector came to Ray's, looked over the high fence into Sowell's yard and indicated there must be a dead animal somewhere close by, Cash said. Councilman Reed confirmed Cash's story. Cleveland Health Director Matt Carroll disputes it. He said one complaint came in September 2008 about a foul smell on Imperial Avenue, and an inspector went out and found no odor.
But it isn't the money he spent nor the accusations against his business that angers Ray Cash Jr. He's angry that no one told him there was a registered sex offender, a convicted rapist, living next door. The law did not require informing neighbors about Sowell's classification, a county official told The Plain Dealer, because Sowell did not move. He has lived in the house since he was released from prison in 2005, after serving 15 years for rape.
"People are mad about not knowing," Ray Cash said. "I'd see this guy all the time. He asked me to taste his barbecue. Somebody should have said something to us."
He remembers Sowell eyeing a new woman on the block, a moment that really frightens him now. "He said, 'I'm going to get that one.'" Cash thought it was just guy talk. Fortunately, he said, the woman rebuffed Sowell's advances. "She's lucky to be alive," Cash said.
Thomas Stone is executive director of the Mount Pleasant NOW Development Corp. For 14 years, it's been his job to try to rebuild the community's sagging infrastructure. The latest surge of unwanted headlines, he knows, is another formidable obstacle to overcome. But there is a greater hurdle for all the Mount Pleasants in America, he said.
"This is not just a neighborhood issue. All over the country there are people living on the fringes of society ... they become vulnerable," he said. "The systems we have in place have to be structured to work for them, too. We must not put less value on someone because of their lifestyles."
The first three victims to be identified -- Tonia Carmichael, 52, Telacia Fortson, 31, and Tishana Culver, 31 -- had histories of drug convictions. So did Nancy Cobbs, who was identified as the fourth victim Friday afternoon. Not long ago, neighbors said, she lived next door to Sowell before moving a few blocks away. She hadn't been seen since April 24, four days after her 43rd birthday. She served time for her drug abuse, but she was a mother, a grandmother, a friend. She's missed.
"They are all people," Renee Cash said, overlooking the crime scene from her office on the second floor of the sausage factory.
She paused for a moment as she thought about what it all meant.
"Maybe this will make us come a little closer," she said. "Maybe we won't be so afraid to speak out. This used to be a community where people talked to each other. Maybe we can be that way again."
Her daughter, Lisa Lester, had another thought. She and her mother both hope the house next door is torn down. "They should make it a park, a memorial to the people who suffered there," she said.
Eleven black women. Maybe more.
Susan Valerian contributed to this report from Cleveland.
