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In a wounded city like Baltimore, the job of a homicide detective like Kelvin Sewell is to try to stop the bleeding. So raw and random is the violence that it's an impossible job, but the way he writes about it is both more chilling and compelling than even the most realistic cop drama on TV. The murders he uncovers aren't the cleverly plotted fictions of CSI, but the more frightening ones that blossom in poverty and neglect, when teens murder each other for a mobile phone or blindly follow a gang leader's order and burn a man alive. In these and other cases, Sewell's street wisdom, ear for absurdity and uncommon humanity, blow them wide open.Sewell's gritty memoir of a life on America's toughest streets is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in how to make our cities safer. David Robinson - Book Editor - The Scotsman Newspaper
Citation preview
Excerpts from Why Do We Kill?
The pathology of murder in Baltimore drawn from real cases of a city homicide detective
By Kelvin Sewell and Stephen Janis
Why Do We Kill?
Excerpts from the upcoming book “Why Do We Kill?”
By Kelvin Sewell and Stephen Janis
Copyright 2011 Kelvin Sewell and Stephen Janis
Table of contents
Introduction: Why Do We Kill?
Case File One: The Bounty Hunters
Case File Two: I Bet You Can’t Shoot That Lady: The story of 14-year-old killer Devon Richardson
Case File Three: Child Killer Melvin Jones
Bonus Chapter Four: Homicide Heat, an interview with retired Baltimore City Homicide Detective Irving Bradley
Bonus Chapter Five: Back to the Old School: Two former homicide detectives say the Baltimore (City) Police Department is broken and they know how to fix it
In a wounded city like Baltimore, the job of a homicide detective like Kelvin Sewell is to try to stop the bleeding. So raw and random is the violence that it’s an impossible job, but the way he writes about it is both more chilling and compelling than even the most realistic cop drama on TV.
The murders he uncovers aren’t the cleverly plotted fictions of CSI, but the more frightening ones that blossom in poverty and neglect, when teens murder each other for a mobile phone or blindly follow a gang leader’s order and burn a man alive. In these and other cases, Sewell’s street wisdom, ear for absurdity and uncommon humanity, blow them wide open.
Sewell’s gritty memoir of a life on America’s toughest streets is essential reading for anyone remotely interested in how to make our cities safer.
David Robison – Book Editor – The Scotsman Newspaper
Why do we kill?
It’s a question that is difficult to answer in Baltimore City. Murder is a constant, homicides notched with clockwork- like regularity. Shootings average two a day.
Death is routine.
For twenty years former Baltimore City Police Sergeant and homicide detective Kelvin Sewell worked amid the chaos. He investigated some of the most high-profile murder cases in the city. He sat across the table from stone cold killers.
He stood over the bodies of children, held the corpse of a six-week-old baby in his hands.
He interviewed a teenage girl who confessed to setting a young man on fire. He watched as a grieving father sobbed over the corpse of his teenage daughter, a young girl stabbed to death by another teen over a cellphone.
Through all these case the question has haunted him, Why do we kill? And most of, in Baltimore why is it so seemingly routine?
How do children as young as 14 find the cold-blooded nerve to shoot a 67-year old-grandmother in the back of the head on a dare? Why does a 52–year-old man believe that an 11-year-old boy is a willing lover, a life partner deserving of being stabbed to death in a jealous rage?
These are the questions Sewell has tried to answer between trips to the morgue, sitting in the living rooms of grieving mothers and in the back alleys standing over the bodies of young men shot dead before their eighteenth birthdays.
Excerpted from Sewell’s upcoming book Why Do We Kill? This first chapter begins with the case of the Baltimore Bounty Hunters gang which burned a fellow gang member alive. Next is the story of 14-year old Devon Richardson, who shot a woman in the head on a dare, a 67-year-old grandmother on her way home from work. The last chapter recounts the psychological turmoil of sex offender Melvin Jones, who killed an 11-year-old boy in a fit of jealous rage, then proceeded to visit his body as it decayed in a nearby park.
These chapters offer a preview of Sewell’s upcoming book of the same title. In it he reveals not only behind-the-scenes details of high-profile murders like the case of Nicole Sesker, the daughter of former Baltimore City Police Commissioner Leonard Hamm, but he also gives a rare glimpse of the politics and behind-the-scenes infighting that plagues the Baltimore Police Department.
Sewell reveals the unreported details of the break-in at the department’s off-site storage facility, a robbery that destroyed thousands of Internal Affairs files, and a crime the department tried to pin on him.
He also gives an account of the investigation of Police Officer Brian Sewell, who was caught on video taking fake drugs off a park bench, baby powder that eventually turned up in evidence as part of a drug case against a city teen. Sewell reveals how prosecutors turned the case against him, ultimately dropping the charges despite what he believes was a solid case against the perpetrators.
Sewell is joined by Stephen Janis, an award-winning investigative journalist who reports on crime and corruption for the online-news watchdog website Investigative Voice and who formerly worked for the now-defunct Baltimore Examiner. Working together in a unique collaboration between reporter and cop, the behind-the-scenes look offers readers a rare glimpse inside the crosscurrents of social decay and personal dysfunction that informs a pathology of killing in one of the country’s most notoriously violent cities.
